The latest edition of the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi and Afghan bloggers, is now available at Dean’s World. This week we have Christmas in the Green Zone, IraqSlogger, a blogging anniversary, and much, much more.
On a related note I’d also like to draw your attention to a diary from Daily Kos. The diary recounts the history of the English language Iraqi blogosphere as one of a brief, bright flourishing followed by slow extinction.  It’s an interesting interpretation but I find it a little too conspiracy-laden for my tastes.
The first problem with the thesis of the post is that I don’t think there’s a great deal of evidence that the English language Iraqi blogosphere is much different than the American blogosphere in that respect. Only a minority of bloggers persist. Many of the top political bloggers from, say, 2004, have stopped blogging, post rarely, have stopped blogging about politics, or have transmogrified into group blogs that don’t resemble the blogs-that-were in 2004.
As Angry Rakkasan, the Kos diarist, notes, quite a number of the Iraqi bloggers who were posting actively in 2004 are no longer. I think there are any number of reasons for that including they’ve graduated from high school or college or gotten a job. Or they’re discouraged. Or they’d prefer to use their scarce electricity for something other than blogging.
But there are also quite a number of brand spanking new English language Iraqi bloggers who’ve started their blogs in the last year or so that are as good or better than the blogs of 2004. Baghdad Chronicles, Where Date Palms Grow, and Thoughts from Baghdad are all a year old or younger.   Roads to Iraq, basically a pro-insurgency propaganda site, is less than a year old. I find Baghdad Connect, a news and commentary blog, one of the most informative and edgiest around. They’re less than a year old. And the video blog, Alive in Baghdad, is only a little more than a year old.
Now, what’s absolutely, incontrovertibly true is that the American big name bloggers don’t link to or, apparently, read any of these new blogs. That’s their loss. It’s understandable when you look at their blogrolls: many are snapshots of the blogosphere circa 2003, full of blogs whose only interesting material is in their archives.
