Is anyone else bothered by the near-invisibility in the blogosphere of the Russian invasion of neighboring Georgia?
Only time will tell whether comparisons to Hitler’s aggression are overblown or sadly prescient, but I do find it disturbing that Digg’s front page has no mention of the invasion (though it does find room for “Man has Sex with Steel Bench, Almost Loses Penis“.
Perhaps it’s just a reflection of the insulated world I live in (Silicon Valley), but I haven’t read a single post or Tweet on the invasion. In comparison, Gmail’s recent outage was treated as a banner headline.
If I didn’t have the antediluvian habit of checking Google News and Drudge, I wouldn’t have even heard of the conflict.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, foreign invasions don’t have a direct impact on Series A valuations. But it sure seems like there’s a lot of fiddling going on.
You’re not reading enough of the right blogs. Even just a few good economics blogs will get you hooked into important world events. And yet they can also be very good for technological advances and startup theory.
Start with marginalrevolution.com, and work your way out from there.
Geek, I am a big fan of Marginal Revolution, and read it daily. Even MR seems oddly silent on the invasion.
The most active blogs on the topic actually seem to be the conservative ones, who see this as a wedge issue that can help Republicans.
I’d second that notion, although I definitely prefer more obscure blogs.
My favorite article had definitely been the one by Gary Brecher, who is a pretty good read about pretty much anything he wants to write about, once you get past the harsh frankness.
Nod. Looking through their archives, they mention the conflict on Aug 8th, but in a way that assumes you already know about it.
Luckily for me, I caveated my post 😉 … with ‘work your way out from there’ – I probably learned about it either from Matt Yglesias, or another eco blog.
In any case, I try to maintain a couple of political blogs in my RSS feeds – Instapundit and Yglesias, and the rest is all business, economics, technology, etc. But just those two end up keeping me up to date on most newsworthy events.
Oh, and Jane Galt as well, but I consider her to be as much economics as wonk.
In any case, you’re right – there’s not a lot said in the technosphere. Probably because they know they have nothing meaningfully coherent to contribute to the conversation.
You should really use reddit instead of digg. It’s not perfect but it has more international posts. A lot less pop culture posts.
As Mr Freer said, Reddit did cover this story a lot, everything from the breaking news, to analysis to posts like this one complaining that it wasn’t big enough news.
Also see how many comments you get when the post is short and easy to reply to without much thought? Also we have a chance of offering a slight correction, I think thats another big motivator.
I did finally see a surge of Georgia coverage this morning. As someone pointed out Matt Yglesias really covered the bases.
I think that I also read Reddit via doggdot.us (I pull Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, and del.icio.us from that feed) but I must have missed the story.
I knew that it was happening in a vague sense, but was amazed by how little most people in the Valley seemed to care.
I am aware of the war, and I have even discussed it in person with others, but I haven’t blogged about it mostly because I don’t know quite what to think about it yet. Perhaps others are having the same issue?