The Air Force is

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The Air Force is venturing forth into the virtual blue yonder with $450,000 in funding for a three-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

That’s right. The Air Force is studying blogs. All part of Rumsfeld’s military transformation, I suppose. Here’s some of what the Air Force has deduced so far:

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” [senior scientist Brian] Ulicny said.

He must be talking about these guys.

One of the problems analysts may have with blog monitoring, Ulicny noted, is there is too much actionable information for the analyst to properly analyze.

I’ve always said that about Wolcott’s blog–too much actionable information.

“Blog entries have a different structure,” Ulicny said. “They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself , such as a news event. It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story.”

Busted.

“The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts,” Kokar said. “Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace.”

I could not agree more.

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