Milblogging.com

» see milblogging.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

milblogging was a piece of the mid-2000s us military internet i had no reason to visit. i was in ankara on the tail end of a computer engineering undergrad, watching the same iraq war coverage on cnn turk that everyone else was. the war had a whole english-language blogosphere attached to it, and i was aware of that at the trend level and not the reader level.

jean-paul borda started the site in october 2005. he was an army national guardsman running a personal deployment blog and figured out there was no central index for the hundreds of similar blogs coming out of iraq. he built one. the directory grew fast. by november 2007 it was cataloguing more than 1,800 military blogs across 30 countries, with tags for branch and deployment location.

military.com acquired the site in january 2006, three months after launch. the acquisition kept borda running the operation and gave milblogging.com the ad backing to stay alive through the peak-milblog window from 2006 to 2010 (roughly). president bush met with a group of milbloggers organized through the site in september 2007. the site got name-checked in army times coverage and washington post coverage of the war-blog phenomenon.

~ the record ~

~ the milblog wave ~

the milblog category is a specific artifact of the iraq and afghanistan wars overlapping with the mid-2000s blogging boom. broadband had reached the forward operating bases through military isp contracts by the middle of 2004. the soldiers doing tours had grown up on livejournal and blogger and knew how to post. the result was a wave of first-person deployment writing that had no analogue in previous american wars. milblogging.com was the index that tried to hold the wave together in one url.

~ after the wars ~

the milblog category shrank as the deployments wound down and the wars slowed. facebook absorbed most of the personal-writing energy that had been going into standalone blogs after 2010. by the time milblogging.com became unreachable in early 2016 the source material for the directory had mostly moved off the open web and into private social feeds where a stranger with an index could not follow. military.com is still online in 2026. the milblogging.com subdomain is not.

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