"War blogging" has come to mean something more than just writing about the war this time around - now correspondents are blogging from the field:

L.T. Smash provided a terse after-action report on one close encounter with the Iraqis:

"Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me this afternoon.

"He missed."

No need for embedded reporters when you've got a keyboard and a modem. "Smash" is the pseudonym of a military officer who is chronicling his exploits amid the desert sandstorms — and getting 6,000 hits a day on his Web site.

For all the saturation coverage of the invasion of Iraq, this has become the first true Internet war, with journalists, analysts, soldiers, a British lawmaker, an Iraqi exile and a Baghdad resident using the medium's lightning speed to cut through the fog of war. The result is idiosyncratic, passionate and often profane, with the sort of intimacy and attitude that are all but impossible in newspapers and on television.

"The most interesting thing about the blog coverage is how far ahead it is of the mainstream media," says University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, whose InstaPundit.com site has seen a surge in traffic as the Iraq crisis has heated up, doubling to 200,000 hits a day. "The first-hand stuff is great. It's unfiltered and unspun. That doesn't mean it's unbiased. But people feel like they know where the bias is coming from. You don't have to spend a lot of time trying to find a hidden agenda."

We mentioned last week that CNN reporter Kevin Sites was blogging from Iraq - Kurtz reports that CNN has shut him down:

"What I'm looking at right now is long line of trucks packed with all kinds of belongings of Kurdish people moving north," he writes. CNN told Sites to suspend the blog Friday, with spokeswoman Edna Johnson saying that covering war "is a full-time job and we've asked Kevin to concentrate only on that for the time being."

Sagacious blogger and longtime MAJOR MEDIA FIGURE in good standing Jeff Jarvis calls CNN foolish:

I'm a big media executive type — in a suit, even — and I have to say that this is short-sighted on CNN's part.
I have no idea what CNN's problem is. I can imagine a few scenarios — e.g., some editor worries that Sites won't do his work (he's in a warzone; what else is he going to do?) or some editor worries that they're not editing what he writes (if you don't trust him, don't hire him).
Bottom line is that CNN proves it is out-of-date.
MSNBC has weblogs.
FoxNews has weblogs.
My big media company has weblogs. Knight Ridder has weblogs. USA Today has weblogs. The BBC has weblogs.
But CNN doesn't.
CNN is not only disrespecting Sites, it is disrespecting his audience, and it is disrespecting bloggers as a whole — which is a mistake, since we, fellow bloggers, are now influencers