A friend sent me a link to this article describing an amazing use of Google Earth, to document the Israel-Lebanon conflict with pinpoint accuracy. The creator of the KML file that adds the information to Google Earth collected the information from various news sources and combined them to give an incredible perspective on the violence in the Middle East.

This application of technology to collect and disseminate news during an ongoing conflict has never reached this level before. Throughout history, battles have been recorded and chronicled during wartime, but not in real-time and not with this level of geographical precision. I’m curious of the impact this might have to counteract propaganda and disinformation spread by opposing forces during a war; with the possibility of organizing information in such a geographically-centric way, tech-savvy citizens in the warzone could have a better understanding of troop movements and behavior, making rumor-mongering and panic less likely. Obviously, this could still be tainted by spreading disinformation to the news sources whose news is subsequently aggregated, but it would definitely be more difficult when comparisons were so readily available.

This is another example of the new distribution methodology present on the Internet today: instead of a small amount of large organizations creating content, large amounts of small organizations (or individuals) generate the information, which is then aggregated and sorted in a way such that the most relevant material bubbles to the top. This is the same methodology used by Google News, digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. It will be interesting to see where it is applied as it continues to spread further into the mainstream information sources.