The US-led invasion of Iraq is being termed the "first war of the Internet age``. In much the same way that the first Gulf War was the making of cable television, so the present conflict could mark a similar watershed for the Internet and help redefine how major news events are covered.
According to an account in the LA Times, the major news sites on the Web have handled from 30% to 100% more traffic this week, with top news Web sites such as CNN.com and MSNBC.com reporting roughly one million more users a day since the war began.
In fact, MSNBC.com figures for the Tuesday before war formally broke out showed that the site served 2.5 million video screens, whereas by Wednesday, the number had rocketed to 6.1 million and topped 10 million by Friday.
Reuters reports that in Britain, the top Internet service, Freeserve, noted that war had toppled Britney Spears and even sex as the most popular search term, while Iraq was number one on the weekly Yahoo search list on Sunday - up from 42nd a week before.
The Internet`s global reach has vastly eased communications, from soldiers writing home, to war protesters organising demonstrations and individuals writing personal Web logs - nicknamed "blogs`` - which has led to battlefield correspondents and others producing their own running diaries of the war in real-time for all the world to see.
Unlike television, the Internet offers an unparalleled variety of war-related reportage, comment, photographs and live video feeds that provide many different aspects of the war.
While technology historians say the Internet will be hard-pressed to match the feat of television in the 1960s - credited with shifting public sentiment and ultimately ending US involvement in Vietnam - the informal, untamed aspect of cyberspace is delivering this conflict to the public in ways much different from the past.
An example of this is the Web log of an unknown Iraqi who calls himself Salam Pax, a pseudonym crafted from the Arabic and Latin words for peace, who is presently writing a Web log from the heart of Baghdad, providing wry accounts of daily life in a city under US bombardment.
Salam, who writes in English, is the only Iraq resident known to be filing accounts of the war directly to the Web and the traffic on his Web site has become so great that it caused the server to go down over the past weekend, reports Sapa-AFP.
Joshua Fouts, editor of Online Journalism Review, feels the Iraqi conflict has truly brought the Internet into the same arena as other media.
"What this war has shown is that the Internet has entered into a crucial and symbiotic relationship with the print and broadcast media. It has become a case of read the newspaper in the morning, surf the Web during the day and watch television at night," he says.
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