Hey, Internet cruisers: Are you by any chance looking for yet another story examining how blogging is becoming the new standard for communications in the twenty-first century?

We thought so!

Walter Pincus, national security and intelligence reporter for the Washington Post, writes today of an interesting and relatively new tactic that the U.S. government has been implementing to reach out to the Islamic world’s young population “in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.”

The State Department, departing from traditional public diplomacy techniques, has what it calls a three-person, “digital outreach team” posting entries in Arabic on “influential” Arabic blogs to challenge misrepresentations of the United States and promote moderate views among Islamic youths in the hopes of steering them from terrorism.

The department’s bloggers “speak the language and idiom of the region, know the culture reference points and are often able to converse informally and frankly, rather than adopt the usually more formal persona of a U.S. government spokesperson,” Duncan MacInnes, of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats on Thursday.

… To prove that it, too, can plug into the modern media world, the Pentagon’s Central Command has a blogging operation at its headquarters. Its Joint Forces Command also has the capability and has even written a brochure on how to do it. “It’s an area we’re moving into,” Navy Capt. Hal Pittman, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications, told the House panel. He added that Central Command may not be using its own Arabic or Farsi speakers, but rather contract personnel. “We’re sharing with State and trying to, you know, better our knowledge on how to do it.”

Whoever said that diplomatic types couldn’t be hip?

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, “we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, ‘flamed’ when we come on” — meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

What do you think? Is this the kind of story that signals a new way of communicating, made necessary by a dire and complex situation? Or is it grasping at straws and — quite possibly— playing with fire?

Check out the original article here and let us know what you think in the comments section, below.