But Jenny Sparks points out this surprising fact: 91% of the users of the Total911TruthNOW website do not have a blog. Does this hold true for other 9/11 forums? Think about this for a second: if you are serious about exposing the 9/11 cover-up, this means you are going to have to get your voice heard by effectively promoting 9/11 information. Joining a forum is a start, but if you are tired about the MSM not reporting 9/11 information, why not do something about it by starting your own blog?
... I would recommend it for anyone who is serious about 9/11 awareness...If you don't speak up, no one will hear you and the 9/11 cover-up will continue. It's that simple. I've had people tell me that reading my stuff has made a difference for them, and that's good enough for me... Even just creating a blog and linking to credible 9/11 sites... improves search rankings and brings new visitors to these sites.
Don't wait for someone else to expose the 9/11 cover-up. Get involved by reporting and promoting 9/11 information. Every person who speaks out by spreading credible information, 9/11 truth websites, and films will make a difference. If the MSM is not going to report 9/11 information, are you just going to keep waiting for them to do this, or are you going to take action and do something about it? Instead of passively reading information and listening to radio shows, why not get involved by spreading this information by promoting it on a blog? As Col Jenny Sparks explains, starting a blog is free:
And of course, 911blogger.com. Along with participating in the 11th Day of the Month Campaign and other types of activism, all of these things will all add up together and the MSM censorship blockade and gatekeepers will be completely irrelevant.
If you start a new blog in part because of this article, link to it here so that others will add your blog to their links. Websites that are connected by many links get more traffic and are found higherin search rankings. For example, I get around 100 visitors a day to my blog and a lot of this traffic comes from search engines. This is why it is worthwhile to create your own separate blog: it can improve the rankings of sites like 911blogger.com and 911truth.org.
Don't forget to link to other 9/11 websites and blogs. Here are some that I especially recommend (although everyone will make their own list and have their own preferences):
Create a new blog, publish at least one post and I will add your site to this list. Post your blog link at 911blogger.com or truthaction. Any sites that wish to endorse the campaign I will add to the endorsement list.
I encourage all participating sites to link to each other and I will add all new sites to my link list.
Today is September 11th, 2008. Why not mark the occasion by starting your own 9/11 blog to expose the 9/11 cover-up? As I wrote:
9/11 truth activists often complain about the Corporate sponsored media (MSM) and their collective silence when it comes to explosive 9/11 information. As just one example, Dr. Steven Jones, Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story was listed at #18 in the top 25 censored stories of 2007, by Project Censored.But Jenny Sparks points out this surprising fact: 91% of the users of the Total911TruthNOW website do not have a blog. Does this hold true for other 9/11 forums? Think about this for a second: if you are serious about exposing the 9/11 cover-up, this means you are going to have to get your voice heard by effectively promoting 9/11 information... if you are tired about the MSM not reporting 9/11 information, why not do something about it by starting your own blog? ...Along with participating in the 11th Day of the Month Campaign and other types of activism, all of these things will all add up together and the MSM censorship blockade and gatekeepers will be completely irrelevant.
The variety and number of websites is what will increase page rank, visitors, and exposure for 9/11 truth. In other words, if we all just hanged out at 911blogger and didn't make our own blogs, we would have limited exposure. By creating separate sites we are significantly increasing exposure for not only sites like 911blogger, but for 9/11 awareness, which is what really matters.
A short tutorial demonstrates how easy it is to set up a blog.
When it comes to 9/11 activism, you are only limited by your imagination. Anyone can get involved by blogging about 9/11 information, making transcripts of 9/11 media, reporting your own activism, making your own 9/11 research, and making your own critical reviews of 9/11 news, research, and other media.
Don't wait for someone else to expose the 9/11 cover-up. Get involved by reporting and promoting 9/11 information. Every person who speaks out by spreading credible information, 9/11 truth websites, and films will make a difference. If the MSM is not going to report 9/11 information, are you just going to keep waiting for them to do this, or are you going to take action and do something about it? Instead of passively reading information and listening to radio shows, why not get involved by spreading this information by promoting it on a blog?... Why not make your 9/11/2008 resolution to start a 9/11 blog and become part of the alternative media to expose the 9/11 cover-up?
Joe Lauria explains the power of bloggers:
Your first question about the internet and its role, there's only one thing that will move the mainstream media, and that's business, whether it starts to hurt their business, and it is, it has, they're terrified of the bloggers, and they're terrified of the internet, because they realize that it is taking business away from them, people are reading them... they're playing around with having their own reporters do blogs to try to co-opt the thing and it's not working very well, and there's a lot of crap on the internet - I would think that a large percent of what bloggers write is absolutely nonsense, and opinion without any fact, they're not trained as journalists... a lot of it is anonymous, but there are a lot of important bloggers who are doing better work than mainstream journalists, they're doing it without pay! They're doing it because they want to show anywhere where the press is not doing its job, and they are feeling that pressure... And the blogosphere is showing that there are... who are really starting to lead the way. And they aren't professionals in the same sense of the training, but they are filling in where the mainstream press is failing - we've seen government run amok because of that, as you know - eight years of the Bush administration.
How does one tell the difference between good and bad information? The Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice website describes misinformation as, “information that is incorrect but not necessarily an attempt to mislead. Misinformation often arises from poor research, biases, and misinterpretations.” On the other hand, disinformation is the deliberate promotion of misleading, false, or inaccurate information. I believe that understanding disinformation and misinformation is of critical importance to the 9/11 truth movement. Why? Because, the official story of 9/11 itself is an example of disinformation.
What can you do about this betrayal? The answer is simple, obvious, and effective: You can report the information that the MSM refuses to talk about by starting a 9/11 blog. If you are up for the challenge, you can take part in breaking the imposed silence of the corporate sponsored media simply by starting a blog.
“Your first question about the internet and its role, there's only one thing that will move the mainstream media, and that's business, whether it starts to hurt their business, and it is, it has, they're terrified of the bloggers, and they're terrified of the internet, because they realize that it is taking business away from them, people are reading them... they're playing around with having their own reporters do blogs to try to co-opt the thing and it's not working very well, and there's a lot of crap on the internet - I would think that a large percent of what bloggers write is absolutely nonsense, and opinion without any fact, they're not trained as journalists… but there are a lot of important bloggers who are doing better work than mainstream journalists, they're doing it without pay! They're doing it because they want to show anywhere where the press is not doing its job… And the blogosphere is showing that there are people… who are really starting to lead the way. And they aren’t professionals in the same sense of the training, but they are filling in where the mainstream press is failing - we've seen government run amok because of that, as you know - eight years of the Bush administration.”
Anyone can start a 9/11 blog, but the question is how can you make the most effective use of your time and resources? Obviously, writing blogs that mistakenly reported bad information or promoted attacks, slander, and gossip about other 9/11 activists would be counterproductive to forwarding the visibility of the 9/11 truth movement. So how does one tell the difference between good and bad information? There are several steps that you can take to make sure the information you promote is credible and accurate.
Fact Checking
There are two kinds of sources; primary and secondary:
“Primary sources have been described as those sources closest to the origin of the information or idea under study… Primary sources have been said to provide researchers with ‘direct, unmediated information about the object of study.’... In scholarly writing, the objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources.”
Anyone who has read a newspaper article will see quotations that the reporter has collected to add context and relevant information. In this case the primary source is the "quotation" and the secondary source is the reporter:
“In library and information science, historiography and other areas of scholarship, a secondary source… is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere.”
For example, if you encounter an article about 9/11 where the author claims that "X happened", or "this person said X", or "I conclude X because of this source", it is important to go back to the original source (when possible) to confirm that the reporter is correctly citing the information because mistakes in reporting can happen. Instead of simply assuming that a secondary source is reporting correct information, by checking the original source you are taking steps to avoid spreading misinformation. This is particularly true when the secondary source is known to be not reliable or credible. What if there is no way to confirm the original source of any given information?
Fact Corroboration
Corroboration is defined as “to make more certain; confirm: He corroborated my account of the accident.” A claim or report is more credible when it can be supported and confirmed by additional sources. For example, take the example of the attack on the WTC. Corroborating information for this event would include:
Video Evidence
Photographs
Witness Statements
All of the available evidence can corroborate an event. The more times an event is corroborated with sources, the more certain and credible the claim. As Ray McGovern explains in the film 9/11 Press for Truth, “The whole mystique of intelligence is that you acquire this… very valuable information covertly… if truth be told, about 80%—eight, zero—of any of the information that one needs is available in open source materials.”
There are many misleading claims presented to explain both the official story and "disprove" it. There are false statements, misleading statements and everything in between. Often, disinformation is supported by flimsy arguments that can be easily exposed by collecting and analyzing as many sources as possible. It is noteworthy that the Scientific Method demands that all information must be accounted for when reaching a conclusion. In contrast, disinformation largely depends on omission.
Fact Citing
Citing sources is also important because without doing this, readers can get the false impression that you are simply “making things up”. If you cite your information, the facts of 9/11 can be less easily dismissed. It is a good idea to develop the habit of always posting references (such as an internet link) whenever a claim is made. By doing so, you reduce the chance that you are promoting misinformation. This is helpful for readers so that they can confirm anything you say. By making this a habit, you are in effect training yourself to avoid promoting information without first fact checking and corroborating your sources. By doing this you are far less likely to promote misinformation.
The facts about 9/11 are out there. If the MSM chooses not to report them there is something that you can do about it. By starting a blog and citing your information the 9/11 cover-up will be exposed.
Quoting excerpts of 9/11 articles increases their visibility when they are hyperlinked. As well, videos are easily re-posted on blogs and promoting a selection of media is going to attract a variety of visitors.
When quoting articles, they should be preceded by an introduction that describes the content you are quoting. It is essential at the very least to establish “who” is being quoted. Longer excerpts can be shortened with (…). It is helpful to quote excerpts and provide links to original articles for full reading.
Example #1:
In 2002, a Bush official widely believed to be Karl Rove explained how the media is manipulated to “create our own reality”:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore… We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
In a letter given in response to Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice and family members, NIST, the organization tasked with explaining the collapse of the World Trade Center admitted, "We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse."
Shorter quotations (3 or less lines) do not have to be placed in a separate line, as seen above.
In some cases it may be necessary to add clarification to quotations. For example, the identity of someone referenced in a quote may be unclear. “He said it was false” could be replaced with “[Bob] said it was false”.
By making transcripts of videos, radio interviews, and other media, they can be more accessible. Even partial excerpts can be very useful when long interviews or videos can have noteworthy information worthy of being highlighted.
Example:
Jersey Girl" Patty Casazza and 9/11 Family Member Bob McIlvaine: 9/11 Symposium, West Hartford Ct, 11/03/07
“The Government knew… other than the exact moment… they knew the date, and the method of which the attacks were supposed to come... And none of this made it to mainstream media. None of it made it into the Commission.
And yet, again, all of your Representatives, on the day that the Commission book came out, were on their pulpits saying, “What a fabulous job this Commission has done. A real service to this nation.” And it was anything but a service. It was a complete fabrication.”
In this example, 9/11 blogger and activist Jon Gold made a transcript of this video on 911blogger.com. Because of this, the text shows up in search engines and those who do not have time to watch videos can read a transcript or even partial transcripts. Particularly significant excerpts can also be highlighted with bold and italic.
If every activist posted all of their photos and information on one website it will only have limited exposure. By cross posting activism on your own blog and a main site like truthaction.org, you are significantly increasing the visibility of your activism. As I explained in another post, internet search engines rank websites based on how many different websites link to them. This is apart from the obvious fact that having activism posted in more than one location makes it more visible. If you are viewing this photo to the right, it only proves my point. Would you come across this information if it was not actively promoted? The cumulative effect of a virtual army of 9/11 bloggers would be dramatic, leaving gatekeepers and the corporate sponsored media in the dust.
By researching, you are increasing awareness about 9/11. Posting articles involving your own research is a great way to get involved, and it can be a challenging, but rewarding pursuit.
“The whole mystique of intelligence is that you acquire this… very valuable information covertly… if truth be told, about 80%—eight, zero—of any of the information that one needs is available in open source materials.”
Although we can’t know the entire truth about what happened on 9/11 without an impartial investigation, Ray McGovern just let you in on a little secret. 80% of the information that we need to know already exists in the public domain.
This is why a resource like Paul Thompson's Complete 9/11 Timeline is particularly valuable. When it comes to 9/11 research, I also recommend Jim Hoffman’s 911 Research. These are two outstanding resources for 9/11 research. With the example of Jim Hoffman’s website, his attention to detail and careful review of information should be a model for any serious 9/11 investigator. He carefully cites his information so that researchers can go back to the original sources. Another excellent resource is the Google search engine. Of course, if you use this, you have to evaluate the credibility of any information you come across. A good way to learn how to research is to look at the work of 9/11 researchers like David Ray Griffin, Michael Ruppert, and others.
It is particularly useful for 9/11 researchers to focus on information that is not covered in detail anywhere else. Writing about topics that no one else has written about or covered in depth “fills in the gaps” of 9/11 knowledge. For example, although many had remarked about the promotions following 9/11, I could not find a complete article anywhere that addressed all of the evidence surrounding this issue. To remedy this situation, I wrote an article entitled, Cui Bono? The 9/11 Promotions. As hard as it is to believe that no one wrote an article completely addressing all of the promotions following 9/11, doing a search for “promoted + Richard Myers +Ralph Eberhart +Montague Winfield + Bowman + Michael Maltbie + David Frasca” confirms that this is true.
By reviewing articles, research, websites, and videos, you are helping others sort through 9/11 information. Critical reviews not only increase awareness of 9/11 issues, they help others to critically evaluate 9/11 information.
Without a method to distinguish true from false theories, investigations of the crime will remain mired in ambiguities.
The scientific method is the proven method of distinguishing between true and false theories.
The scientific method depends on critique (peer review).
A culture hostile to critique is antagonistic to science and to the development of a persuasive, actionable case for investigation of the crimes of 9/11/01.
Such a culture supports stereotypes of challenges to the official story as irrational and faith-based.”
Fact checking and corroborating sources is essential. Although this may be a tedious process, by being careful you are less likely to promote misinformation. What is misinformation? Misinformation is the unintentional promotion of false, inaccurate, or misleading information. Here is what I consider to be a classic example of 9/11 misinformation. It is often reported that “no hijacker names” appear on the flight manifests. From the 911 research website, Jim Hoffman writes:
This is a perfect example of misinformation. As you can see, referring to “victim lists” as if they were “passenger lists” is significantly misleading.
When false information is spread deliberately in an attempt to mislead, confuse, or misinform, it is an example of disinformation. As I argued in my article, 9/11 Disinformation and Misinformation: Definitions and Examples, the official story of 9/11 itself is Disinformation—information that is intentionally promoted to mislead through omission and distortion. Official reports consistently fail to investigate, comment upon, or even mention blatant contradictions, contradictory timelines, contradictory evidence, and contradictory statements.
Conclusion
When it comes to 9/11 activism, you are only limited by your imagination. Anyone can get involved by blogging about 9/11 information, making transcripts of 9/11 media, reporting your own activism, making your own 9/11 research, and making your own critical reviews of 9/11 news, research, and other media.
By creating a blog and posting links to 9/11 information, you are taking part in the effort to expose the truth about 9/11. If only a small number participated in the effort to inform the public about 9/11, the results would be small. By simply creating a 9/11 blog or website, you are increasing the visibility, search ranking, and amount of visitors who encounter 9/11 information, 9/11 websites, 9/11 activism, and other 9/11 news, video, and media. Creating a blog or website and linking to 9/11 information is in itself taking action to expose the 9/11 cover-up.
Blogger.com has some very user-friendly commands that make setting up a blog and organizing it very easy. After setting up a blog and logging in, you can add a links list by editing “layout" from your dashboard. Layout can also be accessed as shown on the left. This video explains how to add a "link list" to the sidebar of your blog:
You can create multiple link lists. For example, on my blog, I have link lists for 9/11 sites and blogs. When you create lists and add-on elements to your blog, you can easily move them around by dragging them in the layout screen.
How Do I Create a Menu or List of Content on My Blog?
Let's say you have important articles, activism, videos, etc. that you want to permanently highlight on your blog. Normally, when you post on your blog, new entries "push" older ones below. By creating a sidebar that permanently links to material you want to highlight, this content will be easily retrievable and permanently visible.
There are two main ways to do this. From the layout screen, you can select either the "text" or "list" options from the "add a gadget" icon.
Text:
Using the text gadget allows you to create whatever text you want, add hyperlinks, etc. This is just like a text editor like Microsoft Word. When you post articles on your blog, each blog will have its own address, which means you can directly link to these pages on your sidebar. Add text and a hyperlink (like this) and important content is highlighted on your blog sidebar after you save your changes.
List:
The "list" gadget allows you to create a list of items. This video explains:
* Compose: a wysiwyg mode where you manipulate text with formatting buttons * Edit HTML: a raw mode where you edit the html manually * Preview: renders a full-body preview of the post, including its Title, links and images
The "what you see is what you get" (or wysiwyg) editor is like a typical, Microsoft Word text editor.
How Do I Add Add Third-Party Functionality or Other Code to Your Blog?
Let's say you want to add a website counter to track visitors or add a banner. For example, the truthaction.org forum has a new banner. How can I add this to the side of my blog? With the layout tab, select "add a gadget" and choose "HTML/JavaScript". Copy the HTML code and paste it into the box provided:
The banner should work.
Creating a Blog List: Promoting other 9/11 blogs
This video explains how to add a blog list on your blogger.com blog.
Why is this useful? You can promote the latest content from other 9/11 bloggers on your blog automatically. Of course, there are many excellent 9/11 bloggers out there and you'll want to promote their content on your site.
As an added benefit, google values websites that update their content more than sites that do not. By having a blog list that updates, you are in fact increasing the visibility of your blog in search rankings (as well as the other 9/11 sites that you link to), because google values sites that update regularly.
In order to add sites to this list, you will need to find their feed address. What is this?
A site feed is a machine-readable representation of your blog that can be picked up and displayed on other web sites and information aggregation tools.
Almost every blog has an RSS feed. You'll have to find this address which is usually somewhere on a sidebar or the bottom of the blog in most cases. For example, on the bottom of my blog you find:
Let's say you want to promote the latest front page stories from 911blogger.com on your blog. On the left side of my blog, I have the latest stories from 911blogger.com. How can you do this?
After logging in to blogger.com and going to your blog layout, select add a gadget. From this list, select "feed".
This is an important concept. How does a Google search actually work? How do they determine what websites get higher rankings in search results? Well it turns out that they invented a mathematical formula to determine website rankings. Wikipedia explains:
"PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E)."
Rankings go from 0-10. 911blogger currently has a rating of 6. My blog has a rating of 4 (so does truthaction.org). Now, as you can imagine, if I have a high traffic website and I link to another website, I am increasing the visibility of that website more than linking from a website that has no visitors. You can download the google toolbar, which will disclose the page rank of any website you visit. Wikipedia explains that, "The Google Toolbar's PageRank feature displays a visited page's PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. The most popular websites have a PageRank of 10. The least have a PageRank of 0." You can also visit www.top25web.com to discover the page rank of a website. There are other important factors for page ranking. If you link to yourself (i.e. with your own website) a million times, it will not affect page rank. Why? Because sites with their own IP address do not contribute to the value of a website link. This is pretty clever because Google realized that if you linked to your website a million times on your own site, you could artificially make it appear higher in search rankings. Which is why Google designed this formula to avoid this potential issue. A video on the subject explains,
"Page rank is influenced significantly by the amount of people that link to your site... you do want external links that link to your site... these can come from a number of sources. The top four sources would be blogs, authoritative sites (government sites), articles... and press releases. My preference among all of those... is blogs. Links from blogs is an easy way to get links back to your site."
For example, if I had 1000 links from just truthaction.org or just 911blogger to my website, these links would all have the same IP address. This means that having many links from the same website is not as valuable as having links from many different websites. The variety and number of websites is what will increase page rank, visitors, and exposure for 9/11 truth. In other words, if we all just hanged out at 911blogger and didn't make our own blogs, we would have limited exposure. By creating separate sites we are significantly increasing exposure for not only sites like 911blogger, but for 9/11 awareness, which is what really matters.
Which it turns out, this is another incentive to create your own 9/11 blogor website. By doing this, you are increasing the visibility of sites like 911truth.org and 911blogger when you link to them, assuming that you add links to these sites.
Let's take for example, the 11th day of every month campaign. If all of the photos and videos from this activism campaign were only posted at truthaction.org, not many people will come across this activism. By having thousands of 9/11 activists creating their own blogs, posting their own activism and linking to sites like truthaction.org and 911blogger.com, the exposure of 9/11 information would be increased by a significant degree.
A Blog Devoted to Discussing 9/11 News, Research, and Disinformation
"When we act, we create our own reality"
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore… We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.'"
“Arabesque is the best writer in the movement, bar none. Arabesque writes with great clarity on all areas of the 9-11 cover-up, meticulously documenting each point through the use of extensive endnotes. Arabesque has also proven that he isn’t afraid to take on the disinformation specialists who would serve to discredit legitimate questions, research, and evidence which would directly contradict the 'official conspiracy theory' about the events of September 11th, 2001. This, I believe, is one of the most important issues facing the 9-11 movement today.” — Michael Wolsey, Visibility 9-11
