Government Discovers Blogs!

Don Rumsfeld’s Boys Find Free Technology They Can Soon Spend Billions For

Blogs have become a great way to communicate news, plans, and events informally and quickly. My family likes to read my blog just to find out where I am and where I will be. Friends keep in touch and share opinions, like we used to do at happy hour. Clients and consultants communicate more freely and more often. It doesn’t need to cost any more than the basic internet connection we have anyway.

But some time ago, Science Daily said:

“The Office of Naval Research and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) are testing out the idea that weblogs can be powerful communication tools to bring together teams of people. The ONR and NUWC are leading a government-industry team to develop a blog as a promising new approach to speeding up the exchange of information on new defense technologies--and thereby speed up getting the technologies into the field.”

Now these guys have picked 12 pilot programs from among 120 under the DoD RAI-NC. It can’t be a billion dollar program without a lot of initials, and those stand for the Department of Defense Rapid Acquisition Incentive Net Centricity initiative. In English that would be “Rumsfeld’s Off the Shelf Internet Boondogle.”

And, they also put two guys in charge, so that they can each pull in different directions. That’s so the contractors can plan on multi-year cash flow.

The contractor is developing a blog “for distribution of general information to staffers from the seven team members. It also will enable users to post proprietary data, for example, test results and reports, that are accessible only to designated readers or groups of readers. The homepage will resemble a newspaper consisting of stories posted by users.” That takes it from costing millions to costing billions.

Now, that sounds a lot like the one you’re looking at. What did this one cost?

Never mind.