Pajamas Media has been on top of Middle East events and commentary over the past few weeks, here is the latest. Co-founder Roger Simon makes an important point in a PJ news release:

"We are increasing our podcast program overall," states Simon. "We had recently published podcast interviews focusing on US issues with Senator Rick Santorum and through Instapundit's Glenn and Helen Show, with Senator John McCain. When the Middle East conflict started to expand we wanted to get access to an Israeli official. We weren't sure we could, but we tried and were able to land an interview with the Israeli US Ambassador Daniel Ayalon. Our interview lasted 14 minutes compared to cable news organizations of perhaps 3- 4 minutes. This flexible timeframe is one of our advantages compared to the more sound bite oriented mainstream media approach"

Personally, I believe that mainstream cable news coverage of the conflict has become totally unwatchable. In the past week most Canadian news outlets have started their top-of-the-hour news reports with endless and meaningless updates of the evacuations of foreigners from Lebanon’s shores as if it were a crucial and defining issue, a feat enthusiastically replicated over at CNN. Some of that coverage approached Katrinaesque levels of hysteria while the key purpose of tuning in - at least for me - was to get some solid battlefront coverage and possibly updates from the diplomatic front. None of that, and if you got it was often highly biased and devoid of any direct relevance. News and commentary, including raw footage are now sourced almost exclusively on the net.

Another interesting development is that blogs are proving to be an incredibly useful tool to go beyond enemy lines and try to forge relationships where they previously had been impossible. My friends at Augean Stables have been in a lengthy discussion with Omar, a Palestinian based in Jordan, and Lisa Goldman notes the following remarkable thing:

The internet has also been offering some surreal experiences, like the ability to have a Beirut-Tel Aviv online IM chat in real time while the missiles are falling. That's what happened to me and this blogger a few nights ago. We chatted while he was sitting on the roof of his apartment building in Beirut, watching missiles from Israeli planes fall on his city and describing it to me. He was carrying on an online conversation with another Israeli at the same time. And he was able to describe his feelings and the atmosphere in a human, personal way that no newspaper article or television news segment could achieve.

Extraordinary.