Realtime war: Israeli military liveblogs, tweets attack on Hamas

Liveblogging. It’s one of those tortured-English words that conjures up images of awards shows, Apple launch events, and Justin Bieber. Whenever something like this is added to the dictionary (kind of how “sexting” was, a couple months back) it’s a little amusing — seeing a slice of our somewhat-frivolous, hyper-connected world given some legitimacy by the “old guard,” as it were.

What is not amusing, however, is watching the Israel Defense Forces liveblog its current operation in Gaza. (And we’re not just saying that because the IDF doesn’t seem to own a decent liveblogging platform.) In addition to updates on the IDF blog, interested parties can follow the action on Twitter, thus ensuring that the news will come straight from the government’s mouth, without the pesky interference of the fourth estate.

Update: It looks like the realtime social media offensive is only getting weirder as it plays out.

In addition to aerial photography and YouTube videos, it looks like the IDF will be letting us know whenever it manages to take out a substantial target, via Twitter pic.

And it looks like the military wing of Hamas will be getting in on the micro-blogging action as well, in its usual florid prose.

We’ll update this post as the story develops, although we hope for everyone’s sake that it doesn’t go on for much longer.