U.S. "Joe Blow" keeps track of Iraq war dead

[babylonsister]

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkpg=http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061227/wr_nm/iraq_casualties_count_dc_2&linkid=28090

U.S. "Joe Blow" keeps track of Iraq war dead

By Matthew Bigg Wed Dec 27, 2:10 PM ET

STONE MOUNTAIN, Georgia (Reuters) - When Michael White, a self-described "Joe Blow off the block," set up a Web site to track U.S. casualties in Iraq he never imagined it would become a leading resource on the subject.

Nothing in his background suggested White had anything to contribute to an understanding of the Iraq war.

The 50-year-old joins the traffic every morning to get to work as a software engineer at a firm outside Atlanta. He's never been to the Middle East, has no military training and speaks no Arabic.

But his "Iraq Coalition Casualty" site, which keeps a log of the dead and wounded among the military and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, gets a million hits a day on peak days and at least four million hits a month, White said.

It attracts analysts, journalists and defense departments as well as ordinary readers with its near real-time updates, statistics, and the names of casualties. Web audience measurement firm Hitwise calls it "one of the most visited non-partisan sites aimed at U.S. politics junkies."

White set up www.icasualties.org in May 2003 when the war was supposed to be winding down and says it flourished in part because of his obsessive desire to make the names, dates and places listed on the site as accurate as possible.

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[proud2BlibKansan]

1. I check that site every day!

I had no idea who started it. Neat story.

[annabanana]

2. My church reads out the names of each week's

casualties during the "Prayers of the People" part of the service. We use that site.