In computer news this week:

Lead: How the internet is making a difference in the Iraq War with news coverage.

The Gulf war happened before the birth of the world wide web - what most of us know as the internet today. The Vietnam conflict had some traditional television coverage, the gulf war had much more active coverage, and now the Iraq war brings to us a new term "embedded reporters", reporters assigned to or embedded with a particular military division. So for the first time we can see a battle as it happens, from the field, and see the action as it happens. But we see these live reports only whenever the major network wants to show them to us.

And of course all the news channels in the world are covering the war, each with their own biases and agendas, and we watch them the same way we have watched tv over the decades, with a channel clicker in our hands, surfing across the channels to catch all the news delivered . Depending on where you live in the world, and what type of television reception you have, you can probably see a lot of the news services, but of course not all of them.

But now there's a new communications channel that's available to the whole world that lets anyone with a computer and an internet connection have access to all the conventional news channel sites, as well as many more sites related to the war and it's issues, and it's not television.

This of course is the internet today. And it's very different from watching traditional television, and waiting for a channel to cover a topic you may be interested in. You no longer have to wait; you can search for and go directly to any site and find any topic by key word search. With television you have to sit and wait and hope they cover the topic you're interested in, and then you have to pay attention when it airs, or else you'll miss it - and of course it only airs once . With the internet - you can read any article over several times, or you can print it out, or you can save it to your computer, and perhaps email it to hundreds of people. On many sites you can even comment about their new articles. It's a truly interactive media.

A lot of the live video shown on television is shown on the internet as well, so you can view and playback and re-view particular videos scenes you're interested in; maybe even save these to your computer.

And has the Iraq War increased traffic on internet news sites? Absolutely! According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, average weekly traffic to the top ten news web sites has increased by an average of nearly 100%.

But in addition to traditional news services covering the war, there are literally thousands of internet sites related to the war that provide different information on different issues.

Both pro-war and anti-war groups have websites providing information on their causes, and they use the internet to publish their owns views and to organize their groups.

Countries have their own websites which publish their own views, philosophies and stories on the war.

Governments and political interest groups have their own websites.

Businesses have their own websites.

In other words, the internet is a completely democratic universal news service. Anyone can publish anything on the internet, anyone can read it, you can read what you want, you can comment on anyone's views, and you can actually become your own news service.

So the question becomes, when you want war news, do you turn on your tv - or do you turn on your computer?

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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