Colby Buzzel Wins Prize

LONDON - A former U.S. machine gunner's irreverent memoir about his year fighting in
Iraq has won the second annual prize for the best book based on a blog.

"My War: Killing Time in Iraq," by Colby Buzzell was to receive the $10,000 Blooker prize on Monday, beating out 110 entries from 15 countries.

U.S. blogging queen Arianna Huffington, a Blooker judge, called Buzzell's book "an unfiltered, often ferocious expression of his boots-on-the-ground view of the Iraq war."

Buzzell, 31, said he would have never written the book had it not been for the encouragement from readers of the anonymous online journal he started in his free time in a war zone.

Read the rest.

I read Buzzell's blog when it was still active. It was some of the most breath taking writing I had read in a long time. Not because it had poetic prose and unbelievably advanced vocabulary, but because it was direct, strident and, despite spelling and grammatical errors, the kind of writing every person wishes they could do: put the reader right there.

Kudos to Buzzell. He was the first victim of stringent blogging OPSEC that I knew of, probably not the last.