LiveLeak

The BBC's Newsnight programme has given some overdue mainstream attention to the role of LiveLeak in the way that people, especially young people, are informing themselves about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The results range from the banal to the chilling via the utterly childish," Liz McKean reports. She missed out moving.

Yes, there's plenty of "I'm going to blow up your mosque"- type material, but there is also a good deal of the kind of 'reality' that ironically we usually only consume through the medium of fiction.

Interesting that the Beeb don't mention the home-movies of our own armed forces on LiveLeak. And what of the Canadians? My cousin Philip couldn't quite believe this clip of the Canucks raiding a Taleban compound "in the Stan". At one stage they are so gung-ho they can't even be bothered to lay down covering fire.

When YOU is a soldier on a real battlefield, the results of Web 2.0 are far from trivial. If Andrew Keen had wanted to write a serious book about what happens when traditional editorial controls break down, this British-based site ought to have been his starting point.

Newsnight asks what drives soldiers to post such "compromising" material on the Web. The answer surely is that they want their already compromised everyday world to be on record, and for the rest of us to see how different it is from the way these conflicts are being represented to us by politicians and the media. And to both celebrate and validate their shared experience.