For people in Iraq and Afghanistan, I doubt that the insights of bloggers has significantly more influence upon their views of the world than upon what they see around them. If the goal of the "kinder, gentler" blogs is to whip up anti-western sentiment, then that is probably a realistic goal, but also a rather pointless one. On the other hand, if some wannabe jihadists actually take to doing this stuff and wasting lots of their time doing it, then all the better. We did have some propagandists on our HVI/HVT lists at times. None of them were bloggers.