Last week James Fallows introduced a brilliant little contest at Atlantic.com. Readers were asked to submit their favorite cables from the 250,000 secret government documents leaked by Wikileaks.
Turns out this was just a genius ploy for some crowd-sourced labor. Now Atlantic.com is making use of the best cables as part of their CableGate Chronicles, a sort of mashup between Wikileaks and Chatroulette.
Users click on a big red button to load a new cable, jumping from one continent to the next, in a stream of sensitive and salacious missives from top U.S. diplomats.
It’s a very clever use of the web, adding a sort of gaming element to what would otherwise be an unwieldy document dump. And to be honest, there isn’t really any organizing theme to these documents beyond the random fun of peeking at what our top political spies are up to.
bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper
