Why is WikiLeaks drip-feeding the cables? At this rate, it'll take seven years to publish them

IN the past 11 days, WikiLeaks has published just 1112 of the 250,000 secret diplomatic cables in its possession.
That's 100 per day. At this rate, it will take almost seven years to publish them all.
So why is the whistleblower group drip-feeding them to us so slowly? It could have published the whole bunch at once, if it wanted to.
It's unlikely there's a technical reason. While the WikiLeaks website has been under attack recently, it's still easy enough to get information out in other ways.
Putting the cables on file-sharing networks would see them spread across the world in minutes.
The group has already used this tactic to distribute its "poison pill", a massive file with the name "insurance" that can't be unlocked without a key.
It's possible that the slow release is because WikiLeaks staff are still combing through the cables, checking that they don't identify things like the names of informants.

But it's far more likely that Julian Assange is trying to get the biggest possible bang for his buck.
And his kind of bang is headlines.
As well as what they contain, it's the way the cables have been released that has given WikiLeaks pride of place in newspapers around the world for the past week and a half.
The only thing now is to see how long Assange's group can stay there, before readers start to suffer media fatigue.
The WikiLeaks founder's approach to publishing leaked material has changed markedly in recent times.
Whereas once WikiLeaks would simply publish documents on its website and let readers and reporters come to it, now it actively courts and works with the big media players.
The big players of its choosing, anyway.
Four publications were given early access to the US State Department cables – El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and The Guardian.
The New York Times wasn't invited to join the club, after running a hard-hitting profile of Assange in October that editor Bill Keller believes may have soured relations.
The Times, which was later given the cables by The Guardian, had been one of the publications working with WikiLeaks on its last major leak, that of the Afghanistan war logs.
It was during the preparation for that leak Assange told The Guardian reporter Nick Davies his theory about maximising media coverage.
"I remember one of the things he said was that there was a problem when you put raw material on a website," Davies said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.
"Each individual news organisation says 'Well we’re not going to invest weeks trying to make sense of that, because for all we know, another media organisation over the hill is already doing that.'"
In other words, nobody would spend time writing a story about the documents because they didn't have exclusive access to them.
The solution Assange settled on for the Afghanistan war logs was to give exclusive access to a single publication in five countries. That way, those papers would go hard on the story and then their rivals would follow suit as well.
This time around Assange has been just as savvy, cutting a similar deal with key publications as well as releasing the information bit-by-bit to stretch out the coverage for as long as possible.
But how long can WikiLeaks stay in the spotlight before readers get bored?
So far the events surrounding Assange's latest leak have given the story an extra kick, turning it from a diplomatic scandal into something out of a spy novel.
In the real world, there's been Assange's arrest in Britain over accusations of rape and sexual molestation. He appeared in court overnight to hear the charges against him and fight his extradition to Sweden, where the allegations were made.
Events in the cyber world have been just as dramatic.
First, WikiLeaks' website survived an unprecedented campaign to shut it down and spawned more than 1300 "mirrors" designed to prevent its removal from the internet.
And today, online activists began taking "payback" by attacking the websites of companies that have cut ties with the whistleblower group.
The websites of credit card company Visa and online money transfer service PayPal were both offline for periods today.
So, for the moment at least, it seems you'll still want to tune in to see what happens tomorrow.