Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, August 14, 2006

Power Blogger

Brian Whitaker noted in a Guardian (UK) column that Iran's president has started a blog. However, Whitaker is not sure what to make of the endeavor.

"A picture of the president shows him writing with a pen on a sheet of paper, which is not very bloggerish. Surely they could have sat him at a computer somewhere for the photograph.

"All this underlines the fact that Ahmadinejad doesn't really get the point of blogging. A presidential blog is almost a contradiction in terms: blogs represent the voice of ordinary people, not politicians who are pretending to be ordinary people. And of course ordinary people who blog in Iran and other parts of the Middle East risk ending up in jail."

Ahmadinejad's blog may be online, but when I tried to view it this morning, it seemed overwhelmed by the traffic generated by publicity from The Guardian and the BBC. It claims to be available in Farsi, Arabic, French, and English.

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