This is amazing: The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has started a blog. Apparently the posts are translated into English, maybe even other languages as well. You can imagine the huge interest this has spawned all over the wired part of the world — which means that sadly, the site is down due to high traffic, so I can’t say anything about its contents besides the second-hand commentary of others.

It’s not clear to me whether he will be writing the posts himself, but it’s probably safe to assume that this site is being used to spread a political message, not for chitchat about his cat, which means he probably employs writers to flesh out his ideas.

It’s also interesting to see the early reactions — the major consensus seems to be a mixture between joy (”The blogosphere now has a bona-fide head of state as one of its members”) and extreme scepticism (”It’s also multilingual, so even us western dogs can read the thoughts of this modern day Hitler.”)

Also note that Iran (alledgedly) is one of the nations that makes frequent use of Internet filtering technologies to limit access to dissident communication channels. Interesting find on Wikipedia:

All media in Iran is controlled directly or indirectly by the state, and must be approved by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance before it can be released to the public. The state also actively monitors the Internet, which has become enormously popular among the Iranian youth. Iran is now the world’s fourth largest country of bloggers.

Sounds intriguing — on one hand a country of highly monitored media, on the other hand a hugely successful adaptation of what we in the west perceive a liberating technology for free, uncensored, public discussion.

Link: ahmadinejad.ir
Link: TailRank discussion