Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The world's newest blogger? Why, the king of Cambodia, of course

Okay,
try to follow this one: Yesterday, blogger Dan Gillmor reported on a new report by the Federation of American Scientists, which claims (based on information from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service) that Cambodia's King Sihanouk is now running his own blog, and that he himself is the one actually typing and posting the entries. Of course, you'll need to be able to read Cambodian to actually verify this yourself, so I guess we're just going to have to take their word for it. Does anyone know if this is the first case of a national leader maintaining their own online journal? I'm curious to know if anyone else has ever done something like this.

UPDATE: Mr. Gillmor's readers answered my question! There have been, in fact, two other personal journals kept by national leaders before this: one from the Ukraine's Viktor Yuschenko, and another by none other than Tibet's the Dalai Lama. It should be noted, by the way, that none of the three seem to be what we traditionally consider a "personal journal;" that is, they all seem to contain occasional entries by the leader in question, but in general are run by someone else. Still, though, I think it's amazing that the leaders of three countries now have used blogs to communicate with their citizens, no matter how limited a fashion that might be.