solanasaurus.com

Like many governments around the world, the US Department of State are dabbling in citizen interaction with a new blog called DIPNOTE. There was a woman from the State Department at the conference I was at last week, who said they “even have young people blogging” for it. But this isn’t something they’ve slapped together with interns. It’s slick and contains carefully edited (and approved) first-person narrative from a range of State Department workers.

As a means of communication and public relations, it’s pretty genius. But as the woman at the conference said, “people can comment all they want, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to change anything”. Okay, so maybe it’s not e-democracy, but they deserve kudos for leaving up the negative comments. While it seems the people whose names are on the posts mostly really are the ones writing them, I think we can expect about as realistic an image of what goes on in the State Department and the countries they operate in as this video shows of America.

Yikes, I’ve just now noticed there’s a link to Global Voices in their sidebar under some very high profile establishment publications (a result of the conference?). How cool that Global Voices has snuck in there right under the Council of Foreign Relations. Talk about influence! Our content belies it, but I hope no one thinks we have anything to do with the US government. Double-kudos to the State Department for reaching out to bloggers of the world and hopefully reading their comments.