When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad started a blog last week, it didn’t get an awful lot of meaningful attention in the English-speaking blogosphere. Perhaps it should have, if only to say that here we have the first blog in the world where the blogger is a country’s leader, assuming that…
Across the front line between Lebanon and Israel, a Reuters report says, bloggers hiding in bomb shelters and watching from rooftops are trading terrifying experiences, bitter barbs and words of sympathy: The postings on Web logs, online journals, are a rare forum for communication between two countries that had no…
In his keynote address at the Gnomedex tech conference in Seattle on Friday, US senator and highly-seasoned politician John Edwards had this to say about politicans’ polish in an age of informality: […] “The problem is that we’re so trained and so conditioned over a long period of time that…
Here’s a good example of an eye-catching headline: Tony Blair starts blogging… This title of a post on Simon Collister’s eDemocracy Update blog certainly grabbed my attention as I scanned the headlines in my RSS reader. The reality is different, of course. The Prime Minister isn’t blogging at all; it’s…
President Putin’s right-hand man says that Russia is more than fit to host the G8 summit, The Times reports: The leading Kremlin spin-doctor [Vladislav Surkov] rebuffed Western critics yesterday with a robust defence of President Putin’s democratic credentials in the run-up to the G8 summit in St Petersburg. […] Mr Surkov’s…
A question about politics from a reader in the UK has given me pause for thought. He emailed me to suggest that political bias influences some of what I write in this blog, pointing out the style of my commentary the other day criticizing the Number Ten podcast and my commentaries…
Just been listening to comedian Eddie Izzard’s European podcast, an account of his two-day visit to Brussels last week in the company of Prime Minister Tony Blair for a meeting of the European Council. Izzard’s concluding remark is that he hopes the podcast has been “vaguely illuminating.” Well, I did learn…
I can think of no better example of why politicians and business make for a poisonous and untrustworthy mix than the unfolding disaster at EADS, the parent company of Airbus, and the delays in bringing to market the new A380 airliner that’s the European rival to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. A…
