As Ahmadinejad launches his online diary, Becky Hogge offers political bloggers a few tips
A friend and I used to share a joke about Iranian bloggers. Well, the joke was really on UK magazine editors. Their interest in the vast array of bloggers scrutinising the Tehran establishment came around about once a year, and each time they treated the discovery that Persian is the second most blogged-in language on the web as if they had come across Lord Lucan convalescing in a retirement village in Bournemouth. "What's hot on the net right now?" the joke used to go. "I know - Iranian bloggers!"
But early this month a new Iranian voice joined the fray: that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Hezbollah cheerleader and nuclear hopeful kicked off his career as an online diarist with a 2,000-word vanity posting and a poll asking readers whether the US and Israel were deliberately starting a third world war. Reporting the story, the premier English-language blog Boing Boing got caught up in the idea that the site might be an elaborate hoax, pointing to the fact that the domain had been registered using a Gmail address and a company based in the Netherlands. After some further investigation of the blog by Persian-speaking readers, however, Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin concluded that it was real.
It's clear why established bloggers called hoax so early - as a blog, Ahmadinejad's offering sucked. But they shouldn't have been surprised. Although the web offers world leaders a chance to speak directly to their electorate, the history of attempts to put this theory into practice is not an illustrious one. Nobody has yet got the balance right, from Tony Blair's cringeworthy campaign blog of 2005 (which, with all its references to "buzzing around with Gordon", was so obviously written by a twentysomething wonk) to Angela Merkel's stilted weekly videocast, in which the German chancellor comes across like a well-meaning Newsround presenter.
So, for the benefit of all world leaders, here are the five golden rules for effective blogging. First, write in your own voice. We know you're bricking it on NHS reform/the IAEA, so repeating that nice little question-avoider you used on the Today programme isn't going to cut it. Next, post little and often. It's all about soundbites. Politicians are meant to be good at those.
Third, use links. There's no point pretending the rest of the web isn't there. And the good news is, if you link to the evidence that backs up your claims about pensions/the Holocaust, most readers won't bother researching what else is out there.
Fourth, allow comments. A blog is a conversation, not a monologue. The only excuse for switching off comments is if you get so popular that you can't handle filtering them for spam - which, with your election majorities, looks unlikely.
And finally, if you want to get noticed in the blogosphere, write lists. Everyone loves a good list.
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