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March 30, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
State Department Hosts Chat On Blogs
Blogs are having an impact all across the world -- from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq to China, Pakistan and even Kenya -- so it makes sense for the diplomats at the State Department to pay attention to the phenomenon.
They are. The department dedicated a four-day "rolling webchat" to the topic last week. A writer for State's Washington File news service recapped the chat in an article published yesterday. A transcript also is available.
The article leads with this quote from journalist David Kline of Blog Revolt, who was the guest for the chat: "Nothing I have witnessed is as potentially transformative of media and politics as the emergence of blogging -- or rather, the emergence of the 'voice of the people through blogging.'"
The State Department's Web site actually is a decent place for information on the democratic impact of blogs and other technologies abroad. A search for the word "blogs," for instance, yielded articles that mentioned "the use of blogs to maintain dialogue during and between elections" in developing democracies and repressive countries, and that noted the impact of blogs in China.
The Defense Department also has given keen attention to the blogosphere, as I noted in an entry last month about a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Not long after that, Military.com published a piece on how the U.S. Central Command public affairs team is seeding the blogosphere with information about the war in Iraq.
And in December, suggestions by The Washington Post that the military is trying to make pawns of bloggers embedded with troops in Iraq sparked outrage among "milbloggers" and their allies.
Then there is the touchy subject of "data mining" -- the use of technology to cull information from databases and other sources. As reported both here at Beltway Blogroll in November and at The Christian Science Monitor, the federal government is directing some of its energy in that realm toward data freely available in the blogosphere, including information in other languages.
The bottom line: Whether as a democracy enabler, an information source or a propaganda tool, blogs are being taken seriously by official Washington. And I suspect we'll continue to see the evidence of that fact mount.
UPDATE: Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media wrote a piece on blogging for the State Department as part of the detailed package on innovative technologies on the department's Web site.
Posted by | 11:00 AM
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