Blogged Down in Work

The rhetoric of the blog of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often indicates that it is part of an ambitious public diplomacy agenda that includes messages directed at a skeptical U.S. audience, such as "A Reply to an American Mother`s Message" and "Message to the American People," which begins with a salutation to "Noble Americans" that is repeated and includes a description of his potential readers from that nation as "God-fearing, truth-loving, and justice-seeking." The personal appeal of his entries often makes a specific citizen-to-citizen pitch.

As you know, the purpose of running this blog is to have a direct and mutual ‎contact and communication with the viewers and even though I have received many ‎messages from the viewers to update the blog and write new notes, I preferred to write ‎less and spend more time on reading the viewers' messages – and not let this ‎communication tool become just a one-way medium.

The text is available in four language, and the blog's interface is quite sophisticated -- much more so than the blogs of any American officials -- and includes RSS feeds, javascript entries, and a search box that actually works (and will bring you Ahmadinejad's Christmas greetings if you type in the keyword "America").

It's also interesting to note that like other bloggers Ahmadinejad sometimes devotes a certain amount of time to justifying not writing on a regular basis. In the Iranian leader's case, his claims of a busy schedule are certainly plausible, but he sounds genuinely defensive about his time-management skills:

Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed. But this doesn't ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending fifteen minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog.

There is also a parody blog on the web, which includes a number of Photoshopped compositions and mockery of his anti-Semitism and homophobia.