Kazakhstan Ministers All Turning into Bloggers Now

Of course it is no wonder to see more and more countries adopting various social media tools now that it is a proven fact that they can be more than efficient in talking to the connected population of a country - with Barack Obama heavily relying on internet and various social media tools in the presidential elections campaign being one of the prime examples. Today we are watching one more country making a step to adopting social media tools: Kazakhstan Prime Minister has ordered that all the ministers should now have personal blogs hosted on the official websites of the ministries and agencies.

The major purpose of such blogs is not to inform people about some insights of the government operations - they are actually more about conversation as the PM demanded that the heads of such ministries and agencies answer comments and questions from the readers posted on these blogs. And he himself promised to track the most popular questions to better understand what people want.

The blogs are scheduled to appear on the websites of Kazakhstan ministries by the end of January so the officials in the country don’t really have much time to learn how to install blogging software and how to handle it properly. But the Prime Minister is actually ready to serve as an example himself: his own blog has been running on the government website for 10 days now and he has already received enough interesting questions from people to make the decision blogs should be written by other chief officials. The entries on the PM blog are written both in Kazakh and in Russian and the latest entry features as many as 158 comments which must be some indication of the fact that such actions are pretty welcome.

From my experience working with Russian public authorities (and all the bureaucrats of the former Soviet Union countries are pretty similar as they share the practices from the soviet past), I suspect that this entire idea will mainly involve tons of extra work for secretaries of such officials as the ministers rarely want to master the computer and type letters themselves so I suspect they will hardly want to master Wordpress or Typepad and actually write blog posts themselves.

In related news, Russian citizens can now leave comments on the video blog of the Russian president Medvedev. To me it definitely looks like the heads of states here at least in some countries of the former Soviet Union are now ready to rely on their blogs to better understand what the people in their countries want.

Via (in Russian)