Some of the more curious sites on the Internet are the websites and blogs of world leaders. Kim Jong-il, my favorite despot and premier of North Korea, has a website that is essentially devoted to him, and Iraq’s top Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has a website, complete with a Q & A section with the cleric himself.  

The latest leader to jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that his country attempts to ruthlessly censors its citizens’ access to the Internet (with not entirely successful results), is Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has started his own blog.  With solicitations to email the president and posts by Ahmadinejad, the blog appears to be an attempt to reach out to younger and more distant audiences that are prone to political dissent, particularly since such dissent often finds its way into the Internet, which is less successfully censored than the country’s print and broadcast media. However, given the president’s first post — a lengthy homage to himself — the blog might amount to little more than a transparent piece of propaganda.

Mimi Hanaoka