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Diary of Negotiations: Argentina's New Experiment in Blogs and Politics

Categories: Latin America, Argentina

The following is a translation of Mariano Amartino's post [1] originally written in Spanish on Clarín's Weblog Sobre Weblogs [2]

Diario de Gestión [3] (Newspaper of Negotiation) is one of the more interesting experiments to have emerged as a way to merge blogging with politics. Basically, it is a website that offers a free weblog to any national or local legislator.

So far (and although they seem to be few, it's a great step forward), there are 12 legislators with blogs where any citizen (or any person with internet access) can leave comments, ideas, suggestions, and why not, criticisms too. This is one the great things about blogs for politicians: they encourage relationships with voters they represent and without intermediaries. The list of legislators who have already taken this step are:

Diario de Gestión is a project of Agencia Blog [16] and OpenSA [17]. It was born on the 10th of December, 2005 and in January the number of unique visitors tallied 5,000; a 111% increase over its first month. A couple more interesting details: in addition to the legislators’ blogs, there is a home portal which gathers related subjects and is quite interesting. On the other hand, it's a good experience to follow each individual blog closely to see how it evolves. But still, it's a good idea to group them together and in case some legislators prefer to keep their blog on their own site, Diario de Gestión can still aggregate their content.