I suppose the idea is to increase openness, but really I'd expect this to simply turn into another PR outlet, regurgitating the same things as the media does anyways. But who knows? Maybe they'll have political podcasts for each candidate too (politicasts?) and a Twitter stream.

Perhaps the youth don't pay attention to the other PR outlets and one needs a blog if one is to reach them. One who can not reach the youth is not qualified to lead a country.

This site is and pretty much has always been a personal blog with a particularly active comments section. There are many stories that are posted in categories they are at best tangentially related to. Who can forget kdawson's past love affair with putting virtually everything in the Enlightenment category, even though that category was intended for news about the Enlightenment window manager?

The Politics section was originally designed to drive page hits by taking advantage of the hot topic of the day, that being the 2004 elections. It has since morphed into a holding ground for basically any vaguely political story, and serves as a way to get controversial (and therefore high page view generating) stories on Slashdot that aren't necessarily directly tech related. The FAQ itself is so rarely updated that you could hardly expect it to contain up to date information on what individual sections of the site are currently used for, or even provide a good list of what sections currently exist.

In short, take a deep breath, relax, and learn to let these things slide.

http://carlbildt.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]

It's in Swedish, but in short it's the Swedish foreign minister's blog and it's written from a personal perspective on current foreign issues, international meetings, government meetings, etc.

Of course it's not unedited (one might even doubt Bildt is the actual writer), but it's musing, highly democratic and extremely controversial.

This is quite a funny blog by a Scottish local government councillor called Terry Kelly. http://councillorterrykelly.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] There are a few regular posters to his blog who bait him and he goes mental. The problem is he doesn't know when to stop and makes a complete fool of himself. There has been a counter blog about him setup called Terry Watch which 'organises' the baiting against him. http://terrywatch.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] Funny but sad that somebody so daft is in a position of authority.

This is actually a big step forward for the ruling coalition's big wigs. Until very recently, no one dares to openly criticise the Prime Minister or the high ranking ministers in the mainstream media or even in real life. The mainstream media, even the privately owned ones spew propaganda ala North Korea. During the previous Prime Ministers tenure, it even got to the level of Stalinisque personal cult. I once attended a university gathering in 1999 where a minister was openly criticised by a student. As a result, he flew into a rage in front of 1000 people and demanded that the Vice Chancellor expel the student. Now, they finally realise that cocooning themselves from criticism is self defeating. The Blogs will provide the people with a way to directly vent their frustations to the politicians. Whether the politicians will take heed remains to be seen. Malaysia is now at an important stage of political growth. Press freedoms are slowly increasing, with the mainstream newspapers starting to give equal coverage to Opposition views. People are starting to realise that they have the right to freedom of speech and should no longer be afraid to use it.