The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

12 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Undiplomatic Blogging For diplomats, the world of blog- ging may be most useful in READ ONLY mode. In November, Croatia recalled an official from its Washington embassy when he wrote Web diaries report- edly describing diplomatic life as boring and saying he saw no differ- ence at all between the candidates in the U.S. election. According to the Croatian news agency Hina, Third Secretary Vibor Kalogjera, 25, was recalled on suspicion of violating state laws on foreign affairs and civil servants. Excerpts of the diaries were published in Zagreb by the daily Jutarnji List newspaper, Reuters reported. Foreign Ministry spokesmen confirmed the recall, but declined comment. Blog is shorthand for Web log, an individual or group Web site contain- ing chronological entries whose con- tent can range from personal diaries to political, social or literary commen- tary, and might focus on one topic or cover a broad range of issues. Blogs have been steadily growing in number and influence on the media scene. Bloggers have been responsible for breaking news stories ( The Drudge Report surfaced the Monica Lewinsky scandal), as well as for keeping the major media honest (they pointed to the apparent document fraud in October that hurried CBS anchorman Dan Rather’s retirement). Blogging was catapulted out of the realm of the tech nerd in 1999, when the Web site blogger.com offered free Web site-building software that could be used by anyone. The 9/11 disaster, when the demand for information and quick communication took a quantum leap, was the next watershed for blog- ging. In January 2002, some 41,000 people created Web logs using Blogger. Today, the Google search engine features 74 directories for blogs. The first in the list, Blogwise , lists 30,000 blogs by country and by subject and adds 80 new entries, on average, each month ( www.blog wise.com ). Not surprisingly, perhaps, blogs C YBERNOTES Site of the Month: FirstGov.gov The award-winning official U.S. government Web portal celebrated its fourth birthday recently. Managed by the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications, FirstGov.gov is a part of USA Services, one of President Bush’s e-government initiatives that is an integral part of the president’s management agenda. The Web site, in both English and Spanish, is the “front door” to online gov- ernment information, services and transactions at the federal, state and local levels. With information accessible by organization, by audience (for instance, “For Seniors” groups links relevant to individuals over age 60), by topic and by task (for instance, “Get a passport application”) from the home page, FirstGov.gov is extremely user-friendly: you can get what you need without knowing how the government is organized or the names of all the departments and bureaus. There are many practical things one can do online through this site, for instance: apply for a government job, find government benefits, reserve a campsite at a national park, report an unsafe product, apply for Social Security, find a scholarship, get a driver’s license, find out if there are any benefits to which you are entitled, and much more. In 2004, the site had more than 70 million visitors and over 200 million page views. FirstGov.gov figures in Forbes.com ’s “Best of the Web,” and in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine ’s “50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites,” and was rated #1 in “Overall Federal E-Government” by Brown University, among many other awards and citations. In 2003, FirstGov.gov won the prestigious “Innovations in American Government Award” from the Ash Institute of Harvard University, the Ford Foundation and the Council for Excellence in Government. This award is given to programs that are “outstanding examples of creative problem solving in the public sector.” FirstGov.gov got its start when Internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer, whose early research was funded by the Department of Defense, donated a powerful search engine to the federal government in June 2000. President Clinton instructed that the new global portal be launched in 90 days, and FirstGov.gov went online Sept. 22, 2000. GSA and 22 federal agencies funded the initiative in 2001 and 2002, and since then FirstGov.gov has received an annual appro- priation.