Thursday, December 3, 2009

Administrations who blog

Googeling the websites of the local government units - municipalities and subdistrict administrative organizations - I have come across some who are present on the blogging sites Blogspot or Wordpress. Announcing news from the administration is something where a RSS feed comes most handy, so one does not have to visit the website every now and then only to notice that something interesting was announced on short notice and is over already. While any decent content management system would allow RSS feeds to include into the website itself, as well as presenting such news on the site, only very few have such sophisticated websites using all the possibilities. The blogging websites offer a free alternative, and much easier to setup and use than a complex content management system.

In no particular order, there are four such blogs I discovered so far, with a varying depth of content. But of course all only in Thai language.
While the above seem to be by the administrations itself, also some of the officers have personal work-related blogs. So far I only found one of this kind, written by the Financial and accounting officer of TAO Siao, Pho Si Suwan, Sisaket. Her blog is named แนะนำอบต.เสียว (Counsel TAO Siao). It's a pity I can only read these blogs with online translators like Google Translate, they could provide some interesting insights on the daily work in the local government.

There is another group of government units using blogs, however these seem to have misunderstood blogging with free webhosting. Instead of more-or-less regularily post news or stories, they have only once posted several articles with the informations on the entity, like the history, location, subdivisions. Two examples are
And some other even made it that far, they have empty blogs where only the header or the sidebar indicate that they were intended to be about the administration.

2 comments:

Born2Serf said...

It seems none of them blog in English. Is anyone aware of a slightly better online translator for Thai than Google Translate? ;-)

Andy said...

Thai2English is the only other online translator I know to support Thai. That one does not create a translated text, but does a word-by-word translation, so you have to check each word and try to make a sensible sentence out of it.

The only other useful thing is the online dictionary a Longdo, but that one can only do single words.