Dan Gillmor says:
Citing information from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the Federation of American Scientists is reporting that Cambodia's King Sihanouk has a blog. The works to which this refers seem to stretch the definition of a blog, but it's fascinating to see a political leader talking this way.
Link to Dan's post.
Most of the entries are large images of scanned paper documents written in Cambodian or French. Among them, I found this newspaper clipping — a horrible AP story about the castration of a Phnom Penh transvestite by two psychotic sex tourists from Japan. Someone (I'm presuming King Sihanouk) wrote two pages of extensive notes around it in French. Kind of like hard copy fisking. Link to the post: "Nouvelles du Cambodge présentées par N. Sihanouk."
Also, I found this awesome entry:
STATEMENT FROM THE NORODOM SIHANOUK WEBSITE TEAM
The Website Team of Samdech Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia expresses its humble apologies to its distinguished audience for the unavailability of the site since March 4, 2005.
The web server has been subjected to a violent virus attack which required appropriate treatment.
The N. Sihanouk Website Team thanks its distinguished audience for its understanding and its faithfulness.
Phnom Penh, March 5, 2005
Link to the classiest message ever issued by a webmaster.
Update: Reader Ryun Patterson says:
From 1999 to 2003 I worked at The Cambodia Daily, the only English-language daily in Cambodia, and Sihanouk (who was king at the time but is no longer) would constantly fax us clippings from our newspaper with comments in French scribbled in the margins. At the end of the month, his staff would bundle up all his assorted media marginalia and distribute them to the media. His comments range from acutely insightful to witty to nit-picky, and these comments occasionally caused major government policy shifts. It's fascinating.
And about the "transvestite mutilation" newspaper clipping entry on the King's blog, Reader Nicolas Desprez sez:
Only the first hand-written paragraph refers to the printed article, the remaining paragraphs (after the three stars, with roman numerals bulleting) are about other stories like Cambodia current state of affairs.
