Sunday, July 02, 2006

A pioneer: Dakshina Kannada Police blog


The India Beats section (which "features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary"!) in today's Hindu has an interesting article about the blog of the Dakshina Kannada Police Department with posts by Mr. B. Dayananda, the Department's Superintendent of Police (the story features his picture, too!).

I had written about the DKPD blog twice: here and here.

While the use of technology is but natural in an IT-driven world, what makes the story of these blogs interesting is that it has sparked off a mini war in the cyber world. It all started when Associated Press carried an e-mail interview with B. Dayananda, Superintendent of Police, Dakshina Kannada district about the police blog started by him.

The AP report, picked up by newspapers in the United States, while making a passing reference to the DK police blog anointed the LAPD blog as the first one to come from the police force of a major U.S. city. The Boston Police, who reminded its citizens that bpdnews.com was launched on November 5, 2005, much earlier than the other two blogs, however, politely contested this.

So who was the first?

In a posting under the title "Still First in the Nation", bpdnews.com states, "So far as we can tell, this (blog launched in November 2005) makes us the first law enforcement blog anywhere (We apparently beat Mangalore, India, by a few weeks). If you know of an official police blog that was launched sooner, please let us know. Till then, we're happy to be known as the First in the Nation."

The report also goes on to say that this trend is catching on in Karnataka:

Now, even the Chitradurga and Udupi district police have followed suit by starting their blogs on April 23 and June 18 respectively. The latest entrants are just warming up to the task of blogging and their numbers are only expected to rise.

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