First it was Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono. Now the Minister for people’s Housing Yusuf Asy’ari has also started blogging.I learned about this thanks to Priyadi’s Place and Harry Sufehmi.

Yusuf’s blog began on August 14 and so far he has three posts: an obit, a welcome message and the most recent on how urbanization is putting a strain on housing policies. There is also an English version in the posts, which are in Indonesian.

His stated aim in blogging, as he states is:

With this blog, I hope to be able to reach out and get in touch with our people, and establish good communications by enabling dialogue between the government and its people.

So far he’s had 32 comments, mostly welcoming him to the Blogosphere and applauding him for trying to communicate more directly with the people.

So should we applaud that the world is changing and should we look forward to the day when we can have naked conversations with the government?

Celebrations may be a bit premature. Indonesia’s leaders have a reputation of mounting a great start but failing miserably in the maintenance section. Jowono’s blog, for all the novelty of being the first minister’s blog in Indonesia, has turned out to be somewhat disappointing. He has so far posted six times since he first started blogging in April and the last time I checked he had not started a conversation with an NGO that was criticising his portfolio.

There is a saying that if you want to do anything you’d better do it well or not at all. Blogging is one of those things. Unless the ministers are willing to make that commitment to post often and be responsive there is little point blogging. They might as well go the traditional route and call a press conference for all the difference they make.

Still Juwono and Yusuf get full marks for venturing into the Blogosphere when many of their colleagues would hardly know anything more technical than how to swagger with a Nokia Communicator.

But Yusuf should beware of Roy Suryo, the self proclaimed IT police because he uses the .com domain. Roy has vexed and huffed about Juwono not using the .go.id domain, even though his client, the President uses the .info domain, as pointed out by Priyadi.

Bad Boy, Bad Boy watchagonna do? Whatcha gonna do when Roy comes for you?