Lots of world leaders have jumped into the information age with blogs, web pages, Twitter, YouTube and the like, but one might not expect a politician to pay much heed to constituents sounding off in the comments field. An interesting story from The Moscow Times:

“When President Dmitry Medvedev opened his blog on LiveJournal nine days ago, Ryazan region advertising executive Andrei Zubarev immediately posted a complaint about the conditions at a local children’s hospital.

What surprised him was that the Kremlin responded — and quickly. Two days after his post, he learned that Medvedev was looking into the matter. Then Ryazan’s governor called a news conference.

‘To be honest, I didn’t expect anything because there were a lot of comments’ on the blog, Zubarev said Wednesday. ‘We were very pleased because the situation really is terrible.’”

Read the whole thing. And if you can read Russian, here’s Medvedev’s blog.