puffbox

The Ministerial blog you don’t know about

I'd like to wish a happy first birthday to Margaret Hodge's DCMS Diary. I thought I knew of every Ministerial blog out there, but a client mentioned this one to me earlier this week, and I was amazed to see it had been going so long. (Hodge only arrived at DCMS at the end of June '07, as part of Brown's inaugural reshuffle, so she didn't hang around either.)

Google Reader only knows of 6 subscribers; and in my experience, Google accounts for 50% of the typical blog's RSS subscriptions, taking us to a mammoth dozen. After a year? - now that's what I call a soft launch. It's basically a record of her glamorous adventures as culture minister, rather than a forum for detailed political discussion; and posts are somewhat sporadic... currently running at one every two months.

It's running on Movable Type v3, with the IP address coming out as a Windows/IIS box at Digex UK (aka Verizon, I think). DCMS's main site sits at Rackspace, which makes me think it's another of the 'sandbox' servers which seem to be popping up (and rightly so) all round Whitehall. Comments have been disabled across the entire site, which is a shame, particularly in the light of the Digital Dialogues conclusion that moderation is never as onerous as you expect.

Somebody really ought to compile a list of Ministers' blogs... but maybe it's best to wait a few weeks, for what are probably obvious reasons.

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