Congratulations to the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the launch of their new staff blogs platform; and particular congratulations for choosing the right software to power them.

Like other Whitehall blogging initiatives such as those at DFID and FCO (both of whom already have their own group blogs on climate change - here and here respectively), the DECC site sets out to give readers an insight on staff's day-to-day activity. Four bloggers kick things off: one Minister, Conservative Gregory Barker; and three (relatively senior) staff members.

On a technical level, it's not dissimilar to the work I did for DFID, in that although the four contributors' entries are presented as independent, stand-alone blogs, they're actually just multiple users writing into a single group blog.

The work has been done by DECC's existing digital agency, the Swansea-based S8080. Like their main corporate site, it's running on a Microsoft IIS server, which may explain the lack of 'pretty permalinks' (although it doesn't have to be like that). There are a few rough edges, and I hope they won't mind me saying, they've done a few things in not very WordPress-y ways: entirely understandable, since they're primarily a Microsoft-based company. But hey, it's early days, and I'm sure it'll all be ironed out soon enough.

It's quite a brave initiative on one level: you only have to look at the number of comments typically received by climate-sceptic Telegraph writer James Delingpole - always in the hundreds per post, and often well into the thousands! - to see what they could be letting themselves in for. There's no explicit comment policy showing on the blog: I only hope they've given some thought to how they'll handle the more confrontational comments they're likely to receive. DFID's is a great example to follow, if they need one.

I know both FCO and DFID feel they've got a lot out of their blogging platforms: and I sincerely hope DECC have a similarly positive experience. But it may be a bumpy ride.