Started back in June, it consists primarily of posts by junior ministers John Penrose and Hugh Robertson - but features occasional posts by secretary of state Jeremy Hunt (who continues to blog on his constituency site), and a somewhat random collection of guest bloggers including celebrities, sports stars and officials: but these only seem to be one-off contributions.

It looks nice, and they're making an effort with photos. But there's no commenting, no subject tagging, no author archiving, just a single global RSS feed, and only the highest-level categorisation of posts. As a result, there's no real sense of structure, and nothing making me want to engage with either the authors or the content.

Nice to see the team at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport launching a new WordPress-based site this week, for the distribution and archival of their transparency data. They promise the monthly publication of financial data, with others 'as appropriate (at least annually)'. Data is being posted as CSV, as per official guidance, and uploaded as attachments to WordPress posts - meaning it can be viewed by (hierarchical) category, and/or month of publication, or via RSS feed.

In fact, it's precisely the model I've been discussing with the Wales Office, for implementation in the next week or two... although in their case, we've been using categorised WordPress posts for two and a half years, integrating things like FOI disclosures into their news stream; so it's really just following an established model.

It's a nice touch to see DCMS using a government-developed WordPress theme - namely, the Digital Britain/Clean Home design by BIS. The site looks to be hosted at Rackspace, like Culture's (ASP-based) corporate site... What? WP on a Microsoft IIS7 server? Hey, why not - WordPress doesn't have to sit on Linux, and Microsoft have been love-bombing the WordPress community recently. Having said that, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable at seeing a WordPress logo on a microsoft.com page. (If you're determined to run WP on Microsoft, this site will be useful.)

If you're coming along to the Word Up Whitehall event on Wednesday, you'll be able to ask CIO Mark O'Neill all about it.

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.