He writes: 'We are demonstrating that globally standard programs can free mainstream journalism from the complex bespoke set-ups of the past.' And his colleague Jack Riley tells Journalism.co.uk: 'WordPress is infinitely more customisable, which means that we can adapt it all as we go along. By bringing it all in-house it also means our development and editorial teams can work closely on getting the features that readers and bloggers want live as quickly as possible.'

I must admit, I always had my suspicions that the Independent's former arrangement with LiveJournal was driven primarily by the personalities involved, former Downing St colleagues Ben Wegg Prosser and Jimmy Leach (now back in Whitehall, of course).

Worth mentioning too that the Telegraph has gone deeper into WordPress just recently, with the migration of its My Telegraph user community. Its blogs.telegraph.co.uk site, for journalists and commentators, moved over to WP about a year ago.

On the face of it, it's a fairly basic re-skinning of Livejournal's community features; the deeper you click, the less it feels like an Independent site, and the more it feels like plain old Livejournal. Nothing wrong with that; it makes sense to use a well-established and relatively beginner-friendly platform. It's a natural move for Livejournal as the new owners are reportedly keen to expand their relatively modest UK user base: their statistics page shows they have 315,000 UK-based users.

Hmm... the Independent? Livejournal? There wouldn't be a Downing Street connection there, would there? Former No10 web boss Jimmy Leach is now the Indy's 'editorial director for digital'; and Ben Wegg-Prosser, ex-head of the Strategic Communications Unit is Director of Corporate Development at Livejournal's Russian owners, SUP. The two also worked together for ages at the Guardian (I think).

It's another signal of blogging's steady progress into the newsroom: speaking of which, it's well worth reading BBC man Jem Stone's write-up of Robert Peston's talk to the BBC's College of Journalism yesterday. 'Central to everything that I do at the BBC,' he says.