Buried deep inside the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy is the two day old Digital Economy Future Directions blog.

Unfortunately, the blog was set up by people without a good understanding of social media, this is apparent as you read through the about page. With a promise that a future post will be on:

How do we maintain the same civil society we enjoy offline in an online world?

Clearly this blog was set up as a one way conduit for collecting input into issues that are to be included in a Future directions paper, that will delivered early next year. It will be interesting to see if this blog develops beyond that limited scope into a device for conversation.

Bad points

• The blog is buried deep inside the regular department web site, with no individual identity of it’s own. Just look at the URL: http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/industry_development/digital_economy/future_directions_blog
• The Terms of Use is written by lawyers for lawyers not humans. The Moderation Policy at least is better, at least I can understand it on the first read.
• The first real post Digital Economy reads like an extra dry Government report. Minister Tanner’s welcome is far better as blog content.
• Promotion of the blog appears to be solely the domain of the trusty old press release to traditional media outlets. However, it quickly made it’ way to new media, which is how I discovered it.

Good Points

• It is a Federal Government blog on a fairly high profile subject.
• People are willing to get involved, there have been over 600 comments on two posts in less than two days. The bad news is most are diatribes about internet filtering.

It is a baptism of fire for the team behind the blog and it will be interesting to see what will happen. This blog will either evolve or be buried under the landslide of comments about internet filtering. It is a case of unfortunate timing, if this blog was launched a couple of months ago, it could of been a good tool in the debate on internet filtering. Now most people have a strong opinion on internet filtering and are willing to voice them. The blog team needs to weather this storm of comments and stay focused. Otherwise this blog will be buried as will the chances of seeing any other blogs from the Australian Federal Government on high profile topics.

My words of advice to the communications team at the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Look at how other government high profile blogs that work successfully, Evolution of Security is my favourite example. Find people inside your department who use social media and get their advice. If that fails, hire somebody who knows their way around social media ( two Canberrans that spring to mind are Trib and NathanaelB spring to mind) for guidance. Finally good blogs are not about making announcements and receiving comments, it is about conversation. So please make the effort to converse with us.

AGIMO consultation blog discussion paper

So the first item I want to highlight is not making use of web 2.0 technology. It is a formal discussion paper about using a blog as a consultation tool, requiring formal written responses. That is the limit of technology, distribute a discussion paper as a PDF and allowing responses by email.

I am just cynical but using a pre-web consultation process on a project that would of been a great test case for a consultation blog, just seems old fashioned and excessively conservative. Has AGIMO not heard of iterative development.