AGIMO (the Australian Government Information Management Office) has a blog which is dedicated to the review of the Web Publishing Guide. Hopefully this blog will lead by example in showing how a Government department can communicate using a blog, lead to a more useful and usable Web Publishing Guide. As well as AGIMO beginning to understand web 2.0 tools and will start making use of other web 2.0 tools.

The big surprise for me (blogging more than a year after I expected is only minor), is that it is hosted in the cloud by wordpress.com. Not that there is anything wrong with this. I would actually recommend hosting a blog with wordpress.com as this resolves issues regarding security and keeping the wordpress current. It is just a conservative government department with I assume considerable IT resources surrendering the total control of hosting in house for the less secure external hosting.

HREOC listening tour blog

Now this is your traditional blog, running on WordPress and allowing comments to promote the Listening Tour of the HREOC Commissioner Broderick as she travels around Australia and to gather your feedback on the direction HREOC should take over the next five years. The comments are moderated as expected and are governed by an acceptable use policy. A couple of the more interesting conditions are:

• do protect your personal privacy and that of others by not including personal information of about yourself or about others in your posts to the blog, (such as names, email addresses, private addresses or phone numbers);

• do represent your own views and not impersonate or falsely represent any other person;

Overall a positive use of a blog to interact with their audience.

What I found interesting was while the blog and main HREOC site look identical they have different domain names and hosting half a world apart. The blog’s domain name is hreocblog.com and hosted on a commercial provider in the US. While www.humanrights.gov.au is hosted in Australia, probably inhouse. This does not surprise me, I know of more that a few Government IT departments that are unwilling to host a blog inhouse because of security fears(ie fear of the unknown), lack of skills and/or knowledge or just because it is easier to say NO. It also looks like the communications staff of HREOC, who I assume are responsible for the blog where unable or unwilling to get their IT people to delegate a subdomain name like blog.humanrights.gov.au and point that to their blog on the other side of the world.