Blears blogging

In what must be the most exciting day in the Department for Communities and Local Government ever, which has seen the start of a Twitter feed and the publication of a major white paper, the latest news is that Hazel Blears is now blogging!

I want to hear everyone’s views, from local citizens to local authorities. As a citizen - I’m keen to know what would make you get more involved in your local community? What are the barriers or challenges you face? What could we, or our colleagues in local government, do to make it easier?

For local authorities or organisations hoping to increase public participation - please tell us about your successes and challenges and what we can do together to get people more involved.

All the important bloggy stuff is there - RSS feeds and comments on posts, which is great. It seems to be a fairly short lived affair - only running for a week until 18th July - and I am not sure if that will be true of the twitter feed too, it seems likely. Still, if it’s useful I guess it will be possible that it will return again in the future.

It seems to be running on Community Server, which CLG use for their forums too, which itself runs on Microsoft .NET technology rather than the open source based approach that the recent developments at Number 10 have gone for. I’ve used Community Server myself quite a bit in my work at the Information Authority, and while it isn’t quite as flexible or intuitive as WordPress on the blogging front, it more than does the job.

So, welcome to the blogosphere, Hazel. I hope you enjoy your stay.