Welcome DBCDE

The blogsphere is an interesting beast, much misunderstood and widely abused. The best of blogging is not just one crazed individual sitting in a corner recording their daily doings and sharing them with the world. The best of blogging picks up on the single most magical element of the web - the hyperlink - and creates a link to multiple sources of content. The very best bloggers are regular cross-commentators.

Blogging has been wrapped up into the generic Web 2.0 definition and aligned with social networking and wikis under the generic heading of "user generated content." Politicians have started using these tools in their election and electoral engagement activities. Corporations have started using them to connect with customers. Examples include blogs by software developers at Microsoft.

Our very own Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has decided to give this a go with a blog to discuss the Digital Economy. Now the purists would probably claim it is not a blog - it is really a "forum" more like whirlpool. And as a forum it suffers from a number of factors - not least the absence of discussion threads and the lack of a registration process (so you do't know if the two "peter's" are the same).

But they've got some reaction and I'm trying to contribute. My motivation for establishing this blog is to create a place where all my responses to their blog can be housed - because the structure of their blog makes finding specific comments hard.

This blog will morph into a general digital economy blog.