The DE Blog Ends (wih a whimper)

Well - the DBCDE blog ended just before Christmas. It was nice to receive acknowledgment on the last post for my efforts. Pity they didn't link to my blog rather than just one of the posts though.

Dave Bath and Sam D both were deserving of that recognition though. Dave gave a good summary of the failings of the blog in general though. I must check his references to the AGIMO work on blogs and consultation.

It is a pity though that most of the coverage of australia and the Digital Economy continues to be about filtering. HotSearch picked up that the blog was swamped with filtering stories. Meanwhile Arts Technica picked up on the leaked then released report on filtering that was the diversion at the end of the year, while UbNews picked up Conroy's comment that the Government would look at peer-to-peer filtering as well. Even the The Minneapolis Star Tribune got into the act.

It ultimately is a pity that the discussion paper released by the Department did show that the blog was just the discussion paper released in pieces (though a different order).

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.