This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 10 November 2008

Thanks for your comments on my last post. It’s been an interesting week for our blogs – they’ve had wider attention than usual, and some may have questioned our approach as a result.

I said I’d make the case for why diplomats should blog. So, here’s a quick history of Foreign Office blogs to start:

We launched our blogging platform in September 2007 by commissioning 6 bloggers who represented a good cross section of Foreign Office work.

We wanted our bloggers to tell stories, using a personal, engaging tone of voice, reaching out to new audiences, bypassing traditional media, inviting and responding to comments.

We’ve had a steady turnover of bloggers since then. The Hansard Society have evaluated our approach. And having proved the concept within the Foreign Office, we opened up the blogs over the summer so that any member of staff with a valid business reason could start an official blog.

We do have some rules, and we provide guidance. So we insist that our bloggers think hard about what they are trying to achieve and who their target audience is before they begin. And we ask them to commit to posting regularly and moderating comments every day. We don’t tell people how to write – I don’t think there’s a right way to blog – but we do offer tips on effective use of the medium.

We’ve learned lessons from the blogs that haven’t really worked. But some of our blogs have been fascinating: Sherard Cowper Coles set the tone, filming video blogs from the mountains of Afghanistan, our blogs from Zimbabwe are always interesting, and Mark Kent is demonstrating how to use blogs to engage a local audience in Vietnam.

Having demonstrated the potential value of blogs, my sense is that we now need to do more to integrate our blogs into the process of diplomacy. I’ll return to how I think we can do this.