markwilson.it

I’m not sure how I missed this one, but the UK Government’s latest public relations stunt is the Prime Minister’s blog. Yes, that’s right - since Monday, Gordon Brown has been blogging at Number10.gov.uk (for those outside the UK, number 10 Downing Street is the traditional London home and office for the Prime Minister of the day - and in case you hadn’t noticed, Tony Blair got out while the going was reasonably good and left the former Chancellor as a caretaker PM until the next election… [sorry, nearly broke my own golden rule for no politics on this blog there]).

Given this administration’s record on matters of an IT nature, I would hope they had better things to do (of course, the PM is not churning this stuff out himself). With Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube feeds (as well as the Brightcove-based Number 10 TV) he wouldn’t have much time left to run the country [on second thoughts, maybe that is what he is doing… it would explain a lot about the state of the nation…].

Of course the site is, at worst, a thinly veiled PR exercise and, at best, an attempt to engage an increasingly disillusioned electorate in discussion with the Government of the day. After all, the standard response to most e-petitions seems to be a condescending e-mail from the appropriate department which can usually be paraphrased as “yeah, yeah, we heard you but we’re still going to carry on regardless”.

Still, at least they’re using WordPress as their CMS (albeit without any kind of acknowledgement)!