Dominic

A few points about the blog which, overall, I believe is a step in the right direction. 1. usability - *familiarity* being the fundamental principle here. It is not consistent with other blog engines that we're all used to (such as WordPress). The navigation looks to be the main culprit here. It's a total mess. Probably because you're trying too hard to put it into some grand hierarchy scheme. 2. predominance - this blog is buried beneath government web layers. I believe it should be something seperate that stands out. If you really want to gather a community to discuss these issues, they need to think you're serious about it. Not just another government blog that no one (after the filter issue) is going to read/use. 3. boring - design wise certainly, but beyond that you need to keep things interesting content-wise. Words on a page send people to sleep unless they're passionate about the subject matter. At the moment the passion is here in the form of anger (filter! ;). When that fades, what's going to be left behind to keep people coming back here? Perhaps add some polls, some images, some social elements like Digg. Sorry, but it's called Web 2.0. Blogging and RSS feeds are just the start. 4. one-way - This is the pattern: you post, you get 100s of comments, none of which are follow-ups from you. Then you move onto the next topic, post again and then it all repeats. This is not a two-way conversation. We're getting nothing back. That's worse than getting "we don't agree" (with a reason) back. I suspect policies and procedures are going to hamper any individual in your department from swiftly posting a response. No doubt any such reply and new posts have to be carefully vetted first. So I suppose the best you can expect to manage is an incredbily efficient people-workflow to give something back as fast as possible. The bureaucracy is always going to keep you from the sort of efficiency other blogs enjoy though.