The Dept. of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has launched a blog to gather Australians’ thoughts and ideas about the digital economy.  The blog will apparently only be ‘open’ for two weeks, so get over there now if you want to share your ideas in this type of forum, and subscribe. There should be a new post every couple of days covering topics such as:

• what does the digital economy encompass
• what benefit is there from open access to public sector information
• what should Australia do to ensure that business and citizens have the necessary skills to participate in the digital economy
• how do we maintain the same ‘civil society’ we enjoy offline in an online world?

That last one is flagged on the site as being related to the internet filtering issue and feedback is welcomed.  No doubt librarians will be keen to weigh in on many of these topics.

Using a blog to  gather this type of feedback is part of a plan to “trial consultation blogs.” according to Linday Tanner’s welcome post.  And this digital economy one is  the first.

My observations on this first one:

• it doesn’t really look like a blog
• there does not appear to be view that will show all posts, or several recent posts
• navigating to posts could be a bit of an issue, but when there are a few more it might be more obvious
• There is no autodiscovery link in the header so my browser didn’t detect the feed immediately and the first RSS icon i clicked on to subscribe was only the comments to the first post
• The URL contains “future directions blog”, but that does not appear on the page itself

I guess I have some feedback to provide on the trial/blog itself. Nevertheless, I think this is a move in the right direction.

Digital Economy blog | Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy