Britannia’s foreign policies served up on the Web

IN A MOVE that reaffirms our blind faith in blogging, video- and photo-sharing as the correct path to world peace & prosperity, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) has announced its new blogging platform, Flickr album (here) and Youtube channel (here).

You can now track Sir Dave of Miliband’s forays into the backstage of international policy-building through short clips on Youtube, or your favourite MP’s photo album on Flickr, while you blog away to your heart’s content. Just remember being the FCO that it is, your comments will be thoroughly inspected to guarantee they conform to the Terms & Conditions – ie: subject to approval by the competent authorities.

Actually the new FCO channels are part of an ongoing initiative dating back to December 2005 whereby the UK’s central government uses ICT to enable and enhance public engagement (yes, I am paraphrasing the supervisory authority). In fact it gives a very different spin to the current use of Youtube by the US Department of State, which is more an information tool for US citizens rather than a feedback tool on the goings-on of foreign policy.

The whole initiative is supervised by the Digital Dialogues review, under the auspices of the MoJ. You can download the findings from this page but, oddly enough, there is no feedback tool available for us to comment on the findings.

Expect retaliations from the Axis of Evil with the forthcoming “Ahmadinejad Show” on iTunes (or maybe not). µ