I worked for a couple of years as a digital media consultant, advising companies on what search engines and ’social media’ might be and mean to them. After a half year break from working life in the UK I moved to Copenhagen and landed a job at the British Embassy. The internet and technology still fascinate me, and having had some distance from MyDigitalLife in the UK (and several months off in the Himalaya to reflect) the potential of open information networks excites me more than ever.
Imagine my surprise then to find that British Ambassador to Denmark, Nick Archer blogs both in Danish via popular newspaper Berlingske here and in English for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office here.
What’s he been saying? Well, the RSS feed of the Berlingske blog will give Danish speakers an idea:
And for the non-Danish speaking here’s the same content translated via Google Translate:
I won’t analyse this in any great depth, but it’s interesting that Afghanistan is mentioned significantly more than Copenhagen, despite the upcoming COP15 climate summit. That may be no surprise, as the two recent posts that have attracted the most comments by far are on this topic:
- ‘Should we send more troops to Afghanistan‘ - 172 comments to date
- ‘Afghanistan: Who said the exit strategy?‘ - 130 comments to date
I’m quite impressed by the British government’s use of the internet and an increasingly open attitude towards non-personal information, they’re in dialogue with some formidable thinkers such as Tim Berners-Lee, and have hosted some interesting events in London recently.
From a Foreign Office perspective the global reach of Digital Diplomacy is an exciting prospect that should help increase the effectiveness of overseas civil servants (a full list of FCO bloggers can be found here). Domestically making public information more accessible in Britain could go some way to restoring public confidence in government after a summer of expense scandals and bank bailouts.
