“And that’s why birds do it, bees do it,
even educated fleas do it,
Let’s do it, let’s [start to blog]“

Wow. Even the International Monetary Fund is getting into blogging with their Public Financial Management Blog.

I’ll tell you the common factors amongst most of the public sector blogs:

• the authors work for an agency or international organization with little immediate political direction
• the subject matter leans toward complex subjects with many interpretations
• there is already considerable public debate about the subject matter
• the target groups for the blogs are not homogeneous: it’s not a case of academics speaking only to their colleagues, or civil servants speaking at the public

It’s contradictory, but it’s true. The departments, ministries, agencies and boards you would expect to experiment with social media - like health promotion, consumer safety, business development - have not. They have not translated their offline activities into online action, no matter how easy a process it may seem.

Instead, they’ve left all the heavy lifting to the wonks, the geeks and the closet cases.

h/t to the World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog