State blog keeps on trucking under new management

As Carolyn noted yesterday over at Madam S., Hillary Clinton's new State Department comes complete with a spiffy new State.gov. Not every aspect of virtual Foggy Bottom has seen change, however.

The State Department's official blog, Dipnote, still looks exactly the same as its Bush-era incarnation. This includes, unfortunately, its eye-straining white text on black background design. Given how little the blog has changed -- I'm guessing it's being written on the same content management system -- it's a bit jarring to see that all the posts written before the new editors took over on Jan. 20 have been deleted removed from the blog and put in an archive page.

I also can't help notice the conspicuous absence of Passport (or any of the new FP blogs) from Dipnote's new blogroll. The previous editors were nice enough to add us after some cajoling. I'm not sure if we were removed before or after the changeover.

As we've said before, there's no reason diploblogging can't work. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband's blog is a consistently good read, for instance. But blog readers are inherently skeptical of anything that looks like official boilerplate (as the Center for American Progress recently learned) and Dipnote never really provided much that wasn't available in mainstream media coverage. Perhaps the Obama folks will be able to shake things up a bit. For now, The Cable and Madam Secretary remain the blogosphere's go-to destinations for State Department news.