Last Wednesday, I spent the morning with a group of British diplomats at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who are experimenting with blogging (blogplomats?).

I was a bit surprised that diplomats blog at all — popular culture has them using elegantly-turned but guarded language that seems at odds with the in-your-face nature of blogging.

But there are more than 20 digital diplomats listed on the Foreign & Commonewealth Office site and I heard some interesting stories of how ambassadors are using blogs to get their jobs done.

In Vietnam, Mark Kent is finding ways of raising awareness of what Britain is really like by connnecting the local population to leading Britons. To mark the Vietnamese New Year he got David Miliband and Sir Alex Ferguson to offer greetings:

Stephen Wordsworth, Britain’s man in Belgrade, is using blogging to influence media discussion about Serbian policies:

And in Zimbabwe, Second Secretary Philip Barclay (recently named as a Times Top100 Blogger) uses blogging in a quasi-journalistic manner to get across the real nature of life in the crisis-torn nation.