Last week saw the launch of a new blog, the Ideas for Development [1] blog.  Authors include the Director General of the World Trade Organization, the President of the African Development Bank, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, and other A-list types.  A quick scan of the posts (why are there no dates on the landing page?) shows big chunks of text with no hyperlinks.  This tells me that it's a one-way conversation.  A blog is not a memo distribution system.  A blog is an online conversation.

And speaking of conversations, James Jacobs responds [2] to my World Library post. 

Moving on in the blogosphere,  Simon Johnson, Director of Research for the International Monetary Fund, launched a blog [3] last week.  Yes, this is the second blog launched by the IMF in the past month.  "Strange days indeed".

Finally, a short requiem for the IFC's Innovations in Emerging Markets [4] blog, which appears to have died over the summer.  I am sad because these folks, along with the PSD blog [5], were the ones who introduced blogging to our IFI community.  The fact that the IFC let this blog die tells me we still have a ways to go in convincing organizations of the benefits of blogging.