The Washington Post ran a story today about a new State Department "digital outreach team" that posts to influential Arabic blogs.

The State Department team's approach is to join a blog's conversation, often when it turns to the motivation for U.S. policy toward Iraq, and when others are claiming that the U.S. occupation is meant to help Israel or to secure oil. "Our job is to address that motivation issue and show them that that's not the motivation," MacInnes said.

"You can't just say, 'Well, here's our policy,' and drop it into the blog. You have to have what I call a bridge," MacInnes said. He then described using a sporting or current event or even poetry that would "allow one to get to be in a conversational mode with people."

This is a tricky operation: the conversational blogging format isn't particularly amenable to official government spokes-speak. And of course blogging isn't known as the go-to method for changing minds on an issue -- most blogs preach to the converted as a rule. But it seems that this particular team isn't getting shouted out of the digital room. It's encouraging to hear that somewhere within our public diplomacy apparatus, there is a real conversation happening, with real differences of opinion aired:

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, "we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, 'flamed' when we come on" -- meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

They were not, and there were such posts as, "We don't like your policies but we're sure glad you're here talking to us about it," MacInnes said. As a result, State is expanding the team to six speakers of Arabic, two of Persian and one of Urdu.