Diocese of Westminster Papal Visit blog is launched

Amen!

I have been hoping for a while that my Diocese would one day create a dedicated blog for the Papal Visit. And now it's finally here (http://www.rcdow.org.uk/papalvisit/blog/)! In fact, one of the main reasons I created this blog was because there wasn't a dedicated informal avenue for my Parish to share our story with! I'm so glad it is up now, and I will be working with the blog masters, so that the Diocese of Westminster may have an even bigger voice to proclaim the good news with to the people of London.

On introduction of the blog, I asked the blogmaster the following:

1. You already have a diocesian website dedicated to the Papal Visit. What would you say are the key reasons for your blog?
    The key reasons for our blog is that there is so much going on behind the scenes to do with organising Pope Benedict's visit to the capital, that we wanted to share some of it with our parishioners and readers. The Pope will actually spend a great deal of time in the Diocese of Westminster and we feel that we should be keeping everyone as informed as we can about the intricacies that are involved with putting on some great and memorable events when he comes. The long term ambition is to try and make people feel as involved as possible with this momentous visit.
2. Who are your main target audience?
   Our target audience for the blog is our own Diocese of Westminster parishioners but we also hope that lots of Londoners, whether Catholic or not, will come to the blog and get a sense of the excitement that Pope Benedict is bringing with him.
3. Which avenues of social media do you intend to link your blog to most, and why?
   At the moment, we really love Twitter so I think we'll tweet many posts out to our followers (@rcwestminster). Social media is a great way of keeping in contact with parishioners and also, for us here in the diocese, of linking us closer to their lives. What we'd love to see is the blog becoming a haven of unique news and information that inspires lots of comments and reactions - let's hope we can do it!

What I love about the blog

• I love that they've launched the blog with an exclusive and exciting story to tell. For me, that's what blogging is all about! It suggests that there will be many exciting blogposts to follow, and that the blog will be updated regularly!
• The access available for people like you and me to comment on the news that the diocese has to share is made all the more time-efficient as a blog - and that's one advantage of the blog over the RCDOW website.
• You will have noticed that I'm no writer! But these guys are communications gurus (at least for the London Catholic community), and write sophisticated articles on a daily basis. So their blogs are likely to hold your attention with correct grammar and use of the English language! 
• It's hosted on the rcdow.org.uk domain, which means that we would be able to find the blog easily within the virtual territory of that name, which identifies the overall webspace for the diocese. I've got way too many bookmarks to monitor already, so this is a plus for me!

I look forward to seeing much more on there soon, and that it continues well past Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the UK as a haven for Londoners to have their say in this informal way too! Thanks guys!