Brown gets bloggers all a-Twitter

Gordon Brown's team have hit on a new way of getting their message across to the outside world - the instant messaging social networking site Twitter.

No doubt desperate for any means to put across positive news (very thin on the ground right now), a Brown aide with the user name DowningStreet has been sending regular despatches to Twitter since Brown touched down in America on Wednesday.

The material is fairly patchy. Samples range from "Ban Ki-moon meeting finished a moment ago - Zimbabwe, Darfur development, Kosovo and others on the agenda" to "No 10 admin in the US is tired, but surviving on strong coffee and muffins" and "I am in New York and it looks like a fantastic city".

But it seems to be proving popular. On Thursday afternoon some 1,383 people were following DowningStreet's Twitter feed online or on their mobile phones, happily debating points and sharing jokes.

However, DowningStreet will need to be much more revelatory to keep his/her audience. For example, the comment on Brown's meeting Barack Obama at the British embassy in Washington - "Beautiful gardens here" – is poor fare by the lowest of standards. ·