Within the BBC, there's currently some debate and head-scratching taking place over whether employees should be allowed to keep personal blogs -- and if so, whether policies need to be formulated to advise staff on what they should and should not talk about in the public domain.

It's obviously an area of some interest to me -- although I'm glad to say that the approach so far has been marked by dialogue and consultation rather than confrontation.

There's no sign that I'm going to be silenced just yet.

It's interesting, therefore, to see how NBC reacted to last night's genuine scoop by its correspondent Kevin Sites -- who's also a blogger.

Sites and I both blogged from Northern Iraq during the war last year, earning ourselves the "war blogger" tag -- although thankfully he emerged from the conflict unscathed.

Rather than playing down or ignoring Sites' blogging activity, NBC actively promoted it on air.

It's the clearest sign yet that some broadcasters are beginning to understand and even embrace blogging by staffers -- even though what they write is beyond their editorial control.

As more and more mainstream news outlets experiment with blogs in various ways, perhaps some of the suspicion that journalists would "give away trade secrets" or keep all their best material back for their blogs is beginning to fade.

I hope blogs like mine and Kevin's have shown that personal websites by journalists need not trouble our paymasters unduly. Indeed, they very often enhance and enrich the work we produce in our day jobs by providing a "rough draft" we can feed into the polished pieces that make it onto the air or into print.

NBC's response to Kevin's exclusive is very different from that of his former employer, CNN, which asked him to shut down his blog during last year's war. Long may it continue.