The commandant of the  Coast Guard has laid out a plan to use “social media practices” to “increase the organization’s transparency,” a blurb from the Armed Forces Press Service reports. Or, in other words, they’re gettin’ bloggy with it.  Naturally, Adm. Thad Allen announced this in…a teleconference with bloggers and online journalists.

The Rat has not been blogging long. But he knows already how the EgoSphere, er, Blogosphere works.  If you stroke their egos, they will come.  And if you throw some buzzwords at them, they will come even faster and more gleefully.The Defense Department(and the Coast Guard, by tangent, the fifth military service over in that other cabinet-level department) has figured out that nothing breeds online cred and swollen heads better than taking the message straight around the “filter”–that would be all you dead-tree and pre-Web electronics journalists out there, yo–to bloggers who not only will spread the word eagerly, but practically trip over their traffic statistics in a rush to get the credibility of interviewing a four-star anyone.

Step two in total blogroll domination:  say “social media”.  By not just pandering to the blogarati but using the same tools as them, the Coast Guard gains blogger cred–or as Joey Ramone sang, “Gabba gabba we accept you we accept you one of us.”