Prime Minister, meet Flickr and Twitter

Not to be outdone by David Cameron, the Tory leader, or David Miliband, the aspirant Foreign Secretary - both of whom have blogs, Gordon Brown has embraced the multimedia age.

A new site called - Number10.gov.uk - aims to give all types of updates about the Prime Minister's movements and views in a manner that the Facebook generation would consider friendly. And how very du jour some of its services seem to be.

Not only are videos regularly posted to a dedicated YouTube channel, there are also options to share news from the site via social networking sites, subscribe to RSS feeds, bookmark content using del.icio.us, flag stories up to Digg, the social news service, even receive 'photo streams' from Flickr, the photo-sharing site.

In perhaps the most web-savvy move of all, users of the ultra-hip micro-blogging site Twitter - which many in the UK still have not heard of - can even subscribe to a Number 10 feed and receive regular 'Tweets'. (A short news update no longer than a text message, for those who don't know.)

Not everything is going to plan, however. While most sections of the site appear to be functioning, the link to Number 10 TV - which advertises itself as "a dedicated multimedia player with a library of films about the PM" - displays a 404 Error Message. (It has been for more than a day now.)

Far from putting the traditional spin on a mishap, however, the site's apology is refreshingly honest - bouncy even: "There are some ongoing glitches with links which our technical support team is beavering away on - please bear with us (we are in beta!)"