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It might be worth explaining a little about how this weblog works (and I'm grateful to my colleague Nick Robinson for much of this explanation). When you come to the front page, which you will always be able to access at bbc.co.uk/robertpeston, you will see all the latest entries I have written, with the most recent at the top of the page. Scroll down the page for previous entries.

On the right hand side of the page, you'll see a calendar. When any date on that calendar is blue, that means there was one or more entry published on that day. Click on the date and the page will display that day's items.

At the bottom of each entry are two words - "permalink" and "comments".

• Permalink simply means "permanent link", and is useful if you want to bookmark a particular entry, or send it by e-mail to a friend.
• "Comments" means just that. Click on it, and you will be able to add your comments to that particular entry - more of which in a little while.

Clicking on an entry's headline takes you to that item's own page, where it is printed in full with all the comments which have been published. From there, if you want to go back to the main index page, you can click either the words "Peston's Picks" at the top of the page, or on the word "MAIN" which you'll find on a beige bar. On that bar you might also see the words "PREVIOUS" and "NEXT" - these simply take you directly to other entries in chronological order.

A word about comments

The main thing which makes blogs different from a newspaper column or even TV or radio broadcast is that it is a conversation between the author and the audience. So the success of this blog will depend on you letting me know what you think about the news, and indeed about what I've written myself.

We are aiming to publish as many comments as possible in this weblog, though unfortunately we can't guarantee to publish every message you send, and they will only be published after we have had chance to read them first.

Try to keep your comments short and relevant to the blog entry you are commenting on. As you might expect, we won't publish e-mails which are abusive or offensive.

You should also be aware of our privacy policy, which, for technical reasons, is a bit different from our usual.

One other thing...

I also want to say a word about RSS. You might have seen a little orange button with these letters on other ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News pages and on other websites, but you might not know what it's about.

Put simply, if a site provides an RSS link, it means you can see its entries in a much quicker way than coming to the website. You can, for instance, see an automatically updated list of headlines in your "bookmarks" folder, if you use an internet browser such as Firefox. Or you might use a specific program to browse lots of sites quickly.

There's lots more about how RSS can make browsing the internet easier on .