Considering how many local blogs obsessively cover the District Department of Transportation, it only makes sense that the city’s transpo officials get into the game themselves. In social media, as it is on The Wire, it’s play or get played.

Thus comes the launch of d.ish, certainly the cutest government blog name we’ve ever seen.

DDOT director Gabe Klein got the ball rolling today with two posts, a general welcome, and then a more substantive response to the recent hoopla over revised plans for the new Pennsylvania Ave. bike lanes. Here’s a taste:

I think it’s okay to admit when we make a mistake, and in our initial design, I think we were a little too utopian on paper, and will benefit from a simpler, safer, more straight forward design. We repave the street every 4 years btw for the Presidential Inauguration. More robust changes can be made to signals, bollards etc. to design around the bike lanes vs. fitting them into the existing streetscape in 2012. So we encourage everyone to take a breath, let us make the adjustments, and then come out to the ribbon cutting to celebrate the opening.

Klein won’t be the only DDOT staffer to post to the blog, explains spokesperson Karyn LeBlanc. A wide range of the department’s roughly 1,000 employees will be asked to contribute, and LeBlanc estimates they’ll be updating at least once a day. Along with their busy Twitter feed and Facebook page, DDOT hopes d.ish will serve as one more way to interact effectively with residents.

“We have a lot of projects in the works that we want to get public feedback on,” LeBlanc said. And as Klein notes in his intro, “we still see our information getting confused sometimes in the public forum.” The blog, LeBlanc said, is designed help the department weed out some of that confusion.