As the famous Honda advert goes, "Isn't it nice when things just work?"

Yesterday I met BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman. I am wary of blogging experts. Just as some people, deep down, fear that all bloggers have absolutely nothing valid to contribute, so I harbour an irrational fear that all blogging experts are only blogging experts through lack of anything else in which to be an expert. "What am I good at? Hmm. Writing lots and lots of stuff on the internet. I'll be an expert in that."

Robin Hamman is not a blogging expert through lack of alternative, I assure you. He knows what he's talking about, he makes sense, and some of the stuff he had to show was genuinely not what I expected, or what I expected the BBC to be grappling with. In a good way. There was a lot of encouragement for going out and doing things with all the wonderful third-party software the internet can offer, from Google Maps to Flickr, both of which we'll hopefully put to good use soon.

The overall message was: "it's okay to try to be clever with the internet". There was a real sense that creativity is still A Good Thing and will be rewarded as such provided it's focused in the right areas and isn't creativity for creativity's sake.

So that was nice, even if I had just eaten a whole packet of polos washed down with chicken tikka masala, which let me tell you is an explosive combination just before an hour-long meeting.

One of my little plans of campaign following the meeting was to put together a list of all the people I could find blogging in Berkshire and preferably about Berkshire. The latter is a little trickier to find but certainly exists, and by the end of yesterday I had 20 plus Berkshire blogs sat in a Bloglines feed reader, ready for consumption.

Of those twenty - a list which includes Boris Johnson since he occasionally talks about Henley - there was one blog which stood out. It was written by the mother of an autistic child going to a mainstream Berkshire school. You can read it here, although make sure you read this post first to understand her story.

I was captivated by the story of her son, endearingly referred to throughout as "Little Monkey Nut", and the school he attends. He has many problems there, from interaction with other pupils and staff through to escaping the classroom and dashing out towards main roads unaccompanied. I don't agree with every point of view expressed on the blog but it's well written and really conveys the day-to-day stress and strain of caring for, and being, a child with autism.

One of the latest posts to that blog told of how the woman had become so fed up with what she perceived to be the school failing both her and her son that she was taking her story to the newspapers. That was posted yesterday afternoon, I read it yesterday evening.

This morning, when I went into work, I flagged this up to our news editor who immediately recognised it as a powerful story. We were able to establish which school the son attended and Laura, one of the news team, worked wonders getting in touch with his mum.

None of that would have happened without that weblog, and without Robin's visit on Monday to set that train of thought into motion at precisely the right moment to catch this story happening. It's an immediate vindication of a far more active, go-getting, enthusiastic approach to weblogs and the internet - not to be feared, but harnessed. We can marry good old-fashioned newsgathering and editorial judgement with the raw experiences of people who, like me, just like to write about what happens to them on their website.

Within 24 hours of adopting our new approach we were involved in a meaningful, captivating story which otherwise would have reached us via the national newspapers tomorrow morning (look out for it). And similarly within 24 hours of writing her intentions on her blog, a frustrated mother who felt she was being ignored had been given an outlet by the BBC. It's nice when old and new media just work.