Friday, December 26, 2003

In the midst of Winter weather CDC is testing a new website.  They have also published this interesting report of their 2003 activities. I just noticed that 2003 will be the last year for the Jefferson nickel, in production since 1938.  A Lewis and Clark design will appear in 2004-2005. Utah's automated winter road conditions report.  I'm looking at a blizzard out my window right now. 11:26:50 AM    comment []

RSS in Canada I haven't seen much attention given to the Canadian government's efforts to provide news in RSS format.  News.gc.ca provides a long list of RSS feeds, including regional feeds form news from each of Canada's provinces.  Outstanding! 11:10:47 AM    comment []

Mad Cow Disease Online Response Three days ago, the USDA announced a single presumptive case of BSE (mad cow disease) in the State of Washington.  Ann Veneman answered questions.  The same day, Gov. Locke made a statement about the case occuring on a farm near Mabton.  Utah's Agriculture Director, Cary Peterson, also issued a statement.  A recall of over 10,000 lbs. of beef has been announced.  Eleven countries have announced a ban of U.S. beef.  Zambia is not a big deal, but I imagine that Japan.  A webcast briefing was given less than two hours ago.  The CDC and FDA also got involved.  Here is the BSE response plan for USDA. Mabton, who most people had never heard of, has now been dubbed the "Mad Cow Town." 10:52:30 AM    comment []

Burial Search The Utah Burials Search is a useful tool for people who want to visit the final resting place of an ancestor.  We should remember to feature this service on Utah.gov for a couple of weeks prior to Memorial Day.  I haven't found another state with a comparable service.  When you google Burial Search, Utah's service comes up first. 9:44:17 AM    comment []

GovBenefits and Integrated Government Services from GovBenefits.gov Partner newsletter: GovBenefits.gov reached its goal to obtain at least one benefit program from all 50 States and Washington, D.C. by December 31, 2003. In addition, each State has a link to GovBenefits.gov on their individual State website. This is a significant achievement for the GovBenefits program, and the goal was reached ahead of schedule on December 5, 2003. GovBenefits.gov now features information on 419 Federal benefit programs and more than 100 State benefit programs. Utah's CHIP program is the only Utah program listed as a partner.  Some states have three or four.  We need to be willing to partner on these kinds of efforts towards vertical egov integration.  The Utah One-Stop Business Registration has been a great success, but now IRS is showing signs of wanting to decouple.  This is not good and would be a significant step backward if it happens since getting an IRS is a significant process in getting registered as a business. Karen Evans discusses the status of eGovernment during last week's online discussion.  Covered in the Washington Post, and Alan comments on the difficulty of funding cross-agency collaborative efforts. 9:35:23 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 David Fletcher.