RSS for State Government Sites
RSS is a very powerful tool. It makes it possible for site owners to syndicate their content, as well as consume the syndicated content from other sources. If agencies created RSS feeds and consumed each other's feeds, information would be more readily available and it would be a good thing.
Intrepid managers of State IT efforts recognize the value of RSS. Dave Fletcher is working to make the creation of RSS simple for agencies. Also, Utah Interactive is in the process of developing a new State business portal, which will feature RSS feeds from various agencies.
RSS is powerful because it makes content available while still allowing site administrators the freedom to decide how the content will be presented. It makes the process of sharing content free from human interaction. Anyone could take the URL http://radio.weblogs.com/0110870/rss.xml and subscribe to the RSS feed for this weblog. The content is there, available for any parser that speaks RSS 1.0 to consume, process, and post on any other site. This is done without actually having to download the content onto the consuming server.
I have an opinion on how the State should approach RSS, which I will share with you here.
I believe that RSS will not achieve its full potential on State websites unless agencies catch the vision and actually create and host the feeds themselves on their web servers. We should sell agencies on the virtures of RSS, and help them create the feeds and post them on their servers. We should also help agencies determine how they would like to consume RSS on their own sites. If we simply create a centralized RSS server and ask agencies to put their press releases there, they will never go beyond that. It will simply be a content contribution system. If that is what we want, then we may as well just have the agencies email the content to a site administrator, because even with RSS, someone ought to look at the content before it is posted.
If they catch the vision of RSS and create and manage their own feeds, then the value of RSS is preserved. No middle piece would be needed to create the feeds for them or manage where they went. It would be pure, powerful RSS. I think using the business portal project as a test case for this would be a good thing.
Anyway, that's my $0.02.
10:43:57 AM 
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