RSS in Government
News about how RSS is being used by international, federal, state, and local governments

The proliferation of RSS feeds by state and local governments offers a unique opportunity to expand the delivery of the critical information by leveraging the most ubiquitous personal communications device in the world -- the telephone. Learn here how to transform RSS content into VoiceXML, an open standard for developing telephony applications, and dramatically expand the accessibility of your feeds by making them available to anyone with a telephone.

You can search for newly published patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but if you want the latest patent applications served to you by RSS syndication and email alerts, you'll need to visit FreshPatents.com. Industry list RSS feeds filtered by USPTO class number are particularly valuable. The content is crawled and indexed by Google as well.

If you're one who monitors the latest news about a drug or treatment, or if you're doing serious medical research, you'll absolutely love the assortment of alerts and exporting features provided by HubMed, an alternative search to the PubMed medical literature database.

While the government may not be enthusiastic over offering RSS news feeds, the Chinese people themselves are embracing RSS news syndication in the form of blogging. NewScientist.com reports that despite official censorship of blogs in 2003, blog services are now sprouting all over China. By the end of October 2004, China had more than 45 large blog-hosting services. According to China's biggest blogging service provider blogcn.com, the number of subscribers has soared from 10,000 in June last year, to more than 500,000 now. Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley reports the "blog revolution" is sweeping across China.

State CIO J. Clark Kelso wants to make government more accessible to the citizens of California. His November "California State Information Technology Strategic Plan" presented to Governor Schwarzenegger provides a blue-print for providing greater efficiences in IT services, offering more accessible service, and doing it for lower costs. What's missing? The plan neglects RSS, a low-cost, open source technology that many states are using to save money and make their services more accessible.

Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's reports that "Blog" tops their list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was the most looked-up word on its Internet sites this year. The list is compiled each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity. The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

Does your state or agency have a Chief Blogging Officer? Government is already rife with chiefs, why not one more? HighBeam Research, Inc. has set the pace by announcing today the appointment of Christopher Locke as its Chief Blogging Officer (CBO). HighBeam also announces a pilot program offering a select group of bloggers exclusive use of its new "blog this document" tools and free access to the company's premium archives.

The Utah Administrative Office of the Courts and the Utah State Bar have been experimenting with the syndication of news and publications for quite some time. They've now published links to their first public syndicated feeds on their homepages.

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Unlike Yahoo, Google has had a long standing resistance to offering RSS feeds for Google News queries. In the spirit of pre-existing Google News to RSS hacks, Justin Pfister has now created "gnewsfeed." Filling out a form converts a Google news query into an RSS feed.

Two Irish County Councils and several other Irish, Northern Ireland, and UK government agencies are publishing press releases using the new Nooked hosted online RSS publishing service.

The State of Virginia was recently recognized by the Center for Digital Government with a third place ranking in the Best of the Web and Digital Government Achievement Awards. The recognition came largely for Virginia's new syndication and alert services. In accepting the award Governor Mark Warner said, "Our real-time online live help customer service continues to set the pace for the nation, and the portal's desktop alerts via live RSS feeds ensure that Virginia.gov users always have access to the most current information." The VIPNet portal and its RSS feeds are managed by the Virginia Information Providers Network. There are currently at least 34 feeds. Virginia uses RSS feeds not only for alerts, but also as a monitoring service that keeps citizens informed of new resources and services added to the portal.