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 13 August 2008

COI News Distribution Service

Posted in: ATOM Feed | XML              

27 Supporters so far - add your name

Posted by: Justin Kerr-Stevens, www.extendedreach.wordpress.com

Public Sector Information Holder: COI News Distribution Service

Information Asset: All Government News Releases

The problem

There are only selective, if any, news releases enabled with RSS/ATOM feeds on COI's News Distribution Service.

My ideal solution

Flick the switch and let the public subscribe via RSS/ATOM.

What I would do

More of this: www.twitter.com/hmgov

Posted at Wednesday, August 13, 2008 7:30:46 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  Comments [4] #   

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 2:10:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Have voted in favour of this idea. Using RSS for all government news will make it easier for interested people to find out and follow what the government is doing, whether by directly subscribing themselves using a news reader or by using services which can aggregate all the news they are interested in in one place. I can't think of any sensible reason why anyone could object to this.
Dave Briggs
Friday, August 15, 2008 9:36:30 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
There's isn't a good reason not to do this.
Jon Bounds
Friday, August 15, 2008 10:43:24 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Last time I looked into this, COI's NDS only offered this as an optional add-on to their main service, and charged extra for it (over a grand, was it?). I also seem to remember a generally negative tone in discussions about RSS usage... but that's really missing the point.

Yes, RSS take-up at consumer level has been pretty low, despite its considerable benefits. But I've personally stopped caring about that; because if one person uses an RSS feed to add live information to a website which gets significant traffic, that's effectively a lot of people using RSS without realising it.

There are also considerable benefits to COI in this. Serving an RSS feed is less server-intensive than serving an entire web page; and in practice, it transfers a lot of the distribution overhead to third parties like Google Reader, Bloglines or maybe even Twitter.

That's before we even consider the convenience to those end users who do use RSS-reading technologies. Or the potential for keyword or category-based RSS feeds, allowing recipients to target precisely the information they want. Or the fact that the purpose of the News Distribution Service must (surely?!) be to maximise the distribution of the news.

RSS is the de facto standard for doing so in the modern world. It shouldn't be an optional extra. It's arguably the most efficient channel available, and should be absolutely core to NDS output.
Simon Dickson
Friday, August 15, 2008 12:55:32 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Simon you got really good points there.
I am working on measurement of eGov and am discussing about an automated tool to detect which sites offer RSS. Benchmarking could help this request to succeed.
I was looking for data on RSS uptake, and the only recent data I found was from Forrester saying that in the US more than 40% of internet users use RSS either thorugh a reader or through a personalized page. Not that I really trust these data very much...
see http://www.researchrecap.com/index.php/2008/06/17/web-20-accelerating-print-newspapers-near-death-spiral/
osimod
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