Office of Public Sector Information

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.