Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog

The state of Nevada has an Information Technology Research Unit.

Here's its Mission:

To research current and emerging areas of technology and other states trends to ensure efficient and cost effective deployment of government services, reduce the risks of innovation through IT analysis, and disseminate relevant information via various outlets.

On it's website to the left it has current links to the information technology departments of all 50 states, and to the right it is displaying GT News using the GT News RSS feed.

10:01am | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - rss - best practices | no comments

Govfeed.com now has a Government Blog Aggregator. Right now I'm updating the Government Blog Directory. If you know of any government blogs not in the directory that meet these requirements please let me know.

I've noticed that there are a lot of other government so called blogs on the web besides what is in the directory that don't have RSS feeds. I don't consider something a blog if it doesn't have an RSS feed, so those are not included on Govfeed.com. Like these ones here, here, here, here. Fortunately a majorty have RSS feeds.

11:13pm | web technology - rss - blogs | no comments

I've seen a lot of talk about Web 2.0 lately. Lot's of discussion about it and what it is. One of the next big buzzword in cyberspace.

I'm actually really excited about it because, to me, it summarizes down to a word many of the great new websites, applications and services I see coming on the Web. The Web as a platform, the Web as an OS.

In the past the idea of the Web has been a bunch of "pages" linked together. With Web 2.0 it's evolving more and more towards the more generic idea of streams of information. A Web page is only one format, one way of displaying an information stream, but there can be many different representations, formats, and relations of streams of information, and the way they interact. I think of Web 2.0 as putting data in more appropriate formats and relations from which it can be better utilized and interacted with.

Om Malik, a writer for Business 2.0 magazine, says in his blog:

I define Web 2.0 as a “collection of technologies - be it VoIP, Digital Media, XML, RSS, Google Maps… whatever …. that leverage the power of always on, high speed connections and treat broadband as a platform, and not just a pipe to connect.”

Wayne Hall, from NASTD, has an interesting post. He says:

State government consumers -- you and me, the citizens, the owners of the information held by state government -- could get such services from a set of information tagged and collected by aggregators like Del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati, instead of using an "end-to-end" state government portal.

Heather Green from BusinessWeek asks the question: Information services or giants (Web portals), what's going to win the masses? Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist has a very good article about it.

New channels are opening up on the Web to better provide, disseminate and make information more useful. Governments can avail themselves of this, as some are starting to do. Some governments are formatting weekly radio addresses as podcasts on the Internet. Rhode Island frees state government information with its public XML Web service. Some state governments are putting their press releases and information in RSS feeds.

Tim O'Reilly has an article all about What is Web 2.0?.

Dave Winer (author of Really Simple Syndication, RSS 2.0) says, "Web 2.0 is really simple, it's RSS 2.0"

8:35pm | web technology - technology governance - egovernment - rss - xml - blogs - open standards - open government | no comments

The Rulemaking blog is collecting RSS feeds from states about administrative rules.

Several states are using RSS to distribute information about state administrative rules. These states include: Delaware, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Utah.

If you are aware of other states that distribute administrative rules information using RSS, please post a comment.

4:57pm | government resources - egovernment - rss - xml - blogs | no comments

King County, Washington, has found an easy way to create RSS feeds for their county news -- no programming required. Every time they put up a new news item they bookmark it in del.icio.us. Delicious automatically creates an RSS feed for all the bookmarked news items and that's the RSS feed that King County provides on its news page. Neat.

Here's King County's news bookmarks.

1:13am | web technology - government resources - egovernment - rss - xml - blogs | no comments

Via Phil Windley's blog: The National Conference of State Legislatures awarded the Utah legislature an Online Democracy award for its website. Of specific mention by Phil and an article in the Daily Herald was the use of RSS and audio/video streaming by the legislature to provide information.

Wayne Hall wrote an interesting article entitled: Open source government - speak, search, create. Among other things he talks about the Center for Digital Government's recent paper The Sawyer Principles.

The Zotob computer worm knocked down Oklahoma's Department of Human Services website recently. I was trying to go to their website to find more information, but I couldn't because the website was down because of the virus. Ha!

The Oklahoma DHS website has a neat javascript implementation I like that displays descriptive content in the middle of the homepage when links are hovered over.

Experimental Space points out Microsoft's Zotob removal tool and worm vs. worm.

The GOCC Weblog provides an open source Indentity Management solution for government. Looks really cool.

Here's an interesting Forbes story: The Rise Of RSS.

Tags: Democracy, Zotob

1:55am | web technology - rss - identity | 1 comment

BearingPoint, a major government IT contractor, has started podcasting. Isn't that a wonder. The podcasts, targeting financial services executives, will be about data security and operational risk.

“This business podcast series brings important information to executives through one of today’s most popular mediums. We believe this approach will help our clients quickly educate themselves, help to comply to new regulations and address possible data security issues,” said Christopher Formant, executive vice president, Global Financial Services, BearingPoint. “This series is not only an example of the way BearingPoint tries to efficiently reach its clients, but also represents a more flexible way for executives to gather critical information and research results for their companies while enhancing their personal knowledge.”

“With podcast audiences doubling every three to four months, the medium is very rapidly becoming an effective way to communicate to companies facing such critical issues as data security and operational risk,” said Paul Dunay, director of Global Field Marketing for BearingPoint, “The podcasting market is growing because the financial services executives and the general public can now get the content they want, when they want it, and in the format they want. The ability to ‘time shift’ has fueled this growth. In much the same way that TiVo has brought time shifting to traditional television, podcasting is bringing the concept to audio.”

12:58pm | web technology - rss - xml - blogs | no comments

John Gøtze writes about the first issue of The Journal of Enterprise Architecture. And he recently retired from the National IT and Telecom Agency of Denmark.

Ealier on John's blog he describes a really cool folksonomy-type tool called TagCloud.com. Thanks John! You give the website an RSS feed or feeds and it visually shows you the frequency of keywords in the feed(s). I created a cloud using the RSS feed of my blog and its comments RSS feed. Here. Cool.

John made several clouds on his own website using TagCloud's web service.

4:21am | web technology - rss - xml - blogs - web services | no comments

As you can see I'm redesigning my blog. I'm going to be working on it on an on going basis, making it look better, adding features etc. Feel free to let me know what things you like.

I added my del.icio.us bookmarks to the lower right side of the blog. It's displaying the "myblog" category of my del.icio.us bookmarks. My del.icio.us home is http://del.icio.us/mudgen if you want to know.

Delicious offers some really cool javascript to use to display your delicious RSS feeds on webpages, which is what I used. It's pretty easy to work with.

Technorati Tag: Delicious

3:06pm | web technology - rss | no comments

Eleven percent of blog readers use RSS to sort through the increasing number of blogs available, says Nielsen//NetRatings.

From the press release:

Use of RSS Feeds, June 2005
------------------------------------------------------------------
Survey Response                             Percent of Respondents
------------------------------------------------------------------
I use feed aggregation software to monitor
  RSS feeds for blogs                                        4.9%
------------------------------------------------------------------
I use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor
  RSS feeds for blogs                                        6.4%
------------------------------------------------------------------
I've heard of RSS and know what it does
  but don't use RSS feeds                                   23.0%
------------------------------------------------------------------
I've heard of RSS but don't know what it does               15.7%
------------------------------------------------------------------
I've never heard of RSS before today                        50.0%
------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings Understanding the Blogosphere
survey, August 2005
	
Note: 1,000 online U.S. MegaPanelists responded to the survey
fielded in June 2005

That's some interesting statistics. Thirty-four percent know it and 11 percent use it. So almost a third of the people that know it, are using it.

It will be interesting to find out what happens to RSS awareness when Internet Explorer 7, with its RSS support, becomes widely used. In the picture on this webpage the RSS support is pretty noticable.

9:18pm | web technology - rss - blogs | no comments

The National Weather Service has an experimental XML feeds service.

Weather alert XML feeds are available for each state and for some counties.

The alerts are provided in several formats: on the Web, RSS feeds, and CAP.

CAP, which stands for Common Alerting Protocal, is an XML format used specifically for hazard warnings.

7:28pm | web technology - egovernment - rss - xml - web services | no comments

Rhode Island released a set of Web services providing state government data over the Internet.

I wrote about it on Govtech.

Phil Windley, on Between the Lines, said the following about how I wrote part of the article.

He says:

To show you how far we are from what Jim has done in Rhode Island being universally adopted by cities and states the second paragraph reads:

A Web service is a mechanism that allows separate software applications to share data over a network. The Internet is such a network. Web services can enable a high degree of interoperability. With Web services, different software applications can share data despite being on different operating systems, platform environments, and written in different programming languages.

When your audience is government technologists and you feel obligated to describe what a Web service is in 2005, you know you're in trouble.

Below is what I think and my opinion. Look at the content of www.govtech.net to decide for yourself.

While I think there is some validity to what he says here, I don't think Govtech's content is written so much for government technologists. It's largely written for government technology managers and people not necessarily very familiar with technology, but who have some weigh in on what goes on in IT in their areas.

Don't get me wrong, govtech is for government technologists, and I think it will be even more so in the future, but I think, at times, govtech and GT Mag are attempting to bring business and general understandings to technical things -- attempting to bridge a gap between business-oriented-and-non-technology and technology.

Govtech, GT Mag and other such resources align with a responsibility of a CIO to bring a greater understanding of and the need of technology in state and local government. CIOs can use these resources to better educate others as well as become more informed themselves.

Today, I believe it is true that any entity Web site on the Internet that wants to provide new information regularly, and actually wants a lot of people to see it, should be publishing the data through RSS feeds no matter how else they are providing the data -- this especially applies to any news or media area. Without such, it is a sign of being behind the times.

Many city, county and state Websites don't have RSS feeds available and I don't know of any other than RI to have any other kinds of Web services available. I know of 10 state Websites that have RSS feeds available to the public. So a lot of state and local governments don't know about RSS feeds or Web services, or why to use them, or are prevented somehow from using them.

Rhode Island's Web services are another step forward. The Rhode Island IT guys are opening the state up to open source development and collaboration. Imagine a bunch of developers not employed by the state writing applications or including features in existing applications that forward the mission of a state government to provide services to its citizens online. This could be really cost effective.

Govtracker

7:50pm | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - rss - web services | no comments

Lots of talk in the blogosphere right now about Windows "Longhorn" and Internet Explorer 7 supporting RSS.

Here are some good posts that I ran across:

What Microsoft Longhorn RSS means to me: sane, peaceful mornings

Explaining it simply: Microsoft and RSS

The press comes in on Gnomedex announcements

6:47pm | web technology - rss - xml | no comments

Good job Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Delaware, Nebraska and Virginia. They all have RSS feeds on their state portals.

Six of the above mentioned have an RSS feed for the governor's press releases. These six states are Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Texas and Utah. However, the governor RSS feed from Rhode Island does not work in my RSS reader and does not validate. Yesterday the Texas governor RSS feed wasn't working in my RSS reader, but it works today.

I noticed that Virginia has RSS feeds on the state portal but not for providing the state's news, which is too bad because it looks like they have some good news going on the homepage of the state portal.

The Nebraska RSS page explains why RSS feeds:

Nebraska.gov’s RSS feeds allow you to quickly access information about Nebraska State Government via one, convenient location. News is delivered directly to your computer and is available at your convenience. When you see a headline that interests you, simply click on the link to be taken to the complete story. RSS also provides:

• Efficiency -- timely news and information is automatically there when you need it;
• Breadth -- headlines from the web sources you care about are consolidated;
• Organization -- sources can be displayed in order of importance with the latest news on top;
• Productivity -- email newsletter subscriptions and unruly bookmarks can lead to clutter and information overload.

RSS brings news straight to your computer or news reader. This way you stay updated with information as soon as it becomes available.

RSS feeds also put the user in control. If you don't want an RSS feed anymore, a couple clicks in your RSS reader and it is deleted. You can do that with some email subscriptions too, but with RSS you're not at anyone's whim. Feeds also enable you to handle and organize your information in a consistent way.

I've found the efficiency and productivity increase of RSS to be cumulative. To me, a single RSS feed is only a little bit more efficient than just going to the Web site -- not enough to prevent me from just going to the Web site. But the cumulative effect of the efficiency increase of each RSS feed, when I have number of news sources, makes it much more efficient and productive to use RSS feeds. And of course, RSS feeds make it easier to organize information, and from a programmer standpoint, RSS feeds are much more flexible allowing you to do all kinds of things with the content.

The Nebraska RSS page also linked to www.govtech.net's RSS page, which was really cool.

I've decided to begin building a government rss directory. The very beginning, which only has some governor press releases displayed using RSS right now, can be seen at www.govfeed.com. If you know of any good government RSS feeds, please let me know.

Ten state governments are using RSS right now, some counties and cities are too. The U.S. federal government has expressed interest and gotten itself involved with the RSS Library.

I think it is apparent that RSS is expanding across the Internet and that it is going to be picked up and utilized more and more by governments. So why not build a directory and make it easy to find any kind of RSS feed from any government?

This sounds like it could be one of those collaborative open source type of projects. What do you think?

7:00pm | web technology - egovernment - rss | no comments

Wayne Hall recently turned down an invitation to receive email updates from the FCC, recommending the FCC provide RSS feeds instead. I hear you.

I noticed Wayne's blog is being syndicated on the homepage of NASTD to provide news. Very cool.

On May 26th the FCC launched a new email notification service. I haven't subscribed, but I'd definitely subscribe to FCC RSS feeds, or Atom, if they had any.

Nothing wrong with email updates, but if people and organizations want to get out their news or press releases there's no reason in the world not to use RSS or Atom.

Some governments are getting RSS. RSS is mentioned in three different locations on the homepage of the state website of Tennessee, for instance.

8:21pm | egovernment - rss | no comments