Nick Mudge’s Technology and Government Weblog

Jim Willis from the GOCC blog says, "Government agencies, with their directories full of rotting, static HTML docs, are ripe to skip right to the front of the class in the move to Web 2.0." Hell yea!

9:25am | web technology - xml - open government | 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

In my opinion Govtech.net had one of its best months ever in September in terms of a lot of good content.

Here are the articles and news I found notable:

GT Mag Stories:

GT Online Features:

Digital Communities Website

News:

10:33pm | web technology - government resources - govtech web site - technology governance - egovernment - xml - identity - SOA - enterprise architecture - wireless - best practices - open source - open standards - open government - security - workforce | no comments

Massachusetts has issued for public review a technical reference model on its Information Technology Division website. Lot's of news about it.

ZDnet: Massachusetts: Out of Office

Paul Bissex: Massachusetts and open source

SolidOffice: Massachusetts Chooses OpenDocument

Experimental Space: Microsoft Watch: Massachusetts State Agencies draft plan to use open formats

Experimental Space: More on Massachusetts Open-Source Decision

News.com: Massachusetts to adopt 'open' desktop

Financial Times: MA proposal puts Microsoft on defensive

Seattle Pi: Tussle over Office format

Boston Globe: State may drop Office software

More news about this.

More blog posts about this.

11:26am | web technology - government resources - egovernment - xml | 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

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

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

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

Brian Jones, a program manager over at Microsoft, and who has been working on XML in Office, has put up a blog to talk to people about it.

2:22pm | xml - blogs | no comments