Sitemapping provides you with new partners

Customized RSS for jobs data

For a long time, I was hoping that our Department of Workforce Services (DWS) would provide RSS feeds of new jobs as they were added to the jobs database. Now it's not really necessary. By sitemapping the data and making it available to search engines, DWS has freed the data and doesn't have to worry so much about the presentation layer. In a previous post, I mentioned how companies like Indeed.com take care of that. I can do a search for any job title and location using Indeed's search engine and it will provide me with the data, much of which is gathered in near real time. Even better, Indeed provides me a custom RSS feed for any search combination of jobs that I might be looking for.

Woopra
I was checking Carlos Guadian's excellent K-Government blog this morning when out popped Carlos in a Woopra chat window. Woopra had notified Carlos that I was reading his blog, so he just initiated the chat. Very cool and surprising.

Mashing Up Government

In a paper published in October 2007, Jerry Brito asks a question, "How accessible is government information?" According to Jerry, not very. Jerry argues that by failing to present data and information in a structured way (ie, RSS and XML), government has actually made it more difficult to find information. He points to examples in the federal government, including FCC dockets and regulations.gov. I went to regulations.gov to look for an RSS feed and couldn't find one. On the other hand, you can see how useful a feed would be for subscribers, you can look at this feed from the Utah Division of Administrative Rules, which presents rules available for comment in an RSS feed.

"When the government makes data available in a structured format, it opens the doors to innovative and enlightening remixes of information known as mashups. Mashups are tools that can potentially be used by journalists, bloggers, and citizens—the Internet’s intelligent crowds—to better scrutinize government’s activities. When government does not make data available online, or makes it available but not in a structured format, third parties take it upon themselves to fill the void by implementing ingenious hacks."

Another initiative that could help to make some of the information tied up in large databases more available is the Google sitemapping initiative. (I just noticed that Google has added some new developer tools)

One of the things I'll try to do over the next few days is try to identify the ten most useful government RSS feeds and the top ten government mashups. Brito mentions some private sites that are mashing up federal government data, such as Metavid, created by UC Santa Cruz.

Local News Sources

There are many small local news sources (including blogs) that cover local government much more in depth than what you find in the big media outlets or sometimes even on the local govt. website. Here are a few that I have become aware in Utah:

• Sugar House Journal
• Cottonwood-Holladay Journal
• Sandy Journal
• Midvale Journal
• South Valley Journal
• San Juan Record
• Moab Times
• Richfield Reaper
  
• More here

It would be really nice if each of these sources had an RSS feed.

Many of the university news sites now have RSS available, including:

• Southern Utah University RSS
  
• College of Eastern Utah RSS

Weber State has some new podcasts, some of which relate to state government.

Snow College South Sevier Center has an RSS feed of their events calendar.

In the process of reviewing this, I have added about a dozen new Utah government sites to the Utah.gov search engine. In the future, we will have a way to leverage all of the RSS / news feeds to create a statewide government news source that is as comprehensive as the site search or the services search.

GAO Reports

I have been reading GAO reports off and on for years, so I am now really excited to have them show up in my RSS reader.

Recent reports of interest include:

• Analysis of US-VISIT
• DHS Architecture Continues to Evolve
• Business Systems Modernization
• NARA Information Management
• Weaknesses in Information Security
• First Responders: Much Work Remains to Improve Communications Interoperability

The Power of RSS

RSS is everywhere. There are dozens of readers and services. It is easy to incorporate into your website and use as a means of content contribution. For now, I have settled on Google Reader as my preferred method to read (and listen). The ability to aggregate feeds, put them in folders, and listen to podcasts without caring about the original media format is excellent. Even so RSS is still underused and not fully understood in terms of its full potential.