August 19, 2004

.Gov Feeds

If you're interested in how government (local, state, federal and foreign) agencies and departments are using RSS, then RSS in Government is a must-read. They also have some good category-specific feeds.

I'd like to see more federal agencies and departments embrace feeds for news delivery, particularly the ones that release reports that would be worth a mention in our science blog at GSU. However, I did some searching and found these:

  • U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission - a feed for product recalls.
  • National Weather Service - The NWS has embraced RSS with its Experimental Listings of Watches, Warnings, and Advisories by State and Territory. You can get a severe weather alert feed for your state, which is a bit experimental. I have to admit, if Atlanta's under a severe storm warning, checking the Georgia feed in Bloglines is not going to be my first thought. They also have feeds for lots of observation stations (39 in GA) of you want to keep up with current weather conditions.
  • National Hurricane Center - Feeds for Tropical Cyclone Advisories: one for Pacific storms and two for Atlantic storms (English and Spanish)
  • U.S. Geological Survey, Earthquake Hazards Program - keep up with recent earthquake activity for the past day and past 7 days (magnitude > 2.5 and magnitude > 5.0)
  • Department of Defense - 6 feeds: press advisories, news releases, contract announcements, transcripts, speeches, and American Foreign Press Service news articles. I wish this page were a little more prominent (it's under Press Resources on the DOD site) , but it's a good start and I'd love to see more departments offer this at the top level.
  • US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) - I've never even heard of this agency, but they have several feeds for broadcasting cyber security alerts, bulletins and tips - for techie and non-techie audiences.
  • National Guideline Clearinghouse - a "what's new" feed
  • U.S. Census Bureau - a feed for the "New on the Site" page, very helpful for a site that gets updated as much as this one.
  • National Institutes of Health - for press releases
  • State Department, USINFO - feeds for top stories: Washington File, democracy, economic issues, global issues, human rights, international security, + 6 for regional news.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is really unfortunate how little the federal government uses RSS. I subscribed to this site's feed on federal government developments for a while but nothing has been posted on that topic since January of this year. The reluctance or inability of federal agencies to take advantage of such simple, useful tools is discouraging to federal employees like me. Having said that, thank you for ferreting out some of the good things that a few agencies *are* doing.