Let’s talk about RSS. USA.gov has a library of feeds. They do a good job of posting these, explaining what RSS is, and explaining why we, the people, should care. My concern is that they have no control over who creates feeds or what pages they are generated from. USA.gov and GSA—who may be the most tech-savvy outfits in the federal government—have no input it what everyone else is doing. They just get to add them to the list if the other agencies are nice enough to share.

And it shows. There is a smattering of feeds when compared to the size of the entire federal government. Most just don’t exist, but others are not publicized. Also, the feeds that are available show little consistency. USA.gov organizes them as best they can, but how do you respond to the fact that the USDA Hogs and Pigs Survey has a feed (seriously), but there isn’t a thing for federal business opportunities or the IRS? Even agencies that have feeds don’t necessarily know how to use them. Many are not updated regularly (Medical Expense & Performance Reporting System News) and others are of absolutely no interest to enough citizens to warrant a feed (Spallation Neutron Source News). My guess is that in those cases, an agency just happened to have an IT person with time on his or her hands.

At the very least the executive branch of the U.S. government needs to sit down with folks who can explain to them how RSS works and when to use it. Even better would be if, after hanging out with the cool kids for a bit, they came up with a government-wide electronic information policy (not so vague as to be meaningless…sorry, webcontent.gov) that sets and enforces some standards for the quality of information delivered by RSS or any other electronic media. Then I wouldn’t have to spend my entire day looking for the latest news from the Presidential Commission on Tea!