Content Syndication
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Content Syndication:
Content syndication provides citizens convenient access to new content and headlines from government via RSS and other online syndication standards.
Summary:
Governments are providing access to more and more information online. As web sites become more complex and difficult to sift through, new or timely content is often buried. Dynamically presenting "what's new" on the top of the web site is only the first step.
Sharing headlines and content through syndication standards like RSS (the little orange [XML] button, ATOM, and others) essentially allows a government to control a small window of content across web sites that choose to display the government's headlines. Headlines may also be aggregated and displayed through "newsreaders" by citizens through standalone applications or as part of their MyYahoo page, for example.
Government web sites without headline feeds offering titles and links to new content have not crossed over from passive provision of online access to active dissemination of democratically important content.
Rationale and Objectives:
What can you use this feature for?
- Generating citizen, media, and inter-governmental awareness of new government content.
- Increasing use of government content in order to better justify the effort required to place it online.
- Providing content users timely notification in a format they prefer other than e-mail. (RSS to e-mail notification technologies are also available.)
Why use it? (Compared to other options)
- Government portals can automatically aggregate and combine headlines and/or lengthier content from across multiple agency websites.
- Allows the value of distributed effort to be shared, which is more sustainable. Press releases may be aggregated automatically from different systems, as long as they all are required to offer an RSS feed with content tagged with similar meta-data.
- Broader use of government information online, particularly time sensitive democratic information, justifies the effort of production and the accountability of those tasked to make available.
Benefits - Describe the top benefits for each group
- All Users: Ability to scan headlines from many sources all in one place through a newsreader.
- Citizens: Time saving awareness of new content, if the RSS feed or feeds are designed properly, from government.
- Councillors: Ability to monitor new content from across the council, as well as display feeds on their own web site. Awareness of new content position councillors as guides to government for citizens.
- Local Administration: Ability to aggregate new content or headlines from across multiple office locations and agencies. This allows a display of "joined-up" government despite structural realities.
- Others: Journalists and other locally focused web sites will be among the primary feed users.
Limitations and Cautions
- Dissemination via syndication is a new concept to governments just getting used to the idea of remote online public access to information. Governments need to accept that while they control the content of the feed, the actual display of the headlines and content will vary.
- Popular RSS feeds can use significant amounts of bandwidth. Details on how often or when a feed is usually updated should be offered to those grabbing the code behind the orange [XML] button so they ping it once a day instead of every hour.
- Automated syndication requires use of a content management system. Most viable content management systems have integrated RSS functions, but the sophistication, ease of use, and documentation of these tools vary.
- There are three variants of RSS, as well as the emerging ATOM standard. It is recommended that a site pick the standard most applicable to their content rather than confuse users with different feeds providing the same content.
Successes collected projects
- Successful Implementations
- Example 1: Province of Alberta, Government News Releases
- Link: http://www.gov.ab.ca/home/index.cfm?page=747
- Usage and Results: The Government of Alberta provides headline feeds for news releases from more than 50 agencies, as well as 20 subject-based feeds conveniently gathering releases based on topic. Feeds containing all releases are also available.
- Example 2: City of Davis, California
- Link: http://www.city.davis.ca.us/rss/
- Usage and Results: Provides feeds on new site content, city job listings, and a calendar of events.
- Example 3: Kansas City Public Library
- Link: http://www.kclibrary.org/rss/
- Usage and Results: This unique service allows the library to share updates on new offerings by topic. For example the "Kids" feed provides listings of new materials and events in the library.
Further Information
Top Related "How-to" Online Resources
- RSS on Wikipedia
- RSS in Government
- All About RSS
- Syndic8 - RSS feeds directory
- Lockernome RSS Aggegator Directory
- New Zealand Government Standard on use of RSS
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