Russell Brown said, during his talk last Friday - and I am paraphrasing because, unlike the more diligent among you, I wasn’t taking notes (if you want to write in and correct the record, please do) - that he thought RSS was going to play a huge part of the future of the web. I couldn’t agree more.
So how does it impact upon public sector communicators? Or maybe the first question should be, what is it? For a quick intro, read this quickstart guide. Running an RSS aggregator allows you to keep track of multiple websites -and in some cases the discussion threads on those sites- from one application, either on your desktop, or in a web browser.
This means that, rather than visiting 30 or 40 websites and blogs a day, you just open your RSS aggregator and scan through the ‘headlines’ of what has been recently posted to each site [see screenshot]. Clicking on the headline (2) displays the feed item (3) which can be a full text or partial text feed, depending on the source. You can then make an informed decision about whether or not you want to visit the site and read the article.
Trust me, this will save you hours over the course of a week.
Once you have settled on your regular line-up of daily feeds, it means that you can get a real feel for what is engaging the blogosphere at any given time. It also means that you can begin to identify bloggers, commentators, or other media that are relevant to your organisations - people with whom it would be worth your time engaging.
Of course, we are only talking about consuming RSS. You should also be thinking about using it to syndicate the content on your websites (and I think that this was the killer app that Russell was alluding to).
Using RSS, you can syndicate your web content to almost any other website - and we are not talking rocket science here. It would help if your content was well structured and semantically marked up, but given our widespread adherence to the Government Web Guidelines, we should all be in pretty good shape…
This means that, as public sector communicators, we need to stop thinking in terms of publishing to a particular site, and start thinking of publishing content that can be displayed anywhere and used by anyone. Now that is open government.
