Most states currently do not provide constituent service blogs for their legislators. One reason is the fear that blogs can be misused. Legislative staff make every effort to offer non-partisan services and information and fear that blogs could be used as state sponsored tools for campaigning.

Most U.S. Representatives and Senators have both official governmental websites and private sites for operating campaigns. The question is, could state governments promote a similar dual model of separate sites/weblogs for constituent services and campaigning?

Elected officials and those running for office have seen how RSS news syndiction can help them spread their message. Howard Dean rose out of obscurity last year using a combination of weblogging and local web meetups to become his party's front runner in the presidential race. Dean and others learned that this technology can even the playing field and allow someone to rapidly organize a grass roots campaign. RSS syndication can help create a dynamic website and produce both email and online newsletters in the same process. With legislative staffs slow to offer the service, there is an inviting market niche for the private sector.

Recognizing this golden opportunity, LaVarr Web, Publisher of UtahPolicy.com today issued an "Invitation to Blog" to elected officials and party leaders wishing to communicate directly to citizens. Mr. Webb writes:

We would like to invite you to become a blogger. UtahPolicy.com is creating the Utah Policymaker Blog and we hope you will be part of it. It is an opportunity for you, as a Utah policymaker, to publish your opinions, thoughts and ideas to a wide audience of opinion leaders. It is an opportunity to participate in an exciting new high-tech communications medium that is becoming a powerful tool in politics, business and in every walk of life.

It's fun and exciting to be a blogger. You are probably aware of how bloggers are credited for toppling the powerful Dan Rather and CBS News. The phenomenon of blogging is growing rapidly and as a leader in Utah you ought to become familiar with this new method of communicating and use it to your advantage. In effect, Utah policymakers will have their own electronic publication in which to communicate with the public.

Some reasons UtahPolicy.com offers as to why elected officials ought to consider blogging include:

• You can communicate directly to citizens and other policymakers and opinion leaders without having your comments and opinions filtered by the news media.


• You can talk back to the news media. You can comment on news stories published by newspapers, and magazines and aired by television and radio. You can even link to the original articles.


• You can promote your pet projects, priorities, legislation, causes, and issues.


• You can respond to others' comments in the blog, creating a dialog.


• You can learn how to use an entirely new, and very powerful, communications channel. At some point you might want to create your own personal blog, and this will give you experience.


• You will be joining millions of other bloggers, some of whom have developed large followings.


• The Utah Policymaker Blog will become a very popular blog if enough policymakers participate. News reporters will read it for story ideas. It will help set the political agenda of the state. It will become a valuable forum for the exchange of opinions and ideas on public policy issues in Utah.

Utah policymakers interested in the offer should send an e-mail expressing their interest to daily@utahpolicy.com. While the general public will be able to read the blogs, only invited policymakers (i.e. elected and appointed officials and a few key opinion leaders) will be able to publish to it.

This is an example of the union of business and government to promote democracy and inform the citizenry using RSS news syndication. We wish them well in their efforts!

The State of Delaware has two new RSS newsfeeds featured by links right off the state's homepage. As lead of the team that developed the feeds, I'm pleased to report this as a joint effort of our office, the Government Information Center (GIC) and the Register of Regulations.

The first feed, Delaware.gov - Statewide News is a general collection of news and press releases from across state agencies.

The Current Monthly Register is the newsfeed equivalent of the The Delaware Register of Regulations, a monthly publication of all proposed regulatory changes, general notices, and final regulations from our partners in the Legislature.

The Government Information Center is the office that manages the state portal, Delaware.gov. The mission of the GIC is to develop and deliver accurate and complete governmental information online. The office works with state agencies, legislators, the public and others to improve the delivery of government services and information through Delaware.gov and other channels.

The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs now provides RSS feeds for top stories from the State Department homepage, daily press briefings, press releases, and remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell. The RSS feeds are found at:  
 
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/highlights.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/briefings.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/prsreleases.xml
http://www.state.gov/rss/channels/sremarks.xml

You can also subscribe to email mailing lists to receive the full texts of selected U.S. Department of State documents and publications that provide key official information on U.S. foreign policy, notifications of travel warnings, and Foreign Travel Per Diem updates.

Unlike Yahoo, Google has had a long standing resistance to offering RSS feeds for Google News queries. Hacks have long abounded from Julian Bond's GNews2RSS, Ben Hammersley's Google to RSS using the Google SOAP API, and Steve Rubel's advice in "RSS Hack for Sites That Don't Offer Feeds".

In this spirit, Justin Pfister has created gnewsfeed. Filling out the form uses a script that converts a Google news query (example) into an RSS feed (example). "I welcome anyone in the world," he humbly proffers, "to use it in an effort to become a more informed public."

Poor Justin. He's looking for a job. Maybe Adam Smith, and the Google Alerts product team will hire Justin to build in the syndication that Google should have offered long ago (hint).

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled broadcast.... to share a message more momentous than we've reported on before. We bring a message of hope, of goodness, of peace, of universal brotherhood. Here's how we can join our voices in a global conversation that can forever change the world.

"In one's own way," my mother told me long ago, "every person can change the world." That advice was at the time more prophetic than a truism.

Hyperbole aside, I do believe that individuals are now empowered as never before in history. Individuals are no longer bound by the confines of time, place, language, and political regime in their quest to do good in the world. We now have the capacity to find each other, to gather, and to converse without ever meeting in the flesh. It's all made possible through virtual communities and virtual networking.

Why does that phrase in the United States Constitution "we the people" so resonate in the hearts of people throughout the world? I think it has something to do with our nature as social beings.

In the past, institutions such as governments and churches were needed to organize and rally people. The problem is that all institutions by their nature become corrupt. Leaders succumb to power and greed, and institutions stray from their altruistic beginnings as they amass fortunes and property, gain political power, and build monuments unto themselves.

To Jesus, the church was the community of believers. It wasn't a building, it wasn't an organization, it wasn't a corporation. The church was not a place nor did it own any property. It's unfortunate, but institutions calling themselves churches have embellished to the point of distraction those simple teachings of Jesus to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. The true church remains the community of believers.

To do good in the world, you don't need institutional wealth, buildings, and treasuries. To self-organize, you don't need creeds, dictums, laws, governments, and rulers. People just need to do be free to do two things: talk and act. You just need to be able to communicate with others of like mind and then to collaborate with them in resolving needs. All conversation inevitably leads to understanding. Understanding leads to acceptance and concern, which in turn naturally leads to the desire to act.

So why can we be so optimistic?

Think for moment about peer-to-peer networks, instant messagers, collaboration workspaces (wikis, collaborative blogs), online communities (Meetups, AOL, Craigslist, Tribe.net, eWomenNetwork, Yahoo Groups, Ecademy, Idealist), alumni communities (SelectMinds, Classmates, TheSquare), syndication technologies (blogs, moblogs, RSS news feeds), and social and business networks (LinkedIn, Ryze, Orkut, Spoke Software, VisiblePath, ZeroDegrees, Knowmentum, Company of Friends). These social networking inventions are now in place and changing the way we interact and converse. But they only portend the future; more powerful social networking is on the horizon.

Social networking facilitates real-world and online conversations. Each of these technologies helps us bridge the six degrees of separation in finding others with similar goals and interests. We just need to apply this knowledge to loftier purposes. It's high time we used what we know for a higher purpose than dating, deal making, and job hunting. How about world peace? Maybe that generation of Miss America contestants had it right after all.

I'll call this repurposing of social networking the "Good News Network." The Good News Network needs no place, no domain, no trademark, no sponsors. It needs only open access and to be built on standards -- standards to converse one language with another and standards to programmatically exchange information. It consists of you and I, our friends, friends of friends, and those yet to be brought into our circle of friendship.

The Good News Network has two functions: to promote conversation and action. We converse by sharing the good news, our faith, and our belief in the goodness of humanity. And we act. We act in small ways, in big ways, but always in individual and personal ways, to share the good news of universality and peace and to promote well-being.

We speak multitudes of languages, we live in diverse regions of the globe, and we comprise all races and nationalities. In this day and age that is unique in history, we can all converse, we can join a global conversation, and we can meet in the virtual living room or the virtual temple of our choice.

So back to the age old question, how do you change the world?

Start by entering the conversation. In your blogs, in your chat rooms, in your networks, in your music, in your poems, in your art, in your families, and in your communities -- tell your story. Let your voice be heard. Sign on in whatever way makes sense to you in order to make a difference. As the marketers say, create a buzz. In the sense of paying it forward, start something in your own way and in your own voice. Start a conversation that will spread, that will continue, that will penetrate the hearts and minds of the power brokers. Those in high places will join us. They will, as Saul of old, see the vision and join the conversation. Perhaps in fulfillment of ancient prophecy, those with ears to hear will find each other, and they who are confused will recognize the voice.

Interrupt your own broadcast to begin the conversation. Let it begin with you; let it begin now. Spread the Good News!

Season's greetings, my friends,

Ray Matthews
Editor RSS in Government

A crack cocaine smoking judge who allegedly presided over his court while high? An attorney disbarred for abandoning his law practice and clients in the pursuit of the unlawful use of methamphetamine? These are only some of today's tintillating stories from official Utah judiciary sources that my news aggregator served me.

The Utah Administrative Office of the Courts and the Utah State Bar have been experimenting with the syndication of news and publications for quite some time. They've now published links to their first public syndicated feeds on their homepages.

Utah Courts offers an RSS feed for "Recent Court Opinions" that links to recently released and archived opinions of the Utah Supreme Court, Utah Court of Appeals, and Per Curiam decisions. If you'd rather get the same information by email, Steve Brown, Courts Webmaster, offers a notification subcription service.

http://www.utcourts.gov/rss/opinions/index.xml

The editors of the Utah Bar Journal with the assistance of Utah State Bar IT Director Lincoln Mead have imported the Journal into Movable Type. Recent past issues are also archived in PDF format.

http://www.utahbar.org/barjournal/index.rdf

This is a good trend because RSS syndicated legal information makes its delivery more timely and its content more findable and accessible.

Government is already rife with chiefs, why not one more? HighBeam Research, Inc. has set the pace by announcing today the appointment of Christopher Locke as Chief Blogging Officer (CBO). Looks like the role of CBO is a pace setter who creates a buzz about the company products and enlists others to blog the cause. Ironically, the announcement came in the form of a (oh, so 20th century) press release.

HighBeam is looking for bloggers interested in exclusive use of its new "blog this document" tools and free access to the company's premium archives of over 3,000 print publications for adding depth and historical background to virtually any subject. HighBeam, under the direction of Chairman and CEO Patrick Spain, is the recent amalgamation two paid content sites (eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com) and a meta-search site, Researchville.com.

Locke says, "The HighBeam database of 33 million articles going back almost 25 years is the best resource I've found for adding historical depth of focus to the sort of stuff I write about. Any blogger who wants to get at the trends and issues underlying today's headlines will immediately see the same benefit I did. And their readers will too. I'm turned on at the prospect of making the HighBeam Research content and tools more accessible to the blogging world."

I don't think Highbeam will need to look too far for volunteers. Chris' own Chief Blogging Officer blog, offers a preview of how you can turn your own ordinary blog musings into a Blogipedia.

According to ClickZ News, HighBeam plans to begin offering its new blog content tool in late January or early February for $19.95 a month or $99 a year.

Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's reports that "Blog" tops their list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was the most looked-up word on its Internet sites this year.

The list is compiled each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity. The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

Source: Reuters http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041130/us_nm/life_words_dc_2

State CIO J. Clark Kelso wants to make government more accessible to the citizens of California. In an interview with Information Week's Eric Chabrow, (Nov 22, 2004), Kelso announced, "We need to start changing the inefficeinent way we provide services." The state spends between $2 billion and $4 billion annually on IT.

Kelso is the author of the "California State Information Technology Strategic Plan" (PDF), a 5-year plan presented this month to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Plan follows a more lengthy report issued in August by the California Performance Review Commission. The Commision was charged by Gov. Schwarzenegger with figuring out how to make state government work better and cheaper. Among the ideas in the panel's $32 billion cost-cutting recommendations: favoring open-source software over proprietary alternatives for new IT purchases.

The report, titled Government for the People for a Change, is a 4-volume study with recommendations including recommendations to "Explore Open Source Alternatives." "The state should more extensively consider use of open source software," it recommends, "which can in many cases provide the same functionality as closed source software at a much lower total cost of ownership."

The CIO's most recent plan to bring efficiency to California Information Technology promotes six strategic goals including three that could be facilitated by open source RSS syndication:

• Make Government services more accessible to citizens and State clients.


• Implement common business applications and systems to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.


• Lower costs and improve the security, reliability and performance of the State's IT infrastructure.

Unfortunately, there is no mention of RSS news feeds or xml syndication anywhere in the plan.

California prides itself as the world's fifth largest economy, but in the world of providing syndicated news and services, it lags behind Rhode Island and Delaware. Social Commentator Jamais Cascio writing in WorldChanging wryly observes, "Some states that you'd think would be technologially on the ball (California, for example) have few if any feeds, while other locations are swimming in them."

You can search for newly published patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but if you want the latest patent applications served to you by RSS syndication and email alerts, you'll need to visit FreshPatents.com. Industry list RSS feeds filtered by USPTO class number are particularly valuable. The content is crawled and indexed by Google as well.

Browse for new patents by industry category or do a keyword search. For example, if you browse USPTO Class 715, Data processing: presentation processing of document patents you'll notice that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to for updates. That makes it easy to find new applications such as application #20040221226 "Method and mechanism for processing queries for xml documents using an index" applied for on November 4, 2004 by inventors Wesley Lin, Yasuhiro Matsuda, and Garrett Kaminaga.

Sign-up for free email patent application monitoring service which will send you a weekly email with new applications that match the keywords you select.

This site is one of those rare examples in which even if you subscribe to the feed, you'll want to routinely visit the website. The site provides searches by keyword and provides lists of patent applications by location (state and city), agent and law firm name, city of the agent, and inventor name.

With the proliferation of RSS feeds in state and local governments, a unique opportunity is developing to expand the delivery of the critical information contained in these feeds by leveraging the most ubiquitous personal communications device in the world -– the telephone. Governments that use RSS to deliver information to citizens using RSS feeds can also leverage VoiceXML, an open standard for developing telephony applications, to expose RSS content via cellular and traditional telephones.

VoiceXML is a web technology that can turn any telephone, even a rotary phone, into an Internet device. VoiceXML is a non-proprietary, web-based markup language for creating vocal dialogues between humans and computers. VoiceXML is similar to another common markup language -- HTML, the basic language of visual web pages. Just as a web browser renders HTML documents visually, a VoiceXML interpreter renders VoiceXML documents audibly. In this respect, one can think of the VoiceXML interpreter as a telephone-based, voice browser. As with HTML documents, VoiceXML documents have web URIs and can be located on any web server. However, instead of pointing a client-side web browser at a specific URI, citizens can access a VoiceXML application by calling a toll free telephone number from any ordinary telephone - cellular or traditional, touch-tone or rotary.

It’s not hard to think of a scenario where a local government or a university could publish an RSS feed with topical news, and have a phone number for students or citizens to call for more information. Depending on how the VoiceXML is structured, the caller could have the option of being transferred directly to the number associated with the information.

The trick would be, in my opinion, finding the right place within the RSS feed to put the phone number (if the publisher wanted to provide the option of an automatic transfer). Ideally, the phone number would be contained within its own RSS element. Glancing quickly at the RSS 2.0 spec, this could be something like the guid element. So, if a publisher was using a software package to author and publish RSS feeds, they would probably need to do a little experimenting to find the right place to place the phone number.

Because RSS and VoiceXML are both XML vocabularies, there are a number of standards-based methods for converting RSS to VoiceXML and using RSS feeds from within VoiceXML applications. The first method involves the use of eXstensible Style Sheet Language Transformations (XSLT). I have created a tutorial covering this technique and some of the issues relating to it. This technique is generally agnostic to the underlying technology used; XSLT transformations are supported in technologies like JSP, PHP, Perl, .NET and others.

To see it in action there is a demo application available at (800) 289-5570. Enter the following PIN when prompted: 9991422919. This example uses the latest headlines news feed from CNET News.com (news.com.com) and the XSLT file covered in my tutorial. This is only running on a demo platform, so I can’t guarantee anything on performance. Still, it gives you a sense of how an RSS feed sounds. This technology could allow travelers only equipped with cell phones to get the latest NOAA RSS weather reports, lobbyists to dial-in for legislative floor calendars, and rescue teams to phone for the latest operational instructions.

The other method for using RSS from within VoiceXML applications is to leverage the new data tag, an addition to the VoiceXML specification that is part of the developing VoiceXML 2.1 standard. Some excellent examples of this technique can be found on the VoiceXML Forum website at http://www.voicexmlreview.org/apr2004/columns/apr2004_speak_listen.html.

VoiceXML also allows for the playback of recorded audio. If one had an audio file that they want to include in a feed, a VoiceXML application could actually invoke the audio file and play it to the caller. There is a VoiceXML service at (800) 555-TELL that plays audio files. Give it a call and try listening to the “News Center” option.

One caveat -- most VoiceXML platforms only support certain audio formats, but the more common ones (WAV, MP3) are usually supported. VoiceXML also supports recording the audio of a call, so if one wanted to let callers post comments the application could record their audio and save it for later playback. There is actually a project called “Phone Blogger” that takes this approach (see www.wombatnation.com/phoneblogger).

By using these techniques, governments that make information available to citizens through RSS feeds can dramatically expand the accessibility of these feeds by making them available to anyone with a telephone.

Mark J. Headd
Voice Technologies for Government
www.voiceingov.org
mheadd@voiceingov.org





[Editor's note: Commenting is turned off because of spamming. Mark is interested in hearing from readers who are interested in how that can use VoiceXML to augment what they are doing with RSS. Please email the author with your comments and we'll invite him to write a follow-up here at RSS in Government addressing your ideas and suggestions.]

The Wisconsin Historical Society reports to Jenny Levine that they now offer three new RSS feeds. Web Development Coordinator James Ellis says that his is the first government agency in Wisconsin to use this technology.

Two new U.S. Supreme Court opinion feeds now join RSS feeds that have been available from the West Virginia Supreme Court and other courts.

The State of Virginia was recently recognized by the Center for Digital Government with a third place ranking in the Best of the Web and Digital Government Achievement Awards. The recognition came largely for Virginia's new syndication and alert services. In accepting the award Governor Mark Warner said, "Our real-time online live help customer service continues to set the pace for the nation, and the portal's desktop alerts via live RSS feeds ensure that Virginia.gov users always have access to the most current information." The VIPNet portal and its RSS feeds are managed by the Virginia Information Providers Network. There are currently at least 34 feeds. Virginia uses RSS feeds not only for alerts, but also as a monitoring service that keeps citizens informed of new resources and services added to the portal.

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Logitech has introduced a range of Sync smart office tools designed to improve workplace efficiency and provide enhanced analytics for IT teams. The new suite includes Auto Book and Auto Release, which automate room reservations and cancellations based on user activity. Additionally, Logitech View offers interactive digital office maps to assist with navigation in large office spaces. Henry Levak, VP of Product at Logitech for Business, highlighted the AI capabilities of the tools, stating, “Rally Bars use AI in-camera sensors to automatically detect and respond to natural workplace behaviors with no human intervention needed.” This approach aims to simplify room… [Continue Reading]

SurveyMonkey, a widely used platform for creating surveys and forms, has expanded its social sharing capabilities to include WhatsApp. This addition allows users to share their surveys and forms directly with WhatsApp contacts and groups, aiming to simplify the distribution process. WhatsApp joins SurveyMonkey’s existing social sharing options, which include LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Microsoft Teams. With over 2 billion active users globally, WhatsApp is recognized as one of the most popular messaging apps. SurveyMonkey customers in over 130 countries, speaking 56 different languages, can now leverage this integration to share surveys and forms through a platform that… [Continue Reading]

When it comes to protecting sensitive information like financial data, personal information, and intellectual property, encryption has become a must. By scrambling data through the use of algorithms, only those with access to decryption keys are able to read what's being secured. Encrypted traffic has fulfilled its intended mission: to lock down data. But, could it simultaneously be helping bad actors slip by undetected? And could encrypted traffic actually make it harder for network defenders to spot threats before it's too late? To find out, we sat down with Phil Owens, VP of customer solutions at Stamus Networks. Phil believes… [Continue Reading]

A new report finds that 75 percent of the 100 most visited websites in the US and Europe are not compliant with current privacy regulations. The study from privacy solution provider Privado.ai shows despite stricter privacy enforcement in Europe a surprising 74 percent of top websites do not honor opt-in consent as required by Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Although top websites in the US have a similar non-compliance rate of 76 percent for not honoring opt-out consent as required by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Privado finds the median volume of compliance risks to be three times… [Continue Reading]

Achieving digital accessibility and optimizing your platform for screen readers, can be a strategic decision with multifaceted benefits. Not only does it reflect empathy and inclusivity for visually impaired users, but it also potentially expands your audience and the reach …

Offering an array of choices might seem like an excellent way to cater to diverse user preferences, but more often than not, it can cause decision fatigue, negatively impacting the user experience and conversion rates. So, how do we strategically …

The National Association of Legislative Information Technology (NALIT) will be sharing "Web Tips, Tricks and Techniques" for building Legislative RSS feeds at their 2004 Professional Development Seminar in beautiful Burlington, Vermont, September 8-11, 2004. Panelists include key IT players from Virginia, Nevada, and Utah. Several states are now using RSS to provide users with notices of new Web content or to distribute newsletters. At least two states are now generating legislative feeds directly from databases. This article previews some of what they'll be showing from the states of Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island.

The Aberdeen City Council's RSS feed of news releases is possibly the first government syndicated news in the UK. It's inclusion in Google News indexing may also be a first.