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!

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

While the government may not be enthusiastic over offering RSS news feeds, the Chinese people themselves are embracing Internet communications with gusto and particularly RSS news syndication in the form of blogging.

According to China's biggest blogging service provider blogcn.com, the number of subscribers has soared from 10,000 in June last year, to more than 500,000 now.

A couple of years ago technology writer Fang Xingdong at his site blogchina.com coined the Chinese term bo ke to mean blogger. He encouraged his readers to try blogging by registering on blogger.com. “Blogging is a true revolution,” he wrote. “One needs zero technology training, zero institution and zero cost to become a blogger.”

The number of Chinese online has quintupled over the past four years. Duncan Clark, managing director of BDA China, a telecommunications and technology consulting firm based in Beijing, said in an email message to the to Tom Zeller, Jr. of the New York Times, "China's rulers are bent on putting communications, mobile phones, Internet access and the new growth area, broadband, into as many hands as possible."

"China is already the largest mobile communications subscriber market in the world," reports the Internet Herald Tribune, "with more than 320 million subscribers." Internet users, who numbered fewer than 17 million in 2000, are now estimated to be somewhere near 90 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Centre, the government's clearinghouse for Internet statistics. China is second only to the United States in the number of people online."

Beijing has an uneven record of late in allowing citizens access to Google English News headlines giving Chinese searchers access to uncensored news from all over the world. According to Reporters Without Borders, China is censoring Google News to force Internet users to use the Chinese version of the site which has been purged of the most critical news reports.

Similarly, the government is also ambivalent about how allowing its citizens to freely blog. Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley runs the China Digital News blog and is monitoring the pulse of blogging in China.

Qiang reports that by January 2003, China had about 2000 bloggers when, without warning, the Chinese government blocked all access to blogspot.com, the server that hosts all blogs registered on blogger.com. According to Qiang:

[The] crackdown in 2003 closed websites and internet cafes and saw the arrest of dozens of online commentators.

Yet this is not proving enough to stifle the pluck and ingenuity of China’s bloggers. The rise of the blog phenomenon was made possible by blog-hosting services. Just as companies like Yahoo host email accounts, sites like blogger.com, based in the United States, host blogs.....

Blog services are now sprouting all over China. By the end of October 2004, China had more than 45 large blog-hosting services. A Google search for bo ke will return more than two million results, from blogs for football fans to blogs for Christians.

Sources:

• Zeller, T. Jr. Beijing embraces the Internet while it clamps down on online dissent, International Herald Tribune, December 6, 2004.


• China View. "Blog" the word of the year, December 5, 2004.


• NewScientist.com. Special report: The "blog" revolution sweeps across China, November 24, 2004.


• Interfax-China. China censors Google News, (November 30 2004, updated December 1).

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 Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) now has their publications syndicated as RSS channels. These publications are brief discussions about the Wisconsin government and the state legislature in particular, and public policy issues facing the legislature.

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If you’re looking for stunning black and gold wedding themes, look no further. Here are some ideas to help guide your choice.

Google Search has been rolling out this new expandable section in the search results titled "current sales." I guess Google is able to figure out what is a sale and what is not, maybe from structured data or Merchant Center and then have a section in the search results for that...

This was first spotted by Khushal Bherwani on X and then by Sachin Patel on X - here are some screenshots:

Then when you toggle it open it looks like this:

Here are more screenshots:

More finds , noticing this in wild on serp pic.twitter.com/ckiNaxS1Wg

— Khushal Bherwani (@b4k_khushal) November 10, 2024

@rustybrick Google SERP has a current sales section. pic.twitter.com/AkFiIBvIia

— Sachin Patel (@SachuPatel53124) November 7, 2024

Forum discussion at X.

This EMF Radiation Blocking Hoodie from Bon Charge looks like it’s just the ticket for these warm winter nights. And when we say warm, you know we’re not just referring to the temperature, right? According to some very sensible people, over exposure to high levels of electromagnetic radiation can be a very not good thing. Now before we all head off and find a deep bunker somewhere, it’s not just the levels, but also the type of radiation that matters....

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This week Jared Bauman sits down with Jake Cain, a long-time blogger with a portfolio of sites, a former Niche Pursuits employee, and an attendee at Google’s recent Creator Summit. In this interview, Jake shares his experience at the event,…

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Learn how YouTube's ban on ad blockers will affect advertisers. Users aren't happy, but smart advertisers can use the change to their advantage.

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Shareablee, la herramienta líder en medición de audiencias en redes sociales y digitales habilita 26 nuevas métricas de medición enfocadas en la plataforma de TikTok para Latinoamérica

The Met Gala once again took over NYC - and our social feeds. This year’s theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, paid homage to one of fashion’s greatest designers on one of fashion’s biggest nights.

Wimbledon 2023 wrapped up with a men’s final tennis masterclass, and social media didn't miss out on the action.

Fr. Stephen looks at the image of Christ with the unrighteous gathered around Him and recalls a famous passage in Dostoevsky.

Reflecting on a sermon of St. Gregory Palamas, Fr. Stephen looks at the significance of the Cross as reflected in the writings of the fathers.

One of the temptations of our secular age is the public drive to make religious faith a "private" matter. Fr. Stephen looks at this tension within our culture and the importance of the Christian public response.

Fr. Stephen examines the use of legal imagery and the problems it causes when we try to apply it to our relationship with God. Instead, he looks at the language of "being" used in the Fathers.

From ancient Rome to the present, public shaming has been a means of controlled violence. What is the Christian place in all of this?

Fr. Stephen Freeman looks at the end of time and how it is thought about in Orthodox theology. It is profoundly important in our every day life.

Fr. Stephen Freeman describes some of the problems that arise when our morality is a "mere morality," marked only by our outward behavior rather than inward healing and transformation.

Fr. Stephen Freeman reflects on the nature of the Kingdom of God and its distinct reality when compared to the wars and struggles of the secularized world.

The holidays are just around the corner, which means it's a great time to snag deals on Nintendo Switch consoles, games, and accessories for everyone on your shopping list.

We've rounded up some top early Black Friday discounts available at Best Buy right now. Save on TVs, laptops, appliances, and more.

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