For the commercial organisations it's a decision that they can make - if they want (although if the main purpose of the sites is to get information out there, they're making a mistake). The Blues and Walsall football sites are running a very old system and it hasn't been long since you had to log in to read the news.

For publicly funded bodies, it's a little more inexcusable - one would hope that they are at least working to put it right.

People shouldn't make the mistake of thinking this stuff "geeky" it's relatively simple but unbelievably powerful - once information is available in RSS feeds people can customise it to their tastes, filter to their needs and combine with other data in thousands of different ways.

If anyone is designing, building or commissioning a website without RSS they're going to end up lost on the hinternet (http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/blog/449/the-hinternet-the-internet-were-missing/) and behind the game.

I disagree with NED LUD, I think a your post raises the issue in a fun way and there's nothing wrong with creating a bit of healthy competition between these organisations. Hopefully, it will encourage those lagging behind to catch up even quicker.

Birmingham City Council are launching a new, improved site soon-ish aren't they? So that (surely) will be one of the main offenders off the list.

RSS? Call me a dinosaur but I love clicking on the website and its blog as and when I think of someone. Such anticipation - such surprise finding something new (or not) - a little like slashing open the envelope of a handwritten letter. RSS misses many a nuance.

Though, in the name of efficiency, no doubt you are right.

U

PS Joanna, personal tip: Never apologize for being combative and what you say in good faith ("rotters" - so what?)

University of Birmingham has rss on homepage and news pages for both events and news

i'm not denying that there's not a valid point about the usefulness of rss - but the way you have gone about it is no better than a bully. sadly, the basis of your post wasn't even to help people use technology more effectively for their benefit - it was born out of YOUR frustration of not getting what YOU want. if you'd stepped outside of that particular personal frustration, you might have produced something more positive and useful.

Just a quick follow up on Billy's comment: I would really appreciate it if someone could link to the RSS feed for the University of Birmingham - I can not find it!

Thanks.

UPDATE: Found it! No icons that I can see, but the feed was in the address bar.

@NED LUD

i think you might have some issues, your response to the article is disproportional, and difficult to relate to. in fact your tone is quite unpleasant.

The notion that one can bully the powerful and influential organisations in the region is somewhat laughable, and the idea that institutions should make it hard for journalists to find their info in order that they earn their crust is doubly laughable, so we'll move on.

The most interesting thing for me about RSS is not that it helps the 200-odd professional journalists in the region do their jobs but that it frees all that information up for anyone to use.

RSS isn't just a delivery mechanism, though that's it's primary use. More importantly it's a standardised way to format information in a machine readable manner. This means that every RSS feed laid out in the same way so you can combine, filter and republish them with ease.

This gets interesting when you think about all the information that a city generates. Currently it's distributed in a myriad of ways from RSS all the way down to Word documents. If it was standardised then you could start building tools that help people understand the city they live in.

One of the most obvious uses of this is news, which is why journalists like Joanna are shouting the loudest for RSS adoption, but the other benefits, many of which we won't know until people start playing with the data, far outweigh this.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your comments and feedback.

NED LUD is making a perfectly valid point. He didn't like the tone of the piece and that is absolutely fair enough. Peace not war indeed guys. ;)

NED LUD is right that I was aware of the tone in which this piece was written and, yes, it is a bit of a jab in the ribs to those who are not using RSS.

RSS has been around for quite a few years, yet not one of the major councils I looked at had RSS feeds for their news (or if they have, have not made it obvious). I think that in itself justifies calling them "rotters".

I wouldn't call that bullying - teasing maybe - but these are the big kids in the playground, I think they can cope.

Now we're discussing the issue it would be great if the comments section offered some constructive advice.

What sort of tips would people give West Mid public authorities and prominent organisations when it comes to making their information more accessible?

My two-penneth would that if you choose to offer RSS, it is worth making it clear with an RSS logo or two in prominent parts of your website.

If people have to hunt for it, or guess it's there, it slightly defeats the object.

NED LUD was making a fair point* but I think Joanna's finding is more important than how it is expressed. Can we move on to how the situation can be improved?

For example, could we find somewhere to put a set of makeshift RSS feeds (via Dapper) for those who lag behind?

Could inclusion of RSS feeds be made a standard requirement of public sector websites? Does it come in to accessibility at all?

Failing that the RSS peace van idea could work. I know a guy who'd let us borrow his Bedford Rascal...

*one I disagree with, fwiw. By being gently chiding I think she's been a little too soft.

@Rob

You can have a news feed that produces RSS set up in about five minutes if you're not worried about it being hosted elsewhere and not branded to your company:

wordpress.com
blogger.com
posterous.com
typepad.com
tumblr.com

The list is endless.

If you want to integrate something into your site I'd suggest using the software from Wordpress.org which can be modified by anyone with a teeny bit of knowledge into whatever your current website look like. I'd say an afternoon to set it up and a few more days on the design. if that.

Adding content to Wordpress is like sending an email. Give it a title, slap the text in the box and press publish. That's it. Easy.

Any web publishing software worth its salt produces at least one RSS feed. If you've been sold one that doesn't then I'd seriously ask for your money back.

It's great to see a journalist making this sort of appeal for rss. When we were implementing rss for press releases for a public museum group a few years ago one concern raised was how few journalists would actually want to receive info this way. There seems to have been a pretty big step forward into the online age from journalists in the last 12 months. From experience a public criticism from a journalist always gets a lot of attention from inside an organisation.

Large organisations tend to implement major content management system changes in roughly five year cycles, I'd be surprised if any of the councils for example won't get rss as standard next time they update (maybe I wouldn't be that surprised actually..). As Pete says any web publishing software worth its salt (and loads that aren't!) will produce RSS nowadays but this wouldn't have been the case when a lot of these were built.

Whenever I visit a football club's website (and that's deliberately rare despite loving the game) I'm astonished at how they get everything wrong so I'm not surprised so many aren't using rss.

Of course, rss is just a technical implementation, its existence on a site is far from a guarantee of effective online communication. The website is often the last place that organisation publishes news, I would imagine that, for journalists, being on the email-with-attached-logo-heavy-word-document mailing list is still the most reliable way of getting the latest news from any particular organisation first.

Any chance of implementing an rss feed for the comments on this page?

RSS is the issue? I think not. Let me ask this: how much time do you spending browsing your feed reader? While you're at it, what aggregators do you use? Once I get a few answers I'll clarify what I'm on about.

FYI, I use Omea, and could spend upwards of 30 minutes a day on it.

Ta, Jo. All will be revealed. Well, something, soon as I hear from a few more RSS enthusiasts about their habits. And as you mention GReader & Bloglines, let's hear whether it's browser-based or desktop. (I know both of those are browser based.)

So: what reader, what format, and how much time?

Tony,

Thanks for your comment! I too am a big supporter of making simple APIs available for all public data. But I thought I'd start with RSS and work from there!

I love using Yahoo Pipes, but wouldn't say I have full mastery of it and use it for things such as filtering and combining feeds. I seriously need to get into Google spreadsheets. :)

Love your blog and will be subscribing (via RSS of course!).

Dp,

Sorry, I forget to say. When I'm working I usually spend 30 to 45 minutes checking through feeds and following up on interesting posts.

Mature

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