I did a quick whip around this afternoon and looked at the homepages of the 34 Public Service departments, as defined in the First Schedule to the State Sector Act 1988, to see how many sites were offering RSS feeds — and the news is not good.

Of the 34 departments, 2 offered RSS feeds. Ouch. Less than 6%. Economic Development and Environment, take a bow. If you throw in the portal and the e-government website, we are still only edging towards 12%. Which, in 2007 by any measure would have to be described as a pretty poor showing.

Why?

RSS is a lightweight tool, easy to deploy and integrate into most (reasonably) modern websites and CMS’s, so the barrier can’t really be technical. If the RSS in government site is anything to go by, perhaps it is a cultural thing (the site was last updated in May 2005 — now there is a cracking feed). The public sector is generally slower to adopt and deploy new technologies, and this is just another instance of that. Or it might be because agencies just aren’t seeing the demand for feeds.

In any case, I would be interested to hear your views on this, particularly if your agency has looked at implementing RSS and made a call either way.