Local Governments tune into RSS

When I spoke to Wyndham City Council back in 2005 about becoming the first council in Australia to offer an RSS feed for its content, they were a bit baffled as to what it all meant or what it could provide.  Being a progressive council, at the time they had recently had Victorian business information (Business Entry Point) syndicated to their website.   They had been investigating using email to "push" website updates to stakeholders, but couldn't put together a business case for it.  Instead, they saw the potential and gave us the go ahead to syndicate to the council's press releases section, with some help information to guide users along.

At that point, a handful of councils in the UK like Aberdeen were the only ones in the world who were moving forward with RSS as a means to keep their stakeholders up to date. 

Usage of the Wyndham City Council had grown dramatically during that time and whether one person (I know I did at least) used their RSS feed or not, their press releases were ranked higher in Google as a result. 

Regardless of these subtle benefits, the point is that now over 20 Australian councils have adopted the new technology, and having done the groundwork some time ago, Wyndham can now reap the benefits of being an early adopter.  They are considering to extend the framework to support the addition podcasts and tagging technologies to the site and like other councils, making the feeds available directly from their homepage.  Fortunately for them, we decided to build the technology in to their Freestyler content management system to make it even easier for them to do this.

Several of our other council clients are now asking us to add it to their websites and Intranets and it is great to see the potential of this technology finally getting mainstream recognition.  We'll post some more on these developments in the coming months.