25% of U.S. Senate Uses RSS and Podcasting
I recently did an informal survey of US Senate websites and found a lower adoption rate of RSS and Podcasting than I had hoped. Of the 100 sites, only 25 senators provide RSS feeds or podcasts of their news items. (None of them offer Atom feeds.)
What I found really interesting is that of the 25 senators who offer RSS, 7 of them are Democrats and 18 of them are Republicans. It would be fascinating to learn what the factors are that lead Republican senators to adopt RSS at double the rate of their colleagues across the aisle. Looks like the “Old” in Grand Old Party doesn’t refer to technology.
Another interesting aspect is that only two states have feeds for both of their senators: Colorado and Iowa. That means the other 21 states have senators who apparently don’t bother to unify/sync their communications efforts. (It might also just mean their webmasters don’t talk to each other.)
Digging a little into the setup of the Senate servers, it would appear that the default websites are using Cold Fusion, and that all senate websites have pre-built facilities available to them for RSS and Podcast generation. The onus is on each office, however, to provide feed icons/links from their sites. (Not to mention content for the feeds themselves.)
Considering nearly all senate sites provide news items and email notifications, there really isn’t much excuse for senators to not have an RSS feed. I encourage U.S. residents to email their senator and ask them to take advantage of it. (Talking points: The technology is already available to them. RSS is cheaper than maintaining email lists, provides better search visibility in the blogosphere, and protects the privacy of subscribers.)
Most senate sites with feeds are using the default Cold Fusion facility, with URLs in this format:
http://{LASTNAME}.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=RSS.Feed
http://{LASTNAME}.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=RSS.Podcast
It would be really easy to compile a blogroll if everybody used the above, but such is not the case. A number of sites have cooked their own feeds, so there is no standard access point. Still, I think an OPML blogroll of the feeds would be in the public interest, so I plan to make one available in the near future. As Puck once opined, a little light in dark places can be a good thing. Stay tuned.
