You might be interested to know that there are seven ATOM feeds for new legislation, updated as and when it is published, linking to the official version of each Act or SI on the OPSI website.

Have you checked out FriendFeed?

Dennis

ps – thanks for adding me to your “People I Read” list!

Thanks for your comments.

@Mulqueeny – will do, thought I might let press offices kick off the news cycle again this week and then provide an update

@SimonD – thanks for the link. I scraped a coupld of the feeds myself – but that will save a lot of time! RE: adoption of RSS – watch this space.

@Colin McKay – Good point. Hopefully this will act as an incentive!

@Dave Briggs – Will do!

So for completeness, it might be worth looking at TheGovernmentSays.com/sources – they do a classic MySociety screenscraping job for many of the departments and agencies which aren’t yet hip to the RSS thing. You don’t ideally want to rely on a third-party service, but needs must etc.

As I’ve commented on Dave and Emma’s blogs, but never actually written up myself (doh!), I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter should be part of major websites’ future alerting strategies. This is a great proof of that concept.

But the starting point is more departments providing RSS. I feel like I’ve been banging that particular drum for years. And yet the best results have been when I’ve managed to sneak it in via the back door.

My only fear is that government communicators may not be capable of writing headlines succinct enough to convey a message in 140 characters.

As Em says, will be interesting to see how many followers you end up getting. Twitter produces an RSS feed, of course, so some people might be interested in that. Going on from that, pipe the RSS into a Feedburner updates-by-email thingy and people can have news into their inbox if they want it.

Brilliant stuff