It is not just business that is taking up the standards of blogs and RSS. Federal, state and local government agencies are finding powerful new ways to exploit these new technologies.
On November 16, 2004, Wired Online reported that:

A steadily growing stream of government agencies at the local, state and national levels [is] also implementing RSS as a natural way to disseminate information to their constituencies. And since almost all government information is useful to somebody, those responsible for informing the public see RSS as a perfect, and inexpensive, method for ensuring that people can get the knowledge they need without a lot of work.

The comprehensive blog on RSS in government, http://rssgov.com, cites numerous examples of how government agencies are taking advantage of these new technologies:

Freshpatents.com feeds the latest patent applications, filtered by USPTO class number. You can subscribe to a feed for updates to, for example, USPTO Class 715, Data processing: presentation processing of document patents


Hubmed is a means of generating RSS feeds from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database. Hubmed allows you to search the PubMed database, generate an RSS feed of your search. When new articles have been added to PubMed, HubMed will send you this information notification as an RSS feed. Hubmed also provides a personal information management system that is fully integrated with communities of biomedical researchers and key databases.

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Blogs and RSS are taking hold in businesses and government agencies because, as Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystem’s President and Chief Operating Officer believes, the appeal of blogs is due to their “advancement(s) of simplicity and convenience… Simplicity changes the world. Convenience is a force multiplier.”

Schwartz concludes: “the simplicity of blogs, the pervasiveness of networks and an explosion of content sources” can be critical for “any industry that finds competitive advantage in the latency of information, or in complexity—from national security to the whole IT industry. Simplicity can be a sustainable competitive advantage.”

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Pingwillauerkayaks is a group
weblog developed by the Otter Group for an Outward Bound middle school
on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor. This 8th grade class is using its
weblog to document their progress in building four kayaks that will be
auctioned off at a year-end school fundraiser.

Each student is required to post what they are learning as they build
their kayaks. The blog is rich with photos documenting the student
work. It provides a wonderful window into the classroom for parents,
teachers, and out-of-town relatives.

Teachers Darcy Hoyt and Thad Foote recently presented their project and
the blog to the National Expeditionary Learning Conference in Denver,
Colorado, where it generated a great deal of interest among
participating teachers.

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This online program, developed for CDM by the Ottergroup, helps project managers at a global environmental consulting firm develop new strategies and skills for managing conflict, negotiation, and problem solving. Four times a year, a cohort of 25 CDM project managers is convened to participate in the six-week course. Each session lasts 90 minutes and is conducted over Live Meeting. Sessions include presentation of concepts by Professor Josh Weiss (of the Harvard Program on Negotiation), discussion via telephone conference, and online polling. Each participant is responsible for developing a strategic resolution plan for managing a conflict in their current position. At the end of the six weeks, participants present their plans to the group and they are critiqued by Josh Weiss and by a senior executive at CDM.

This program, in its fourth year, is taught online by Josh Weiss, the Associate Director of the Global Negotiations Project at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law Shcool. At the PON Josh is conducting research, consulting with a variety of organizations, and teaching courses on Negotiation, Mediation and International Conflict.

Read a case study about this program.

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Wellesley College has launched a pilot program for new alumnae online community service built on a blog network. Otter developed this ground-breaking program to take advantage of blogs as an ideal system for sharing all kinds of information among alumnae: news, ideas and opinions, contacts, photos, music, book and film lists, recommendations for travel, restaurants, entertainment and more. Wellesley alumnae are using their blogs to promote their professional interests, to document their lives, and to manage communications for their clubs and reunions.
The PingWellesley portal site has a number of customized features built by Otter to help build community: a list of blogs in the Wellesley network; an aggregator which shows all new posts on all Wellesley blogs; and an advanced search tool that enables readers to search only blogs within the PingWellesley network.

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RSS is not only for outbound communications. Organizations can build RSS radars—the ability to create RSS feeds that are aggregated compilations of news from selected sources and filtered according to specific criteria. The Otter Group built an RSS radar for a wireless start-up company, Propagate Networks, which needed to make a case for their “Auto Cell” product, developed to address expanding interference problems in congested wireless environments. Here is how Founder Paul Callahan described the advantages he gained from his RSS radar:

“I’ve been using a newsreader for about two months to look for and collect information on Wi-Fi interference all over the Internet. I’m getting feeds from all the big search engines. Once these feeds are in my aggregator, I scan them for relevant information, wrap comments around them, and publish them. In the process of collecting all of this news about Wi-Fi interference, I was shocked at the volume of hidden discussion about this topic. I would never have been able to find all this stuff without RSS feeding it to me. I started doing this because many of our potential customers were completely unaware that the problem even existed. Once we pointed them to the blog (where the stuff we collected through the RSS radar was stored), they were convinced. Blogging makes this concentrated syrup available and allows me to make a very compelling case about AutoCell.

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In 2000, The Otter Group was brought in
to convert a second-year MBA course by Professor Andrew Lo at MIT’s
Sloan School of Management for electronic delivery to a group of high
performing employees at financial services giant Merrill Lynch. Over
the five years Otter has managed this e-learning program, the focus has
shifted from delivering content to supporting participants  as they worked through a new product
development process. In 2004, we replaced the standard asynchronous e-learning
tools of a course Web site and e-mail listserv with a weblog network
for course participants to document and share what they were
learning. This innovation resulted in dramatic improvements in the
degree of participation in the online component of the course as well as the quality of the
ideas presented by the students. We attribute these improvements not
only to the simplicity and convenience of these tools for documenting
and sharing knowledge but also the visibility given to the student’s
ideas: important contributions that would have been hidden in an e-mail
system or on personal hard drives were now “visible” not only to other
students but to the faculty, as well as senior executives at Merrill
Lynch.

This successful program illustrates how
knowledge worker productivity will be managed in the future for
significant gains in job satisfaction and profit: Participants are
given high-level latitude to develop ideas for new products and
services based on the theories and models in Andrew Lo’s and Deborah
Ancona's material. They use simple and powerful tools in the form of
weblogs and RSS to exchange ideas, and make their own product
development process more transparent to one another. They collaborate
across traditional corporate boundaries. As a whole the group becomes
more intelligent and generates valuable business ideas and products
that are now being implemented for high returns at Merrill Lynch.

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Rapid adoption of blogging technology is taking place in business because these new tools are conferring competitive advantages to those firms that adopt them. Blogs and RSS in the hands of knowledge workers enable them to capture and share what they know. Blogs and RSS form a new bottom-up approach to collective intelligence by capturing the knowledge and wisdom of broad numbers of workers and then directing this knowledge to workers to rapidly improve their performance. When this internal knowledge is coupled with externally focused RSS radars, blogs and RSS become a new form of business intelligence—one that looks inward at the company itself, as well as outward to customers, markets, and competitors.
Yet most organizations are still operating in the mode of traditional top-down training.

The problem starts with unidirectional activities coming out of formal training organizations: senior management identifies a need and prepares a response and then hands it down from the top. By the time the training hits the field it is stale and irrelevant.
We believe organizations need to re-think how they train and educate their knowledge workers and take advantage of the new tools available to them. New technologies like blogging and RSS can be put in the hands of front-line employees and because they are so easy to learn, use, support, and deploy, they can be rapidly adopted as a means of capturing and publishing critical front-line information. Built-in RSS can be used to aggregate and share this information so that people get the information they need when they need it. Once the learning network is up and running, the information can be mined and analyzed to identify trends, best practices, and emergent leaders.

This structure has the real potential to transform how people learn from one another and to make them better, smarter, and faster. Instead of employing “instructional designers” who “re-purpose content” learning organizations need to employ Learning Directors who manage the process of learning, aggregate information, and produce a community-wide view of new knowledge. This transformation has a big benefit of making the jobs of people inside training organizations much more exciting and satisfying.

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A weblog (or web log or blog depending upon which spelling you want to observe) is a new kind of personal web site that is very easy to update–if you can use Microsoft word, you can make people think you are a full-fledged programmer. A year ago blogs were regarded as the daily diaries of people (mostly teenagers and journalists) who had nothing better to do than write about themselves. Today weblogs are being discovered as very powerful new tools for sharing knowledge, networking, making connections, sharing photos, filtering information, finding people and things, and more.

Blogs are built on RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, a technology that allows you to broadcast your writing on the Internet. RSS is an open and simple way for:

• writes to publish,
• for reaers to locate and subscribe and
• for subscribed content to be

accessed,

processed,

scanned,

read,

discussed,

archived, and

subsequently retrieved.

RSS can be used for distributing any kind of content–blogs, news, updates to a web site, as well as music, photos and video.

Above is a simple diagram we created to help explain how blogging works:

Step 1: The writer posts the article to the blogging systems.

Step 2: HTML and RSS are updated. RSS enables readers to get information in new ways: each time new information is added to a blog, central servers are pinged to store notice that the blog has been updated.

Step 3: Blog readers use a tool called a news aggregator or RSS aggregator to poll blogs and news sites to see if anything is new. If so, their aggregators will show the updated information.

Step 4: Search engines (Google, Feedster, Technorati) are updated.

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From Campus Technology Update:


Over three-fourths of the time prospective students spend searching for
the right school is spent on the Internet, according to a recent Harris
Interactive poll. Which means the latest Internet trend-blogging-will
increasingly play a role in students' decision about where to apply and
where to go to school, according to a firm that specializes in student
recruiting.

Edu Internet Strategies believes blogs “can no longer be considered
luxuries. Many students already use blogs in their daily routine,
quickly making e-mail obsolete. Thus, incorporating blogs is a
necessary service that potential students expect.”

George Waldie, director of the company, said campus admissions
departments should incorporate the technology into their recruiting
strategies. “Not only are they edgy, honest assessments and opinions
attuned to the perspective of today's youth, but they are also a great
way to drive traffic to your site,” he said. “Search engines love blogs
because they have archives, links and continuously updated content. But
optimization is still important because search engines can quickly
become flooded with blogs.”

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