The Welsh Assembly hasn’t grasped the possibilities of RSS (or Atom) syndication. Although sites like AssemblyOnline have been providing RSS feeds of the Welsh Assembly media briefings and forum postings for some time, it seems the Welsh Assembly itself thinks you aren’t quite ready for it. Here’s what they say:
With reference to the use of RSS newsfeeds and weblogs, I can assure you that Cymru Ar-lein is keen to explore all appropriate new technologies to facilitate and improve service delivery
There are merits in using RSS to drive content directly from our site to recipients automatically, quickly, and without interference from viruses and spam. The combined use of RSS and Weblogs in the education and learning communities is also very impressive and introduces the world to a whole new interactive Internet.
At this stage, however, Cymru Ar-lein is not in a position to do more than monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs. While keen to embrace and promote appropriate new technologies both within the National Assembly for Wales and throughout Wales as a whole. Cymru Ar-lein must move at a pace which is feasible for our customers. Translating the enthusiasm that stakeholders have toward using ICT into their habitual use of the Cymru
Ar-lein fora is a slow process, but one that is more about the culture of ICT usage than it is about the nature of the tools used. Thus, promoting the use of the Cymru Ar-lein fora by stakeholders and within the National Assembly for Wales remains a priority
New technology? The revision 3 spec for RSS 0.91 is 5 years old. It’s been around longer than these peoples’ desktop PCs and probably longer than their marriages.
In their parallel universe they will monitor the rise in popularity of both RSS and Weblogs while being incapable of creating a home page in HTML (see the new Welsh Assembly website).
If you have a moment, why not email the asembly and tell them that you’re quite au fait enough with technology to use RSS feeds.
