There are many reasons why governments will adopt RSS and similar approaches to content dissemination and awareness.

"Selling government agencies on RSS would be easier if we could demonstrate to them an easy way to convert their existing news formats to automatically generated and delivered email newsletters." -- Ray Matthews

RSS to email newsletter formats is certainly one way to generate additional interest, but there are other issues that need to be addressed.

One of the basic difficulties that all governments face (indeed, all businesses) is the emerging requirement for semantically tagged content. Most government legacy systems are not easily refactord to produce XML content over HTTP. Furthermore, even the few that are able to do this have little or no capacity to provide a unified information model for discrete URL addresses for each information object. eGov initiatives must consider these issue if they are to build sustainable systems that deliver long-term benefits.

Providing infrastructure to clear these hurdles is an important step that will ultimately allow RSS (and other XML content formats) to thrive in government. The machinery required to do this has started to fall in place with the help of XML standards such as xHTML, XSLT, and SOAP. At MyST we regularly tackle this issue by using the MyST platform as an intermediate meta-data repository (i.e., a place where information objects can be easily represented as first-class items in a Web services environment). In so doing, all flavors of RSS are immediately available and XSLT is ready to meet other requires like RSS to email newsletter transformation.

MySmartChannels provides a number of ways to capture and manage comment content that provides agility depending on the application requirements for commenting.

"A third approach would be to not include comments in the blog feed at all, and instead provide a separate feed for comments in addition to the one for entries. The blog reader would then need to load both and combine them for display. The end user would need to enter two different URLs for blogs in that case, which doesn't seem great." -- Kevin Lynch

I think Kevin hit on the right approach in his Weblog entry (i.e., separate channels for items and comments about items) but I don't think he considered an abstract enough framework that could provide unlimited ways to present the comments with the information items.

Imagine a channel of information items and another channel where comments about the information items are stored. There are many benefits to this approach because items in MySmartChannels are first-class items regardless of whether they are original items or items created about other items. This makes it very easy to subscribe (with RSS readers) to separate feeds for comments and original items. In some cases this is preferable especially if you're the only author of a channel and simply want to monitor feedback on that channel.

But as Kevin points out - there's more to this issue. You may want a presentation (or syndication feed) that comingles the comments with the original information items. I'm not sure what that structure might be but I believe there are likely to be many interpretations. Given a true separation of content and presentation, this is very easy to model - quite literally model with XSLT. The MyST platform assumes implementation details will vary and we try not to rule out ideas that haven't yet been imagined. Rigid adherence to rules-based programming models (using XSLT) makes this cost effective.

The MyST platform provides a very general framework for creating object relationships that can easily produce separate RSS feeds or combined XML flavors that mingle comments with original items.

"The blog reader would then need to load both and combine them for display."

In my view, RSS readers should read only RSS. The task of assimilation and presentation is the domain of the information architecture. Of course, in the spirit of innovation and agility, I don't rule out the probability that an RSS reader with comment assimilation through some sort of namespace extension will emerge.

"Unfortunately, these feeds don't contain any of the comments that people make on the entries. So, you need to jump out of the blog reader and into a web browser to see if there even are any comments."

I disagree - one way to eliminate this commenting blind spot is to update the RSS item indicating that something has changed about the item when a comment has been added. This is easily achieved by assimilating the information items with comment data at the moment the RSS feed is generated.

And when that comment-aware RSS reader pops onto the scene - well, we're ready. ;-)