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Feds are blogging, are they listening?

Update 6/24/2007 – The incredible efficient folks at usa.gov have added the Future Digital System blog to their blog directory, which I hope will expose GPO’s efforts to more citizens and allow for a broader range of input than just contractors and docs librarians.

The usa.gov folks added the blog a few days ago, I just haven’t gotten around to mentioning it. So if you see a federal blog that should be on their list, notify them with the confidence that they are responsive.

Now for the original post:
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The federal portal USA.gov has started a new page of government agency blogs at
http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml. The list currently stands at ten active blogs, although I know they are missing at least one because they don’t have GPO’s FDSys Blog at http://fdsys.blogspot.com. I have reported this oversight to USA.gov and hopefully one of our GPO readers will contact USA.gov directly.

The blogs are from a range of agencies and I was a little surprised to find that a majority allow for “blog-standard” commenting. A seventh blog, Pushing Back from the Office of National Drug Control Policy surprised me by at least accepting comments on blog entries, but these seem to be mailed to ONDCP staff and never seen by the public.

Rather than rant against the agencies that run blogs without public feedback, let’s celebrate the agencies that understand that Web 2.0 is about interaction:

So let’s applaud the agencies who understand and hope the rest will follow. While FGI might highlight a government blog or two in postings, we do not intend to start our directory. If you know of blogs not on the USA.gov list, please tell them.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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