Oz Politics Blog

Once again most of the mainstream political parties fail the Internet web-savvy test. This time I decided to review their syndication services.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) allows users to skim the contents of a web site into an RSS aggregator for viewing at their leisure. Using an RSS aggregator takes the pain out of surfing the net, especially if you have a long list of sites that you want to check every day. With an RSS aggregator, you can automatically collect and collate all of the sites you want to review, and focus on those that have updated their content.

As political parties are in the communication business, providing an RSS feed to their web site should be an important communication strategy. Unfortunately, from my quick look at the parties with representation in the Federal Parliament, this does not appear to be the case.

• The Liberal Party does not provide an RSS feed for its web site.
• The National Party does not provide an RSS feed for its web site.
• The Family First Party does not provide an RSS feed for its web site.
• The Greens party does not provide a single feed for its site. There are feeds for Greens members and past candidates. However, if Bob Brown’s feed is any example, they are out of date. Brown’s latest entry is little more than a static pointer to the media release page on the Greens’ web site. The entry before that is dated April 2005. A single RSS feed for the Greens media release page would be a good idea!
• While the Australian Labor Party has a feeds page, as I have noted previously, Labor has a problem keeping its web site current. The latest feeds are about a week old.

Only the Australian Democrats passed this test. The options on the Australian Democrats’ feeds page deserve commendation. As does the information/links on RSS at the bottom of its page; I particularly enjoyed the article, RSS Killed the Infoglut Star

My page of feeds from the political parties is here.