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Labour HQ neglects RSS news potential

Posted: 21/04/05 By: Jemima Kiss

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Labour is trailing behind the other major political parties as the only campaign site with no RSS news feed.

The Conservative site offers a range of feeds, as does the Liberal Democrat site. Several parliamentary candidates have their own blogs and RSS feeds including Labour's Clive Soley, Lynne Featherstone of the LibDems and the Conservative's Boris Johnson.

RSS is a simple string of information from a website. Most news sites now offer free headlines feeds, which allow users to receive new headlines as soon as they are published. Users can download a free desktop program or sign up for a web-based account to store feeds from all their favourite sites.

For busy web users, it's a simple and very efficient way to scan new information and new stories from many sites in one place. For election watchers, it's the ideal way to monitor new information and posts from party websites and candidates' blogs as well as news sites.

"It seems ridiculous that a media-savvy organisation gives little regard to the best news syndication tool available," said RSS specialist Mike Barlow of FeedFire.

"RSS will get their news to those people who are most interested in it but who probably have neither the time nor the inclination to go to the website to search for it."

Feeds are easy to set up and totally editable, so the publisher is in total control of the information they publish, said Mr Barlow. He recently set up a free feed for the Monster Raving Loony Party.

"To be the party in government and find that your opponents have all the weapons and you have none - well, it sort of makes you realise what Goliath thought when David belted him one in the eye," he told dotJournalism.

"This smacks of 'we don't believe in this the new-fangled fad' approach to technology. Little do they know it could be their greatest asset."

A Labour spokesperson told dotJournalism that they knew what RSS feeds were, but didn't know why there weren't any for the Labour site.

When told that a feed had been set up for the Monster Raving Loony Party, he said: "well it must be good practice then".

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