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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

City Your Government Feeding Tube

Posted by Dominic Holden on Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 3:03 PM

The City of Seattle has just formally announced CityLink, a feed of stories and updates from 11 city departments. It's essentially an aggregator of existing city blogs, such as the always gruesome and entertaining SPD Blotter, contained in one convenient place. Right now there's a story about a man who says he got carjacked this morning. In more bucolic updates, Parkways, the parks department blog, is presenting a fruit-tree expert to give you tips for your own little backyard orchard.

Citylink is a lovely concept, but its prioritizes are, for now, a little skewed. The page leads with a four-day-old paving update, but it would be more interesting to lead with information about an upcoming city council hearing—like the sure-to-be-contentious hearing on new rules backyard cottages later today—or recommended events from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. Anyway, CityLink. Huzzah!

Comments (5) RSS

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Hope nobody slips up and swears. That would be bad.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on September 15, 2009 at 3:05 PM

So the city is paying about 300 people to blog and then aggregate the blogs in another blog. This kind of crap annoys me greatly. When I visit the city website I want to know how to contact the Water Department, not get a recipe for nutritionist-approved cupcake frosting.

Posted by Fnarf

on September 15, 2009 at 3:13 PM

There is a severe need for recipes for nutritionist-approved vegan cupcake frosting in this city, actually.

Try dialing 411, it's faster.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on September 15, 2009 at 3:29 PM

Fnarf dear, calm yourself: It's a collection of press releases. These press releases have been written by the same people since 1620 or thereabouts. They've been on the intranets since 1898 or so. All this website is doing is collecting them in one place.

Although that probably took ten contractors to do the coding, and a PR firm to come up with the name.

Posted by Catalina Vel-DuRay

on September 15, 2009 at 10:05 PM

Reminds me of when Attachmate wanted these complex reports and I just stared at them and in eight hours wrote a form that generated all these reports for them based on adjustable queries.

They thought it would take six months. Half the time I spent was just testing the reports for accuracy.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on September 16, 2009 at 12:08 AM