European Union Use Of RSS
A week ago there were some reports about American government bureaucracies starting to use RSS, and it was interpreted as a sign of RSS hitting the mainstream.
I thought I would check the status in the European Union, and I actually didn't expect to find much. We can't talk of RSS as a mainstream tool in Europe yet. But it was not complete darkness. I found four different agencies (or similar) of the EU bureaucracy that uses RSS.
Most interesting, I think, is the feeds of the European Environment Agency's State of the Environment Reporting Information System (SERIS). It is a bit difficult to find the feeds, but if you choose any of the countries or biogeographical regions you will find a button that says "For Webmasters / XML" (example UK). Basically SERIS is an environmental report system.
More examples:
The portal to European Union law, EUR-lex, offers channels for news and information from the Official Journal of the EU.
The European Environment Information and Observation Network (EIONET) has a number of different feeds, for example news releases and announcements.
Finally Interchange of Data Between Administrations - a European programme using advances in information and communication technology to support electronic exchange of information between public administrations across Europe - is also publishing RSS.
There may be more. And we must remember that this is still just RSS, the tech stuff. No blogs. But if government agency use of RSS is a sign of the technology becoming accepted there are things happening on this side of the Atlantic too.