Flutterby™! : public service and RSS 2009-03-26 13:56:33.969685+00

public service and RSS

2009-03-26 13:56:33.969685+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Over on Petaluma360 I made some comments about both the failure of local news sources, and how cool it would be to be getting information from the local police and fire departments, to answer questions like "why was that helicopter circling the east side the other day?". This led to a few email exchanges, and last night I went to the Petaluma Municipal Technology and Telecommunications Advisory Comittee meeting.

It was interesting, there were really two things on the agenda, the first was a look at the changing state laws on cable television franchising, the second was talking about Sonic.net deploying WiFi over various regions of the town. There were, from comments emailed to the clerk, a few people watching online, but aside from the commission and the city employee making the presentations, it was me and one other guy who came in later to make some comments about the WiFi stuff.

I did learn a few things, and this morning was searching around for info on RSS feeds for public services information when I stumbled across this notice that Indian Police discover RSS Hindu Terror Cell which was pretending to be Muslim‏s. I know there have been some religious wars over this, but I had no idea. I mean, I rather prefer that Atom has a better spec, but I never considered that syndication formats might result in terrorism.

On a different note, anyone know of people pulling data out of Accela? That was one of the potential data sources mentioned. I'm not sure what the details are, but it'd be nice to know when new construction is being proposed for my neighborhood, for instance...

The answer to your query about the helicopter will be, of coure, "Police Business."

#Comment Linked blog a purveyor of hate-motivated falsehoods? made: 2009-03-27 23:54:39.029512+00 by: chrisx

I'm not sure whether the "Indian Police discover RSS Hindu Terror Cell..." link is a good idea, at least without a caveat.

I understand that Dan linked innocently for the pun. But the linked blog includes other posts such as "The Protocols Of Zion - A one page summary" which treats the famous smear as fact.

I'm not sure how legitimate the allegations in the linked post about the "Hindu terror cell" are on their own. The post includes a link to an in.news.yahoo.com page that doesn't exist at present, and a link to an article at expressindia.com which does seem to exist.

Thanks, chrisx, I've rel="nofollow"ed it. I actually didn't explore that site any further than giggling over the pun, but in hindsight anything with "pakalert" is probably a bit reactionary. I'll try to find something better to replace it with, though a cursory search indicates that it'll be different to find any resource without an ax to grind.. Religious wars writ large. The Wikipedia page on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).