| RSS Feed Use By Accountants and Accounting Departments previous page May 31, 2006 I. Introduction. This article’s purpose to provide information on RSS feeds providing useful information to management accountants and accounting departments Currently, 435 feeds are available on the 160 content pages at the Management Accounting Information Center (MAIC). Each content page has at least two feeds and some have five. Information on these feeds is provided in this article. (Content pages are the pages that can be linked to under Section 3, on the right side of the MAIC front page. Content pages deal with content related to the major topic it is associated with. A content page has links to other websites containing information relevant to the content page’s content. A content page also has feeds identified in this article and has Yahoo Publishing Network ads. Both the feeds and the ads are intended to also be relevant to the content.) This article provides an evaluation of the usefulness of RSS feeds as a source of management and accounting-related information, based on the RSS feeds delivered to the 160 content pages at the MAIC. From an evaluation of these feeds, comments are made on the future of feeds as a useful source of information for accountants and on the use of feeds by accounting departments. II. News Feeds. Companies, such as Google and Yahoo, have search engines that you can go to and search for recent news articles that have been generated and reported on by various new sources. These news search engines are able to deliver up news stories and articles to visitors to the search engine page, as well as to “feed” news stories and articles out as RSS feeds. You can go to the company’s news website and do a search at the site using keywords. Google’s news website is at this link, http://news.google.com/nwshp?ned=us, and Yahoo’s news website is at this link, http://news.yahoo.com/?fr=sfp. The news sources are such organizations as the Associated Press, Reuters, newspapers, network news organizations, and many others. Google advertises that it searches over 4,500 news sources and Yahoo advertises it searches 7,000 news sources in 35 languages. These news sources frequently update their websites with breaking news. Also, news wires are being transmitted as news develops. These frequent updates and transmissions are very relevant and important for the usefulness of RSS feed technology. As these updates and transmissions take place, RSS feed technology can pull the new content from the news sources, through such companies as Google and Yahoo, and deliver the news content to the recipient’s website. Hopefully then, relevant content is frequently updated at the recipient’s website, without anything more needed from the recipient than bringing up the website page being fed. On each of the MAIC’s content pages are two feeds pulling to the content page frequently updated news from the Google News system. If you go to the Google News home page, you will find that you can search the Google News for news articles, using the same search methodology and technology used by Google Search. I have found that this ability to search, using Google search methodology and capabilities, is important in the use of RSS feeds because you can tailor the RSS feed output from the 4,500 news sources to your unique informational needs. From searches using relevant search terms at Google News, it is a relatively simple process of copying a RSS URL address. (A RSS URL address is needed for the process to work. Google provides this RSS URL for each search conducted at the Google News site.) The address then is pasted into a RSS reader (the one I use is available on the Internet and can be used for free). The RSS reader easily generates the needed "script” (programming code, incorporating not only the RSS URL and the keywords, but also the selected format of the feed appearing on the content page). This script then can be copied and pasted onto the recipient's website page, as I have done for each of the 160 content pages on the MAIC. Each of the MAIC's 160 content pages has 2 RSS Google News feeds, delivering “news” articles from about 4,500 news sources, based on keywords I selected for each feed as being relevant to the page’s content. Here is an example of one of these feeds (this feed also appears on the MAIC content page dealing with accounts payable): I suspect you will read at the links, seen in this RSS feed example above, information relevant to accounts payable (invoice processing are the keywords used to pull, or feed, these article links). Also, the publication dates should be close to the date that you are reading this article. (I cannot be certain of the dates because, although the fed links do change with time, updated links depend on how often the news sources deliver information related to the search terms.) III. Government RSS Feeds. Government agencies have begun to use RSS feeds to send out agency-related information. US Government RSS feeds, now on some of the MAIC 160 content pages, are from the following US Government agencies: the Small Business Administration; Census Bureau; Consumer Products Safety Commission; Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and of Chicago; and the Department of Commerce (Bureau of Economic Analysis). Here is an example of one of these feeds (from the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis), which appears on the MAIC content page that provides links to United States economic statistics and data: Just as the use of RSS feed technology by Internet users to pull information into their websites is relatively recent, the use of RSS technology by government agencies to deliver (send out) relevant information apparently is also relatively recent. The number of government RSS feeds that currently is available is probably small compared to the number that could be useful and justified. And, the potential number (in my opinion) of government RSS feeds with relevant information for accountants and accounting departments is probably relatively much greater than what is currently available. I suspect, and am hoping, that the number of RSS feeds from government agencies will become higher in the not too distant future. One of the major missions of many government agencies is timely, adequate dissemination of information. And, just as the government website has had a dramatic effect on the increased efficiency and effectiveness of this information dissemination mission, I suspect RSS feeds will also. Therefore, RSS feed use by government agencies will likely increase in numbers and value. Because accountants and accounting departments often use government information for task performance and decision-making, government agency RSS feeds should become increasingly useful for accountants. Besides the RSS feeds from the US federal government agencies identified above as being currently available on some of the MAIC content pages, RSS feeds from other departments such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Labor, and state agencies will likely become available. Relevant feeds from government agencies will be added to the MAIC as they become available and identified. click here to go to the next and final page |