U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological Survey

RSS and the USGS

Brief description of how the USGS uses RSS

Where RSS is Used

There are several areas of the public website for which RSS feeds are currently being offered:

Recent Earthquakes Latest USGS News Releases Latest Landslide Hazard Alerts

(CAP – Common Alerting Protocol) Latest Volcano Hazard Alerts

(CAP) National Cooperative Geologic Mapping

Program News Geography – What’s New

With the exception of the Earthquake feeds, we have recently begun our implementation of RSS on the USGS website.

USGS Newsroom and RSS

The USGS Newsroom was the Office of Communications’ first offering of information via RSS. The Newsroom website was first revamped in April 2004. Traditionally news releases were posted as hard-coded HTML. Moving all of our releases to a database driven application was not only a timesaver, but opened the door for other dynamic data driven possibilities. Originally, RSS was not part of redesign plan. Shortly before launch in April 2004, we decided to offer RSS feeds for the Newsroom.

The Newsroom is built using ASP with a SQL Server backend. We implemented an ASP script which taps into the existing database, grabs the data and repurposes it into an RSS format. That RSS is available from our RSS feeds page, and on both the USGS homepage and Newsroom main page and will appear in your address bar if you’re using Firefox.

Intranet USGS of RSS

Use of RSS on the USGS Intranet website is very limited at this time. The Communications website has a small RSS feed for a section called “Spotlight on Style” which highlights editorial and other writing techniques.

Although current Intranet use is limited, we do have plans to expand our offerings.

Future Use of RSS

The Office of Communications plans to offer additional RSS feeds for other areas of the USGS website and it’s properties. Some feeds that are currently being discussed are:

USGS Calendar Frequently Asked Questions USGS Publications Science Features Fact of the Day

Ideas about offering a user-customized listing of selected RSS feeds from various resources might be offered through the Intranet homepage. As more and more RSS feeds are implemented though, education is going to be key to wider spread adoption by the non-technical user. If we can’t show to the non-technical users the benefit of how RSS not only increases awareness, but also daily productivity, then it will turn into a “nice-to-have” and not a “must-have.”

U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological Survey

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/catalogs/

USGS Earthquake RSS Feeds

U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological Survey

Example Applications

Of course, one can “subscribe” to our Earthquake RSS Feeds using any news reader.

More interestingly, several folks have developed applications that obtain real-time earthquake info via our RSS feeds:

worldKit Sherlock QuakeSaver Earth Alerts

worldKit is an easy to use and flexible mapping application for the Web (light weight GIS). It's a Flash-based (SWF) application, configured by XML, and data fed by RSS.

Example earthquake map created by Mikel Maron, the worldKit software developer

http://brainoff.com/worldkit/quakes/

worldKit

Sherlock is an application included with Mac OS X that uses web services to sift through information on the Internet. It is organized by specific channels, allowing one to find pertinent information such as movie listings, flight status, etc.

Sherlock Earthquake Channel, with a split panel interface to view detailed earthquake info from usgs.gov below the list of quakes

Sherlock

QuakeSaver is a Windows-based screensaver that displays recent earthquakes on a satellite image of the Earth.

You can choose to display past day earthquakes, or past week earthquakes on the full world map, or select a specific region.

QuakeSaver

http://www.mgshareware.com/qsmain.shtml

Earth Alerts is a Windows-based application that provides alert notifications and other information on acts of nature, including earthquakes.

Details of an earthquake in California

Earth Alerts

http://earthalerts.manyjourneys.com/