This is really cool – new Federal spending, according to the recent stimulus bill, will need to be exposed through an RSS feed. This means, in theory, that as new spending is approved, we can all receive notification in our blogs… or better yet, since these updates will contain structured data (see below) we can incorporate this data directly into an analysis engine. Most excellent!

RTFA: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rssstimulus

As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill’s implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

The document is very clear that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable data