News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 10 (entry 2)

(3) Tue Aug 10 2004 22:21 PST Fiddlesticks!: I have the darnedest luck with the websites I scrape for the Automat. They either change their website formats while I'm working on them or they stop updating before I can make sure the automatic import works. Case in point: the Catalog of Government Publications ("Pueblo, Colorado stuff", says Kevin), which has been averaging 25-30 new online documents a day but which only had one today. Hope it picks back up soon; I've actually found several very interesting documents in this stream (examples later, when I don't have to go to sleep).

What are they doing, anyway? About two-thirds of the documents they put in the database are not online, and lack even a reliable bibliography link, so I haven't been able to put them in the RSS feed yet. Are there 75 and only 75 new documents published by the government every day? I have no idea whether or not that number even sounds right.

Supposedly the GPO is required to keep a master index of everything the government publishes, but is that really all of it? They're still releasing documents from 2000 and 1994. That implies that there's a big delay in getting some information from the government agency to the GPO. It's a mystery. I am driven by the cool idea of having an RSS feed listing every document the government publishes, but even if this feed had all the not-online ones I can't shake the feeling it's only scratching the surface. Does anyone know?

Comments:

Posted by Frances at Wed Aug 11 2004 11:56

Of course it's only scratching the surface! Not only that, the government has TOP SECRETstuff they are publishing so that it can get leaked. The government and its publications permeate every aspect of life, every corner of the country, like a sporulating mold organism.

The tentacles reach far, yes indeed!

Posted by jack masters at Wed Aug 11 2004 19:35

was it Pulp Fiction that prompted you to bring up scandinavian humor in the mp3 about john travolta?

Posted by Leonard at Wed Aug 11 2004 20:04

No, it happened to be the next kind of joke in the joke book.