In a recent Government Technology News article Wayne Hanson asks "Can Social Software Improve eGovernment?" One interesting thing that struck me in the opening paragraph is that he throws RSS into the pool of accepted technology. That's saying something for RSS that I'm not sure is acknowledged much.

The article talks about blogs, referencing an article from last February that spoke about our blogging experiment in Utah when I was CIO. It also mentions wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, and collaborative editing tools like Subetha and Moon Edit.

Unfortunately, the article reaches no conclusions and even makes a few blatant errors (calling mash-ups "social software," for example--a classification I'm not buying). I'd be very interested in seeing where social software has been used to good effect inside Government. I'm pretty sure there are wins and having some publicity around them would do everyone some good.