Hello ladies and gents,

USA.gov, our favorite government portal, is now offering you the chance to make it even better! That's right, Uncle Sam wants YOU to go to http://dialog.usa.gov/ and talk about how USA.gov could be better.

It is only open until January 8th, so waste no time!

This is your chance, ladies and gentlemen. We can rebuild it! We have the technology. We can make it better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Okay, maybe that's the Six Million Dollar Man...but it applies here, too.

Sonnet

Because government information needs to be free...and organic.

NextGov reports that the General Services Administration will be outsourcing the hardware and "the programs that run the federal government's official Web portal (USA.gov) from government servers to those operated by a private company."

• GSA puts its USA.gov Web site in the cloud, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov, 02/25/09.

USA.gov uses Microsoft "Live search" for indexing and searching and the article does not mention any changes in that. Apparently, the shift is mostly about hardware.

The Sunlight Foundation has interesting thoughts (and images!) of what a better USA.gov might look like and how it might function:

• Rethinking usa.gov, Sunlight Labs Blog, January 23 2009.

In thinking about a new structure and new design for usa.gov we had a few goals that we wanted to accomplish. They basically were: letting the user customize and personalize the content that was displayed on the site, having better structure and navigation, and just having a cleaner, more powerful overall look to the site.

...Taking that idea a step further would be pulling content from other government websites. For example, if you have student loans and what to see your balance, or if you just need to know where you’re currently registered to vote, wouldn’t it be nice to see all of that content in one place?

Check it out and add your comments!

A tip of the FGI hat to GovGab blogger Jacob. He reminded me that this coming week the GovGab blog celebrates its first birthday.

The GovGab blog is brought to you by the same agency that brings us usa.gov, which I find as staggeringly useful as others find the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To celebrate this first birthday, each of the GovGab bloggers will blog about what the U.S. was like when they turned 1 year old. This sounds like fun. Since I'm subscribed to their RSS feed, I'll get to see every entry. How about you?

The folks that brought us usa.gov have established a blog of their own over at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/. The blog is called Gov Gab and is maintained by "a team of five bloggers with different backgrounds and interests, all experts on government information via their jobs at USA.gov, Pueblo.gsa.gov, or 1 (800) FED-INFO."

The blog is a week old and so far have had conversational, user-friendly postings on photo resources, gov't travel sites, apartment hunting and organic foods. If you're familar with Lori Smith's blog on MySpace, you have a sense of the tone of this blog. The sites featured are taken from federal, state and local web resources. If this week is an indicator of the quality, this will be a great resource. I hope it gets maximum promotion from librarians and other interested parts.

The blog accepts comments according to this reasonable sounding policy:

We welcome your comments and expect that our conversation will follow the general rules of respectful civil discourse. This is a moderated blog, and we will only post comments from bloggers over 12 years of age that relate to topics on Gov Gab: Your U.S. Government Blog. We will review comments for posting within one business day. You are fully responsible for everything that you submit in your comments, and all posted comments are in the public domain. We do not discriminate against any views, but we reserve the right not to post comments.

According to a reply to a comment I saw, the blogging team is very open to suggestions for future topics:

We would love to get ideas for future blog topics! You can email any of us by clicking our name above our posts and sending us a message.

Spread the word! The more the merrier around here.

Consider the word spread. Thanks much to Ray Matthews of the Utah State Library for pointing out this new blog to me. Now go and do the same for others!

Two recent changes for the US government's government search engine, USAsearch.gov:

• In the Advanced Search option, the option to limit a search to federal websites has been removed. USAsearch.gov searches both federal and state websites. An option previously available under the Advanced Search option of "Search In" allowed a researcher to specify that they were only interested in results from federal websites. The option never worked cleanly. I had dubbed it a "leaky limit" because some state website results always seeped in. Now there is no federal-only option. Fortunately, once you have your USAsearch.gov results, the agency-sort option makes it easy to view just those results coming from federal agencies.
• On the plus side of the equation, USAsearch.gov now indexes the USDA Forest Service websites that use the .fed.us domain. Any search engine can limit results to those that have a .gov or .mil domain suffix. But some federal websites are exceptions to that rule, as was the case with www.fs.fed.us. Now your searches will find that Forest Service information. I had often run a search in training classes for information about "remote sensing." It was a good way to show how many agencies were involved with this technology, and to show off the agency sort option. Now I have one more agency showing up in my results!

Update 1/18/2007 - Name change confirmed by GSA, new usa.gov site. See their reasons for the change.

Tamara Thompson of PI Buzz posted Jan 5 2007 about a name change to FirstGov.gov.

In This Week in Public Records Tamara tells us that

The government Web portal for Georgia is announcing a name change for the federal government site Firstgov.gov, due January 11. The official Web portal of the U.S. government is changing its name — to USA.gov. FirstGov.gov will become USA.gov and FirstGov en español.gov will become GobiernoUSA.gov.

The State of Georgia's e-government web site, georgia.gov confirms this story.

Why the name change? Even though FirstGov.gov gets more than 80 million visitors a year, its name recognition is very low. The name doesn’t intuitively tell you that this is the official U.S. Government site. It is cumbersome to say and difficult to remember. On the other hand, USA.gov clearly describes the site. USA is the term that most people around the world recognize for the United States – in fact, we already get about 600,000 visits a year from users who guess and type USA.gov into search engines. USA.gov is intuitive, simple and easy to remember.

Several years ago the ICGI Web Content Standards Working Group recommended renaming the web site, and it looks like this is about to become official.

While no announcements are posted on the FirstGov.gov web site, search results for USA.gov point directly to the FirstGov.gov web site, and it appears as if this rumor may be the real thing.