Picking the right RSS feeds for your screens

Digital signage is creating a lot of demand for current and meaningful information.  We're talking data that is useful, that is easy to access and readily available.  There are many sources for this type of data. but you  will need to do some research.  A great place to start is you local government's web sites.

Lets take hospitals, doctors offices and other health service providers.

Government offices publish feeds that can be of interest for visiting patients.  If you're in Canada, you can check out the Canadian Food Inspection Agency web site where you can link to RSS feeds listing food recalls and allergy alerts.  You can access the complete list of available feeds on this site from here.

For US information, check out the USA.gov RSS page.

This type of information can be extremely useful for the public and it be displayed in a ticker or as a full screen element.

Screens located in travel agencies, used by law enforcement or installed government offices can use feeds from the Canadian Border Services Agency or their US counterpart, the US Customs and Border Protection.

You can even retrieve information about border wait times which can be of interest to businesses near the US/Canada border.

Government agencies constantly refresh their data and make their feeds available to everyone.

Here are some other practical examples.

The Ontario Ministry of Transport publishes RSS feeds with information of interest to all motor vehicle operators.  You can find similar data published on the web sites of most province and state transportation offices.  These feeds would appeal to automobile and motorcycle repair shops, car dealerships and other related businesses.

RSS feeds published by government agencies can be more useful that your common TV news feeds for the following reasons:

• You can select news that is relevant to your specific venue or audience.  
• Since you are showing public data there are no usage fees or copyrights to deal with (just to be on the safe side, always check with the feed provider before redistributing their feeds).
• By publishing information of public interest, you contribute to your community's health and safety which benefits everyone.