A few people have raised the objection that what Mash the State is currently doing with council RSS feeds is really just helping councils to deliver their PR (or as those critics often like put it, “propaganda”).

In one sense, they’re right. A council’s press releases or “news” are just their own side of the story. You’d have to be pretty naive to think otherwise.

But getting any kind of information out into the open where it can be scrutinised, compared, cross-referenced and easily discussed is always an advantage. Here’s how to build a discussion blog around your local council’s news. Of course, if they don’t have an RSS feed this isn’t possible, which is why Mash the State exists in the first place.

Time required: Around 15 minutes.

Skills required: Just basic web use stuff. No programming or HTML. Anyone online should be able to do this.

Here’s one I made earlier: Boris Backchat. Got something to say to the London mayor? Just leave a comment.

Apologies to those outside London — I had to choose something!

Here’s how I did it:

1. I registered a new blog on WordPress.com. This is free and only took a moment.

2. I found the URL (web address) of Boris’s RSS feed. Visit your local council or other government website and hover your mouse over the RSS feed link or icon. Right-click and choose “Copy shortcut” (Internet Explorer) or “Copy link location” (Firefox) or whatever your browser gives you in the right-click menu.

In this particular case it was easier to grab the feed URL from the Greater London Authority Mash the State page.

3. I signed up at xFruits which has a whole set of free tools to do things with RSS feeds. This is free.

4. I used the “RSS to my blog” tool on xFruits which automatically copies the contents of an RSS feed into a blog, making a new blog post for each item in the feed.

First I typed a title for the new blog site and a few tags.

Then I pasted in the feed URL that I’d copied in step 2.

To configure this I also needed the URL of my new blog’s “API endpoint”. This is the address which other programs can use to push data into your blog.

The API endpoint URL for this blog is:

http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

The format is the same for all blogs on WordPress.com:

http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

I also had to type in my WordPress username and password, and as I’ve got several blogs on WordPress, had to choose the right one to send the RSS feed to from the drop-down menu.

5. And that’s pretty much it. I went into the WordPress settings and set the time zone correctly and edited the site description. Now we’re ready to go.

To close the loop, if you want to keep up with the latest posts on Boris Backchat you can subscribe to both the new posts (articles) and comments in your RSS reader.

xFruits will work with most popular blog systems including Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type and WordPress hosted on your own server.

Welcome to open government.

Thanks to Jon Bounds on Twitter for tipping me off about xFruits. It’s a great set of tools. Jon has just set up a similar site for Birmingham City Council.

… and as I always like to say about these things, it’s taken longer to write about it than to do it!