More than 100 Dot-Govs Cut or Consolidated
By
Joseph Marks
The government campaign against outdated and unnecessary websites appears to be gaining steam.
An updated list of top-level dot-gov domains posted to the government dataset repository Data.gov Friday lists only 1,634 domains, down from nearly 1,759 domains when the list was first posted.
The government's dot-gov reform effort is aimed at rationalizing the federal web presence, which mushroomed during the 1990s and is now bogged down by outdated and clunky sites and a cacophony of different site architectures and content management systems.
The campaign's endpoint isn't clear yet. The British government, which embarked on a similar effort five years ago, aims to have just two government web domains with all other sites slotted in as sub-domains.
U.S. federal Agencies have acknowledged shuttering some sites as part of the reform effort, but so far there's been no central list of closed or consolidated sites.
One oft-cited example of an excessive federal website, Deserttortoise.gov has evidently been consolidated into Mojavedata.gov, a repository for publications and mapping services related to the desert's ecosystem. Another popular example among dot-gov waste cutters, CouldIhavelupus.gov is still functioning as a standalone site.
About 300 of the remaining sites are redirects, common misspellings or abbreviations of a site name that bump the user over to the original site, according to an informal analysis by Benjamin Balter, a Washington-based graduate student and New Media Fellow at the Federal Communications Commission. Peacecore.gov and Peacecorp.gov, for example, both redirect to Peacecorps.gov.
Balter's analysis also sorted dot-govs by other metrics, including the sophistication of their content management systems and whether they could run on the Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6 platform, which the government plans to move to by the end of 2012.