Dot-gov Web sprawl a challenge to untangle

The Office of Management and Budget has retired 200 top-level domains since last June as part of dot-gov reform efforts, writes Joseph Marks on NextGov.com. But that's the easy part.

"The more difficult parts of the dot-gov reform effort will be, first, folding important but underutilized sites into larger domains so they form a comprehensive whole, and second, updating the governments' content management systems, search functions and social media interfaces so citizens are not only more likely to find government sites but also to be engaged by them," Marks writes.

OMB was ordered to both freeze new dot-gov websites and reduce the number of existing websites by 25 percent, as part of President Barack Obama's Campaign to Cut Waste. With approximately 2,000 top-level domains and nearly 24,000 websites, it's no small feat.