There’s a great post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about Government 2.0. The point they make is that rather than having the government post web sites that are notoriously ineffective, the government should open up their data with an API for use by other sites. If the government can’t make helpful services, let others build the service around government data.
This is generally what happened with geospatial data some time ago. There are still portals for data access, but increasingly I hope we see data servers.
