Since 2ooo, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations( FAO) has undertaken a number
of initiatives to facilitate the creation of standards for agricultural information exchange, especiallyin the area
of document like information objects. In the last couple of years,a strong need has emerged for a standard way to interchange other types of information (on organizations,
projects,expertse, events,news)between systems residing on different platforms in the agricultural community,
on capable of cutting across networks of partners while at the same time overcoming barriers to cooperation and interoperability. The need to (i) facilitate
collaboration and (ii) harmonize the decentralized eforts in the development of methodologies for successful agricultural information management was reiterated
by the Expert consultation of October 2oo5, which stressed the need for an "intervention point on interlinking different information types: During the consultation,a Content Management Taskforce(CMTF) was
established to focus on this soecific issue.One of the areas of work on which the CMTF was asked to concentrate was the "exchange of news feeds and how the
community supporting agricultural information services can benefit from collaboration through the application
of freely available Web 2.o tools.In the long run, more sophisticate systems may be developed that allow for example, filtering to produce custom-made feeds,
such as those for an early warning syste on topics such as avian influenza, desert locusts and climate change.