Google Reader is dead
Ben Werdmuller, March 14, 2013

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Just to make my life more complete still, ben werdmuller(who actually read Google's anouncement it's killing RSS) also notes: "In the same announcement, Google are talking about killing the standardized CalDAV API in favor of a Google Calendar specific set of calls." Ack ack ack ack ack. He continues: "You mean to say we’re going to have to go back and build that web again? That sounds like a good thing to do. (If you’re missing Google Reader as much as I am, The Old Reader is a worthy alternative.)" Image: Alan Levine.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Google, RSS]

Someone took my feedbag
Brian Lamb, Abject, March 14, 2013

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Brian Lamb on Google's announcement. On the one hand, he takes an attitude of acceptance. "I have a hard time working up much outrage. I see something almost pathetic in begging Google to take pity on us and keep the service open." And "I place this as the latest episode in an increasingly sad story, a sequel to when Twitter discontinued RSS support." But maybe it will result in something good. "To hell with them. There are options moving forward. And yeah, it’s a wake-up call." Then he begins to bash Robert Scoble. "with his peculiar gift for fatalistic corporatist hype-mongering." Can't say I disagree with any of it.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Twitter, Google, RSS]

California Unveils Bill to Provide Openly Licensed, Online College Courses for Credit
Cable reen, Creative Commons, March 14, 2013

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A logical next step for MOOCs. California introduces a bill that "will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties" (note 'CA' here stands for 'California', not 'Canada'). The caveat here is that these must be courses "in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college." So we've set up a situation here where private providers will now lobby government to cut back university funding, in order to limit the number of spaces in introductory courses, to drive students to themselves.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Vocational Education, Canada]

Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)
L.M. Orchard, blog.lmorchard.com, March 14, 2013

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L.M. Orchard writes, "Marco and Dave have it right: This will probably be a good thing for RSS. The problem has been that Google Reader was just good enough to lull me out of scratching my own itch." Quite true - even though I have my own aggregator, I still use Googel reader, because it has been good enough for now. But - now what? Maybe something like "distributed social novelty filtering." It woukd be really nice to see someting set up along those lines; "the important thing here is that it’s distributed and a thing that’s conventionally done out there on the web. This shouldn’t be constrained to a single vendor’s silo ever again." Hear hear.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Google, RSS]

RIP: Google Reader Meets Its Inevitable End
Mat Honan, Wired, March 14, 2013

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Google has always been a reluctant player in the RSS arena, maybe because people who use RSS have much less need for Google's core search services. One of my major complaints about Google+ was that it did not support RSS either as input or output. So now we read that Google is retiring its RSS Reader application, as of July, and it's hard to be surprised. Support for RSS on Blogger ahs weakened over the years, and Feedburner looks to be on the way out as well. Personally I will be able to use gRSShopper, but for people without their own aggregator the alternatives are not especially attractive. I can accept that RSS is a dying technology - nothing lasts forever - but the replacement, living inside the walled gardens of Facebook,  Twitter and Google+, is just awful. For those of us who want to read from the whole web, it's back to the days of scraping, it seems.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Twitter, Google, Blogger, RSS]