By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How 'Google Science' could transform academic publishing
Liat Clark, Wired, 2014/08/20
According to Wired, "Google is allegedly working on a free, open access platform for the research, collaboration and publishing of peer-reviewed scientific journals." Kent Anderson responds, "I recommend that you read the entire article. As a piece of journalism, though, it is irresponsible. You can see the author straining to make a story out of whispers. There is nothing to report here." What makes the rumour plausible is that it's the sort of thing Google would do, and if it desired, could do. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Chromebox and Chromebase - definite contenders for desktop replacements
David Andrade, Educational Technology Guy, 2014/08/20
I'm not yet ready to make the leap to Google's Chromebox and Chromebase but my recent experience with a Windows 8 debacle (downloaded videos that refused to play because I was not online) pushes me away from Mocrosoft and back into thinking there may be alternatives. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 10 reasons to trust Microsoft in the cloud
Tim Bush, Microsoft UK Schools News Blog, 2014/08/22
OK, I'll be pretty blunt about this: don't trust Microsoft in the cloud. I speak from personal experience: I paid Microsoft for online products (specifically, videos) and thanks to some back-end account problem, I cannot play those videos. My efforts over the last few weeks to fix this have been fruitless. Their online assistance helps for a bit, but then loses interest and stops responding. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results
Eric Enge, SearchEngineLand, 2014/08/29
You may have read about the benefits of adding authorship information to your web pages using Google+ functionality, but Google's attempt to incorporate these into search results has been discontinued. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Early Review of Google Classroom
Phil Hill, e-Literate, Jul 29, 2014

The fade-to-black transition in the slide show was so distracting I couldn't finish (yes, it's that bad). And that's the main problem I can see with Google Classroom - tight integration with Google tools. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Operating System
Alex Chitu, Google Operating System, April 16, 2013
Alex Chitu, who is nornally pretty positive about Google, is experiencing a warped Catch-22 world in the land of DMCA takedowns. To begin, he received a takedown for a Blogger web page about a Greasemonkey script that allowed you to show music lyrics in the YouTube interface (pictured). The takedown (which he had to search for on Chilling Effects, they don't actually send it to him) states, "The URL listed below is one of nearly 20 song lyrics sites who have attempted to post lyrics for the song titled 'Alden Howell' by the artist Inspection 12." Fair enough, but the page doesn't post Alden Howell lyrics and the blog doesn't mention 'Alden Howell' at all, ever. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Apple's Virtual University Patent Finally Comes to Light
Jack Purcher, Patently Apple, April 19, 2013
Ever since iTunes University we've all seen this coming, but it is interesting to finally see the lid removed from Apple's "Virtual U" patent application (it's interesting to me that not even the name is original, as longtime ed tech devotees will recognize the name from a Canadian project in the 1990s (and several other projects worldwide more recently)). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microsoft Bids $45 Billion for Yahoo
You've seen this everywhere by the time you've seen this. My only comment is that I hope such a bid fails, for both Yahoo! and Microsoft are too large as it is. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Making Money with Adsense - Without Annoying Your Users: Wordpress.Com
One of the outcomes of the recent debate about The Edublogs Magazine was a link to this article on how advertisements are served by WordPress.com - and more interestingly, how they are not served to regular readers, people who link into the site, or who use Firefox. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Get Started with Google Wave
My Google Wave invitation finally did arrive - and I dispensed with my additional invites in about five minutes. This site will be useful, providing instructions on how to get started with Wave. More...