By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. 43 Things Amazon Conspiracy
There was a social networking meme that went around a few weeks ago called '43 Things' - the idea is that you would form online groups dedicated to doing one of the 43 things would would like to do. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google, Wikipedia and More
I was talking with Chouki the other day, and what I said was, "Wouldn't it be neat if we could take every page in Wikipedia, do an associative analysis of the contents of each of the million plus articles, and use clustering algorithms to create a genuine dynamic folksonomy, rather than the highly artificial (and hence, unstable) structures generated by tagging." His response was, well, you could do that, but you wouldn't need to analyze a million articles; a subset would do it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Getting Microsoft to Support Blogware ...and LiveJournal ...and Flickr ...and...
Citing this article, Roland Tanglao says, "just like VoIP will be part of every app so will Post To Blog." In other words, content authoring tools - such as MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and opthers, which now simply save to file or print, will (and should) be able to post content to any online service, such as Blogger or Flickr. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Publishers Irritated by Google's Digital Library
In a press release formatted to look like a news article, Nature Publishing Group is expressing displeasure with Google over its plans to index and excerpt academic articles. "Google has not yet struck any legal agreements with publishers, either individually or collectively... Few publishers would want to opt out of the library scheme, Morris says — but they need to be asked to provide the appropriate permission." This is probably not true; copyright law is not intended to prohibit such use. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. RIP: Google Reader Meets Its Inevitable End
Mat Honan, Wired, March 14, 2013
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. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Social novelty filtering (or Google Reader, R.I.P.)
L.M. Orchard, blog.lmorchard.com, March 14, 2013
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. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Reader is dead
Ben Werdmuller, March 14, 2013
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. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Where Did Google Reader’s Users Go? Check Your Phone
Sarah Kessler, Fast Company, March 15, 2013
So why is Google killing Reader? Here's some relevant data: "In 2011, Google Reader accounted for 16% of Mediafed RSS feed readership on March 14. On the same date last year, it accounted for 13%. More...