venta

Never mind all this popery. The big news of the day is that Google is retiring Google Reader in July.

I use Google Reader, and am thus disappointed. On the plus side, with that gone, I'll have no reason to be signed into my Google account most of the time. I do use Google Docs, but that tends to be an infrequent sign-in-use-sign-out business. And anything which takes me one step away from Google's Giant Data Extraction Vortex is probably a good thing.

I'm lightly surprised, though. Apparently usage of Google Reader is declining. I'm not sure if this is indicative of better software being out there, or of a general decline in RSS use. Maybe all the cool kids use Facetweet as aggregators these days?

So, ladies and gentlemen of LJ, how should I read my RSS feeds in the future?

[Poll #1901989]


(Ars Technica is running a poll on "where should we go instead?", and they probably have a slightly bigger readership than I do. They're also better informed about the large number of RSS readers which rely on Google Reader to work.)

Hideously early tomorrow morning, I'm off to La Lachera di Rocca Grimalda. If you read that site, you'll know about as much about it as I do. It's a strange-sounding Italian folk festival, in a mountainous region, and this year their foreign guests include my occasional rapper team, Boojum.

I am woefully underprepared for this. Mostly because the trip isn't for ages yet, not til February... oh. Yesterday featured a lot of scrabbling around, packing, trying to find out exactly where Genoa was anyway, and so on.

( And we have numerical confusion to deal with )

Ah well. What can possible go wrong ?

Panic!
Wikipedia's servers appear to be down. Accordingly, I don't know anything at all. This is scary.