News Readers for Chromebooks
With Google Reader going, and Google Currents being Android and iOS, what would Google recommend for reading general news on Chromebooks? Flipboard and Apple's Newsstand are also platform restricted and not available on Chromebooks. 
 
It seems to me that Chromebooks need a general purpose news reader just as much as laptops / PCs and mobile phones / tablets. Chromebooks are inherently portable and reading news is an obvious use case when on the move and sitting somewhere like a cafe or on a train.

So apparently we need a cloud based, browser based, general purpose news reader for the Chromebook platform just as much as on the other platforms. And of course, it should be accessible on phones / tablets / Chromebooks / laptops and sync read/unread across all the platforms you access it from.

So if Google don't want to provide it, we'll find it elsewhere.
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https://soundcloud.com/paveun/xxyyxx-fields-hesk-paveun

Actually pretty much all of XXYYXX's stuff is awesome but this is an epic remix.

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They've poisoned the well in the worst way; they made it clear that Google is worse than mercenary - it's banal.

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Google Glass and a related up tick in interest in Virtual Reality is making me nostalgic for 1990 (and it's view of the future).

I'm almost ready to coin a new word Futurastalgia. Nostalgia for an old and alternate future that didn't quite arrive.

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What if Facebook built a Google Reader competitor right into Facebook?
I'm very, very uncertain of how good an idea this is for all of us in the long term. But it's food for thought, no?

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Geotagging posts in G+ desktop browser view
Allow posts to be geotagged in the desktop browser view using the modern browser's geolocation functions. In the same way as in the old mobile web version. And provide the same "Nearby" view of posts. This also needs the ability to geotag to a street address as well as to a business or local place. And/or the ability to define new places.

Maybe then we can get rid of Latitude and roll it's functionality into G+ 

We also need some more control over the Places section of profiles. It's annoyingly wrong too much of the time.
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Dammit. Chrome's G+ button has just lost my text. Again.

Anyway, the attached article is short but important.

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There's a very simple cocktail known as the Whisky Mac, allegedly invented in India during the Raj, but more likely in Glasgow pubs. Basically equal parts Whisky and Green Ginger Wine (either Stones or Crabbie's). And drunk room temperature, or with an ice cube or two or even hot.

So here's the question. Is there a name for the same drink but made with other whiskies such as Irish, Canadian, Bourbon, etc? Any other cocktail uses of Ginger Wine? Given the Dark and Stormy, you'd think that something could be made with a med or dark Jamaican Rum as well. 

After  a party at Christmas, somebody left behind a mostly full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and another bottle of J&B. The wife needed green ginger wine for some cooking recipe and then starting having a small sherry glass or two. The end result is that the Whisky Mac been a fairly common fri/sat night drink in the Bond household. Especially as the weather hasn't been great and the Whisky+Ginger is really warming in front of a wood fire.
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Superb article about the history of RSS and Google Reader. Unfortunately it's TL;DR!

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The statue on one of the roundabouts outside Jerez on the way to the Jerez circuit. I have to say, I would like to live in a town that puts up statues of motorcycles!

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'Fauxstalgia'. Nostalgia for a time you never knew.
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So here's Laverty doing a Jerez 1m41.47 
http://superbike-news.co.uk/index.php/Motorcycle-News/aprilia-racing-tests-at-jerez-de-la-frontera
Which would have put him on the grid in front of all the CRTs last year and level with Bautista.

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Oh, the irony.
http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/rip-google-reader.html

A hyper competitive space with dozens of choices? Reader made its first public appearance a couple of months before this, in October 2005. I remember this period well - it was a time of immense excite...

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Google announces closure of Google Reader. WTF!
http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html
http://googlereader.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html

This is why we can't have nice things. Google Reader was just better than most of the alternatives back in the day so they all slowly disappeared as everyone switched. Which then meant there was no money in building a better alternative because Google owned the space. Now it's not paying it's way in Google so they shut it and have effectively killed a whole segment of the software market. And as Dave Winer might say, it's worse than it appears because it kills the idea of rich feeds whether it's RSS/Atom or whatever, which is why G+, Twitter, Facebook and a host of other newer services don't provide them.

Meanwhile we're all supposed to be switching to mobile devices with "Apps" so we get fed "News Services" like Currents, Flipboard and so on that only run on these mobile devices and have more focus on surface froth in the UI than on actually consuming large quantities of news. And they heavily push MSM sources who will pay for the privilege of being highly visible.

The real losers here are the small blogs on wordpress.org, blogger.com and others who will lose visibility, readers and comment engagement because there's no longer any easy way to follow them.

 I'm all right jack because I never used Reader much, preferring my own home written news reader (php+MySql hosted on my rented server) but I'm already suffering from the lack of RSS on major services.

Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer are you watching all this? Here's hoping you pick up the ball that Google just tossed over their shoulder. You've got the resources, servers and infrastructure to directly replace them.

And the real puzzle? There's a whole bunch of ex semantic web, Atom, XML people inside Google. Did they all get sidelined?

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47North (2013), Paperback, 716 pages
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Nice piece about the Amen Break
http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/the_amen_break_the_most_famous_6-second_drum_loop_how_it_spawned_a_sampling_revolution.html

See Also http://www.economist.com/node/21541707 which has this wonderful quote:-

"A lot of young people are nostalgic for things they weren't there for,"

And this. Best tracks containing the Amen Break http://www.economist.com/node/21540676

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Seems there's one or two people around with Vanity URLs for their Google Plus profiles. So how did that happen, and how do I get one?

eg https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer
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I'm a sucker for a good aphorism:-

"Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it."

"We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think."

"Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors."

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3984

Predators run to eat. Prey run to live.

Wealth corrupts. And absolute wealth corrupts absolutely.

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Here's a good one for Google Play specialists. How do I copy a Winamp playlist to Google Play? Can anyone point me at a simple recipe? A quick search turned up some youtube vids and some descriptions that sounded horrible and awkward involving going via Windows Media player.

Search both in Google and Google plus was effectively useless as it just wanted to promote Winamp for Android or it was full of spam for keycodes to Winamp Pro.
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