Angry Robot

Super Feedpocalypse

As I mentioned in the links, Google Reader is being “retired”.

(Aside: I love retired and “sunsetted”, but at some point could we also try “horse doctored”, “old dogged”, and “behind barned”?)

Perhaps there aren’t that many of us any more who rely on feeds. I understand the twitter and that other, blue-thumbed, oversharing service are often used to “curate” and “discover” links to web sites. But I’m guessing there are a few million of us diehards still, all thinking over our options right now.

Option one for me is to try using Fever again. Pluses: it syncs with Reeder, and I already bought it. Minuses: it’s probably not for you unless you’re in the habit of installing software on servers.

Option two appears to be Feedly, which has built a clone of the Google Reader API, which theoretically means that all the apps that used GReader as a back end could easily switch to Feedly. However: the developers of said apps would have to do that first. Also, Feedly looks like another free service with no apparent business model, which I’m guessing means ads or data mining at some point. That or a sudden shutdown.

There are some more options and thoughts here. I agree that it’s a good thing for the category; Google basically did a Microsoft Internet Explorer with the feed reading market, wrecking anyone’s chance of making money by being huge and free. Let’s hope that readers find new options and are willing to pay some money to create some sustainable businesses.

Anyway, given this news, I suggest we bloggists start to get worried about Feedburner, another critical piece of infrastructure that is free, niche, owned by Google, and hasn’t seen an update in ages.

Revelation and the Gnospels

This Seminar about Long-Term Thinking is worth listening to. It’s from Elaine Pagels, who has written books about the Book of Revelation and the Gnostic gospels.

“The Book of Revelation is war literature,” Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.

Jesus had prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, so its occurrence was not just a horror to early Christians, although it most certainly was that. It also presented the possibility that if he had been right about that, perhaps his other prophecies would also come true. Maybe he was coming back, and if so… well, cue hallucinatory revenge fantasy.

Pagels also talks a bit about the apocryphal gospels, a subject I love. In super short form, the New Testament originally had many more books in it, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The early Church, starting with Athanasius the Bishop of Alexandria in 367 began to canonize the New Testament, excluding such works. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the excluded books often painted a different picture of Jesus than what has become common today. The Gospel of Mary quotes Jesus as saying, “Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.” In the Gospel of Thomas, he says “That (resurrection) which you are awaiting has (already) come, but you do not recognize it.” He presents spiritual awakening as an interior and personal journey, one not requiring a bureaucracy of church representatives.

Anyway, it’s a good listen, and a glance into a fascinating world.

Future Photography

With regards to Google Glass, Adam Mathes writes:

The idea of a camera that is always ready to take a photo of exactly what you are looking at seems so powerful to me, with the capacity to change the way we think about photography and videography.

And it’s not hard to take that a step further and imagine an always on camera that has a buffer of the last few minutes — with a single action you mark that frame of time to review later and it’s saved.

That’s the key, there. Saying “OK Glass, take a picture” is too clunky. But if I tapped on my watch whenever I wanted to save something that happened in the last five minutes, I could see that working. Google Glass right now is a bizarre thing, a step towards making computers less visible that actually makes them more so.

Interesting to think of photography as one of those jobs that humans just won’t do in the future. We’ll only “curate” machine photography, and even that I expect will be increasingly automated. “Save any footage of my baby laughing, and in a month, edit it together and post it to whatever hideous Mega-Facebook all the cyborgs are using.”