• Bad day for bloggers

    Today is, rarely, a bad day for bloggers. Today is the day that Google Reader is being switched off by those people at Google.

    What it means is that the primary way that some people read blogs is not going to be available to them. Clever-dick readers will already have switched to another server. (I’m using Feedly). The worry is that non-Clever-dick readers (I’m using technical terms here) will just not bother or not rememeber in time and end up reading less blog posts as a result. Loss of readers is a bad day for bloggers.

    Lots of people are cross with Google for turning off Google Reader. But it has been a service free at the point of delivery (funded by advertising and giving Google and insight into what one is interested in). I think that makes it harder to complain.

    Some people can’t cope with the bother of using a reader service to aggregate or collect all their blog entries. For them, the joy of email is still the best way of ensuring that they don’t miss a blog post.

    I’ve got a simple service that allows people to sign up to receive my blog posts by email and you can sign up here.

    Don’t be shy!

    And for goodness sake, sign up with Feedly or something similar too. Shake that magic Google dust from off your sandals. It is time to move on.

    If you want to be reminded of why it is a good thing to use a reader in the first place, read my description of why you should have signed up to Google reader in the first place.

    You can find it here: How to Read Blogs

    And for good measure, here’s what I said about Google Reader’s demise previously: Google Reader RIP

18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”

  1. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    DCampbell writes:
    Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings

    Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:

    resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
    looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
    Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
    Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).

    An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.

    This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.

    Kennedy

  2. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    Or another thought-

    We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.

  3. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie

  4. kelvin Avatar

    My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.

    See for example:
    http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html

    “Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “

  5. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

    Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.

  6. David Campbell Avatar

    Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?

  7. Kelvin Avatar
    Kelvin

    Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.

  8. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.

    We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.

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