I suppose I'm just not enough of a herd-dweller to understand either why some people insist that RSS is dead or are surprised that it remains alive and well. Colin Walker, in one of his characteristically thoughtful pieces, has this to say:

When Google Reader closed people had to actively seek an alternative in order to continue consuming their RSS feeds. This pushed many towards simply using their social streams - they couldn’t be bothered to find an equivalent service and re-add all their feeds.

No such need would exist with something like webmentions. People may not be able to immediately interact with as many properties but things wouldn’t stop working for those not hosted on the major player’s platform.

Well, OK. But that's not how it went for me. I found Newsblur pretty quickly and have stuck with it, although I hear good things about lots of other readers. I never really took to the idea of any of the social silos being a substitute for a reader, and as they become more algorithmic they became less and less interesting on that score.

I do wish Newsblur would do more on the sharing front. For a while it allowed cross-posting to ADN and I can't imagine it would be that hard to allow more generalised cross-posting, but the developer just doesn't seem that interested.

The huge draw of RSS for me is that it costs nothing if a site lays dormant for months or even years. Just last week, a site I subscribe to sprang back into life after more than three years. I can't believe that would ever have made it into my timeline at a silo.

This is just so astonishingly cool and Jetson-like.

Sunk costs rears its ugly head again:

Little Boy cost, well, a bomb. It seemed a shame after all that effort not to drop on somebody.

As proven by his stunts, Richard Branson knew how to drive a tank. Unfortunately for Virgin Cola, Coke knew how to control an army.

The things you find when going through old stuff.

Can't say I am too surprised. But I wish I were.

Such a sensible analysis. I ought to think a bit more myself along these lines. 

Effectively, Google’s autocomplete function is working as my “desktop dashboard,” a flow of messages from the deep space of the Google data sphere.

Just by accident found this piece on transcribing podcasts with IBM's Watson. I wonder how it compares with SwiftScribe? Need to give it a try, because as I attempt more complex stories it certainly helps to have a bit of text in addition to notes and markers on the audio.