The Future of RSS

  JamesLedbetter has a great article in the Big Money about the future of RSS feeds. Basically he's arguing RSS is a hard thing to make money of of, in that publishers like only to publish headlines to drive traffic to their sites, but bloggers like the full articles to appear in their RSS readers, so they can blog about it, which in turn drives traffic to the  original site.  The Big Money's experience suggests that the latter is the case.  He also points out that Really Simple Syndication is not really that simple and enjoys only about a 10% uptake.  I like my netvibes page and the availability of seeing the headlines from about 50 different sites all at once.  RSS was also invaluable in setting up the NESA Virtual Science Fair in that each course had a help button. The RSS reader allowed me to monitor all 500 teams for signs of trouble.

Summer Learning PD

In the part of the blogosphere that I read, there is currently circulating a Summer Professional Development/Learning Meme 2009 originally started by Cliff Mims.  in the spirit of this challenge, I'd like to declare the following goals for this summer:

1. Learn GarageBand
2. Read: Dan Pink's a Whole New Mind, Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen, and J.F. Rischard's High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them.
3. Start blogging regularly, at least twice a week.
   

Rules

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules

NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.

1. Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
3. Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
4. Title your post Summer Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
6. Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
7. Achieve your goals and "develop professionally."
8. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

Technorati Tags: pdmeme09