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Amazon Peer Review: Coming To A Preprint Near You
Phil Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/04/02


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That sound you heard was academic journals everywhere going "uh, oh". They don't need to worry just yet, it's just an April Fools joke. According to this article, " Starting today, anyone shopping on Amazon will soon be able to review manuscripts... Amazon Peer Review™ works by linking Amazon’s online store to bioRxiv, a rapidly expanding source for preprints in the biomedical sciences. Ratings will be tagged to manuscripts with an Amazon-branded quality badge." Yes, it's just a joke, but how bad would it be, really?

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Why No One Finishes An Online Course—And Why It Doesn’t Matter
Tyler Basu, Influencive, 2018/04/02


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This post reads like marketing but it still makes a pretty good point. "Your customers aren't going to buy your course because they want to learn everything you know about XYZ topic. They’re going to buy your course because they want to achieve a specific result. To them, your course is just a way to learn how to get that result. It’s the result they value, not the information." If they get that result, the course was valuable, even if they didn't finish the course.

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It's Time for an RSS Revival
Brian Barrett, Wired, 2018/04/02


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I of course have never given up on RSS and use it every day as an ad-free user-selected searchable alternative to the social media newsfeed. And I think it's worth noting what Ben Wolf (of The Old Reader) said when Google killed its reader five years ago: "How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won't be getting any valuable information? For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users. It won't be long before your news feed is worthless." RSS is our path back to an open internet; the infrastructure already exists. All you have to do is use it.

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Copyright 2018 Stephen Downes Contact: stephen@downes.ca

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