If John Lennon’s song had another verse that said, “Imagine there’s no Google….” I’d know something about that because my Google Reader has been “loading” for the past day. No, I haven’t actually been watching the little spinning icon in the yellow bar because I’ve got better things to do, but every now and then I try to get into the account, and I can’t. When I tried to open the Reader settings, I got an error message.

google error message

Clicking on the “More” link in anyone’s “Shared Feeds” gives me the same thing.

I still have a Bloglines account, but it’s been so long since I paid attention to it that it’s out of date, without many of the feeds I currently read. It was interesting to see what was in there, like finding a box of old stuff in the basement. But I’m not going back. Instead, I spent my lunch time today downloading BlogBridge, and I’ve been locating the feeds from a combination of memory, bookmarks, and google history.

Funny thing, yesterday I was planning on introducing Google Reader to the teachers I’m working with in the web2.0 course we’re doing together. I told them that RSS delivers web content to you and puts you at the center of your own network. But I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t get into my account. So there I was, kicked out of my own little corner of the web - a pedestrian again.

I don’t want to dump the account because I want to keep the email. And the Reader has worked fine until now. I sent Google an SOS, but with little faith that a real person will respond. This is what I get for using such centralized services. Dependence and disappointment when they jam up. I have no idea what’s going on.

I’m getting used to the idea of living in a Google Reader-free zone for a while. I’m stoking the fire in the woodstove and piling up books for the winter.