A resounding a perfectly clear - NO. You can't even compare Reader to any of the other shuttered projects Google closed. Reader is a mecca for information for Google to use in their secret sauce.

If you're a newspaper company, would the pure cost be worth knowing exactly what columns your subscribers are reading? Absolutely.

Google Reader is a internal service where ads will only muck up what they have going for them.

One of these things is not like the others.

(hint: Google Reader is extremely popular)

While I would hate that, Reader's disappearance would strongly boost my productivity :)

notice the trend in the world diving into a recession as google reader gains more and more features?

I hope not. Reader and Gmail are two that I cant live without. They are so well designed and super powerful.

Tech Bloggers are blogging themselves into a corner. Instead of covering things that are happening of relevance, they're constantly making wildly inane speculative entries because x and y happened without factoring why z has/has not happened.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market.

If it's the best RSS reader on the planet, why even make the suggestion that such a service would just go away?

Erm, yeah right. That's why they only just updated the look of it a month ago. So they could shut it down.

Google Reader is here to stay. I'm not worried.

This would be a disaster of biblical proportions. GR isn't just a aggregator of feeds, it is a feed-based social network! I can see, in real time, what my friends are reading, what they find interesting, and their thoughts on the issues. I can break up my content by subject, tag items as I see fit, then publish feeds of specific tags and shared items. No other tool has allowed me to so easily share what I am READING, not just thinking. Since I am not a very interesting person, my thoughts are not often that significant, but as a voracious reader I can function as a filter on other people's content, and my contacts do the same for me. Losing Reader would devastating to my info-vore ways.

I use google notebook intensevely... I started using it, because I wanted to store my great findings on the cloud, so I never, ever loose them... Knowing google notebook is about to close I wonder how safe my data is... Is there any way I can save easily all of my google notebook notes?

How will Google Reader ever make money? Bloggers will not allow RSS readers to run ads near their content. While I don't think Google will kill Reader, I have to wonder where the revenue is here.

The same could be said about many products that Google isn't likely to kill. How will they make money from Chrome, for example? (which is probably a fair bit more expensive than GReader).

Google has deep pockets. The reason they killed those products was not because they weren't making money, but because they weren't popular.

How will bloggers stop it?

There is some (limited) potential for advertising on the google reader site itself, but I think the biggest two gains for google are user analysis and blog search.

Your OPML list gives google a pretty good indication of what your primary interests are, which they can use to deliver better targeted ads throughout the ecosystem.

Google likely has fairly strong integration between blog search and reader; it's likely they'd be doing a fair amount of analysis and caching of this data in the first place, so why not build it into a full on service?

Although the snippets are shorter, Google already does run ads next to third-party content, as their search result titles and descriptions are pulled directly from the websites.

They need it so Feedburner can make money.