Damien Mulley

Invisible people have invisible rights as my tagline goes.

Extracted from this blog post:

While waiting for the next report to start the DJ took to the microphone to take a request. A young man was on the line and the DJ asked him his name. “Sean�, he replied. The DJ asked him what song he wanted to hear and who he wanted to dedicate it to. He said he wanted to hear The Door’s “Light My Fire� and he wanted to dedicate it to his boyfriend Josh. The DJ said “no problem Sean, and where are you and Josh tonight?�. Josh replied “Hamilton� and the DJ then said “You guys have a good night� and with that the song began to play.

The blogger cries after hearing this. I just smiled cos I’m a bloke and my mates and I talk soccer and stuff. A real manly thing to do. Grrr and rarrr.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear more things like this on the radio? I don’t listen to the radio that much but when I do hear people ring in requests I have never heard one dedicated to a samesex partner except once ever at 630am on TodayFM when a girl asked for a song for her girlfriend and the amount of males that rang in afterwards doing the equivalent of rubbing their thighs and going “phoar” was quite high.

Richard might think that political gays are more visible in the blogging world than the stats suggest they should be, but when it comes to daily interactions such as the trivial things like requests on radio shows and so forth, gay people are still quite invisible. Even less invisible if you don’t go to hair salons and buy your clothes in Top Man. I’d much rather see the odd mention that gay people exist like via requests on radio stations than having to suffer Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace – a show then years old and where the main gay character has kissed a guy once or maybe twice on-screen and the best supporting gay is the most vapid creature on earth. Though they exist in real life, I admit.

There was meant to be a point to this post I think, hmm, oh yes here it comes around the corner now: It seems quite disappointing that society is now coming around to the fact that gay people exist yet most are still out of sight. Tony Cascarino was on the sports section of the Last Word on TodayFM on Friday talking about gay soccer players and his advice was they should stay closeted as it would be too dangerous for them especially sharing a dressing room with other soccer players and the taunts they’d get from the crowds. Bit of a way to go yet then.

So before I start on my overdue contract assignment I have a few more things to blog about.

Conn Ó Muíneacháin has a new blog. One which ignorant mise can read. Yes Conn, you are an Edge case.

The Google GDrive is coming closer to launch. Wow and stuff. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

How Robert Scoble enabled a company to sell 1.3 million dollars worth of software in three days. One man, one blog, one good idea, one million dollars though they didn’t make one dollar. So the deal was they offer their software for 5 dollars. The 5 dollars would be donated to the Red Cross. They wanted to see how many units they could sell in a 4 days. They sold 2,642 units. That’s a lot of new customers and customers who are techy in nature and might all have blogs. Very clever idea. Who’ll try it in Ireland?

Speaking of which. Hugh mentions Sprint giving free phones to bloggers and says they’re not doing anything new or interesting. He thinks his idea of giving free wine to bloggers was better because he himself blogged as well did the Stormhoek folks. It wasn’t just push marketing. Stormhoeks was a two-way thing. o2 gave me free phones of late to give to those at the Blog Awards without any conditions but I have asked all winners to blog about the phone. o2 might get themselves even more credit/kudos if they had their own blog for their i-mode products. I’m actually considering only taking sponsorship next year from companies who blog whether it being an official blog or an identifiable employee that blogs.

IR Free Stuff – give away stuff for free or get stuff for free. Isn’t the word “stuff” great?

Markham spotted an Irish ice cream blog. Mmmmm. Again I say: mmmmmmm. Nice find Markham and it’s a great blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get more and more people blogging and getting more companies using blogs and RSS/Atom/(whatever feed technology) and how to convert as many as possible into using this medium*. I suppose one should go with the easy wins first. Go with those most suited for blogging and encourage them. Let them be the first ones to dip their foot in the news rivers and tell the others the water is great.

Murphy’s Ice Cream are the perfect company for blogging. If someone is passionate about their job/work/product then a blog is a great outlet for conversing with the public. For them a blog is probably a natural extension of what they already do which is telling the public about their passions. Small companies would naturally do this more than larger ones. All levels in the Murphy’s probably work with the consumers on a regular basis. Could you say the same for larger companies? I couldn’t but from now on this will change.

Microsoft are probably the biggest company to encourage blogging. Look at how many people in there are blogging now. Look at the blogs for all the various products they make. Even supersecret Google are clenching less and working with their public more and I’m sure their products will be all the better for it and thank goodness because the most of their latest products are bland and many are just lame.

So, I’m going to start looking out for passionate people and passionate companies. My friend Stephen is a candidate for blogging. As is my friend Allan. Same definitely goes for the guy I get wine off of in Bubble Brothers, as I mentioned previously. How many people do we know who are passionate? Why not make a list and have our own tupperware conversion party every few months to try and convert them? The Cult of the Blog O’Sphere. Why am I thinking about that Simpsons episode where they converted Homer by going “ne ne ne ne ne LEA-DER”?

And now I’ll try and find some Murphy’s Ice Cream in Cork and follow their recipe for hot chocolate.

* I may have something to announce on this in the next month or two

Patrick Tufts visited my site and commented on the Aine post. Howdy Patrick. Don’t know who Patrick is? He’s into AI. You use something he developed everytime you use Amazon. Amazon’s “customers who viewed this item also viewed …” recommendation system. That was his baby. See more of his CV. Nice having you visit Patrick.

Check out this Goatse Zen like moment on one of his blog posts. Subtle!

I was going to do a Russell Beattie on Friday to boost traffic. What’s an RB? Blog about why Macs are shite and you’ll get a lot of traffic. Baiting Mac fans always generates traffic. They protect the brand so much they almost put a Jihad on you. Russell probably does it for an increase in ad revenue or maybe like me he loves winding people up. However the Sligo post generated more traffic than I have ever gotten on this site. Some 1200 page views on Friday alone and now that the Metafilter people have seen the page (thanks to Jett) my Sunday traffic has surpassed 600 page views. Sunday is normally the dead day for this site. Coolness.

So there was no need to take the piss out of the petulantati but just for fun here is the video rant about Why Macs Suck.

Previous posts by Russell on Macs: Russell switches back to the PC
Russell and 33 things that bug him about MacOSX

On Friday I logged into my GoDaddy control panel and changed the dns settings on ten of my domains and on this one too. I did not mean to do this one. I changed them back quickly but as a result the dns settings fell off the Internet and this site is still unavailable to anyone on eircom.net or IOLBroadband. Fuckity fuck. I’ve done some tweaking on my own computer thanks to advice from Conor and so now I can blog and I have so much to empty out of my brain.

Steven celebrated the first birthday of his blog and threw a question out to his readers about blogging and what would we do if we didn’t blog. I kind of gave a long meandering answer:

Blogging consumes me but if it wasn’t blogging it’d be something else. There’ll always be something else. Many of us have this personality trait and I guess technology has brought us together.

Blogging helps me remove thoughts from my head that would only go stale and start to smell in there. A smell worse than gone-off milk. I blog about these thoughts and ideas and share them with my audience who really I feel are friends. Friends who I sit in a room with the TV on but turned down and eventually gets turned off. It’s a dark winter evening and the temperature is just a little too warm so many of us have flushed cheeks. In this room which is really the Blog O’Sphere we talk about different things and the conversation goes all around the place and moves on. The interesting thing though is that as this happens some in this large group restart or add to previous parts of the conversations and in a very quantum way we chat about new things, present things and old things all at the same time but yet none of us talk over the other. Once those thoughts are out of my head and shared I am happy to move on and allow fresh thoughts to run around the head until it is time again to do the blogging equivalent of the little teapot song and tip my head over and pour the ideas out. So, maybe blogging keeps me sane or less insane?

This is blogging to me. I’m sure I’ll have slumps where I don’t blog but in that time I’m sure my obsessive personality is concentrating on something else.

And with that I have about 6 blog posts to write.

The French Army Knife. Handy that I just threw out about 20 t-shirts tonight. (By threw out I mean gave them away.)

Aine Chambers guides you around the sights and scenery of Sligo via her Sligo Tourism website.

Check out her video guides to Sligo.

Lissadel beach and a special Christmas message are some of the more fun ones.

I’m now hearing rumours that these vids will be on Podge and Rodge soon. Let’s make her number one in Google for the search phrase “Sligo”. Link to her site with the phrase Sligo Tourism.

Ambrand has linked to Swimwear with the Irish Tricolour. Cringetastic!

EDIT: Hello MetaFilter readers