Damien Mulley

You may spot a theme here.

HMV screws Irish customers over more than their UK ones.

CIE wants to screw us by increasing their fares again.

The ESB who are about to screw us all over with massive price hikes wants to buy an NI power company. Will it bring prices down? Not a chance. It means a bigger monopoly. Split them up like the consultants report said, Dempsey.

Oh look, now the English have seen they can screw us over.

And lastly, the Government have no balls and are only making a piecemeal effort to protect kids.

With all these accusations and counter-accusations, where are the vids on YouTube, where are the Flickr photos? This is 2006, right?

Sweet jesus. Are things that bad everywhere else too?

Eircom TSS, the sales contact centre operation of Eircom, has picked up an award for Best Contact Centre in the World, at the International Contact Centre World Awards held in Las Vegas last night.

The annual awards recognise the best contact centres and best contact centre people and strategies worldwide.
The Irish telecoms firm said that it had beaten competition from more than 250 entries from around the world as well as two rival finalists representing Asia (Apple Care) and North America (Sage).

Gerry Culligan, Director of Consumer Market, Eircom said, “It is fantastic to be recognised as the best of the best by our industry peers from around the world.”

Haha.

Colbert calls it quits. Fantastic rant.

How men (straight) choose their clothes when getting dressed. Gross generalisation!

Google talks about easy export of your stuff. Where’s the export option in their services again? Where’s the one for YouTube?

Information Politics. From the OfcomWatch folks.

Via Twenty:

Footage of Kevin Federline finding out via text that he’s being divorced. Bye bye millions.

Calm down James. Village Magazine now seems to own another url – Village.ie. I had thought the Village venue owned that. Apparently not. I’m not sure what will go up on it but they have RSS and feeds for various sections of the site as well as OPML. Their urls include “blogsection” but that could be to do with their content management system or might be a clue that they are going to start blogging. Time will tell.

While I was away details of the Digital Media Awards were announced. These are the yearly awards that Ashville Media run. I was asked to judge a new category for the 2007 awards which is for blogging. It was pointed out to me when I was asked to be a judge that unlike the Irish Blog Awards these awards are pay to play type awards. Now I’ve gone on record before and slammed the Golden Spiders for their awards and the curious way that a sponsor of one category ends up winning another category. I’ve also expressed my unhappiness with the Netvisonary awards where if you are shortlisted and want to attend the event, you have to pay.

So why would I be a judge at this awards show? Well first I think the organisers of the Digital Media Awards want to run a respected and professional awards show and that is why they asked a genuine blogger to be the judge of the blogging category and someone that knows their stuff about podcasts to be the judge of the podcasting award. I’m not au fait with the other judges but trust they are experts in their judging areas. I also think there is plenty of room for a full blown blog awards and blog award sections in other awards shows. Lastly, I think that getting podcasting and blogging added to well known award shows will benefit the blogging and podcasting communities which are still small. It is really nice to see blogging and podcasting to rub shoulders with other areas of digital media. Oh and so you know, I am not being paid to be a judge for this.

In regards to the Irish Blog Awards themselves, I will never charge people to nominate a blog. Bookmark this post and remind me if I ever try. 🙂

Now, can we start a fund to get Twenty nominated?

Disclaimer: I’m in no way an AdWords expert so this might be old hat to some people but I found it interesting and also a cheap way to advertise. I run Google Ads and have a few running for PoliticsInIreland. I have them running when a TD’s name is mentioned on a webpage. Google have demanded at least 45 cents per click and up to 8 euros for the likes of Bertie Ahern. I decided to bid 5 cents per click. You’d think then I’d get no ads shown or at least I did. Instead the ad that displays when Willie O’Dea is mentioned had 23,524 impressions in the past week. It tells me the average position for this ad was 5.0. For Tom Kitt the ad had 35,577 impressions in the past week. In total for 64,713 impressions, there were 33 clicks. A terribly low click-thru rate but with the name and the url displayed in the ad, maybe that’s all is needed when the ads are pretty much free.

Anyone got experiences of the same?

It seems if you give an opinion about a concert and it doesn’t fit with the views of others then you are ignorant. I obviously just don’t get that some people like that “fucking screeching zombie” and as a result I’m ignorant. I better go off and complete that thesis in music theory before I ever decide I like or dislike something again.

My journey to my own bed is almost complete. 1000s of miles have been covered and now I have just a few more inches to go and fall asleep in my own bed and wake up readjusted to this timezone. New York is fantastic. Talk some more in a while.