Archive for November, 2007

Fluffy Links – Tuesday November 13th 2007

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

They is back.

If I ever decide to write a blog post as gaelige, at least I now can use these Irish words and phrases were I to talk about tech in Irish.

Remember the upcoming National Dig Out day for Bertie et al.

Buying this t-shirt. Just so you can’t.

Indeed. I agree with Joe. Brian Caulfield won Technology Person of the year. Met the guy a few times and he’s very in tune with technology and one of the few people that was involved in venture capitalism that took the time and effort to come to Barcamps and other events and share his widsom.

First blog post for the Science Week competition. Remember you can win a Nintendo Wii for blogging about science. Don’t forget to take part!

Via Andrew:
Twin Musical Tesla Coils playing Mario Bros

Irish Labour Party* – Live streaming, Flickring, Twittering and blogging their conference

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Labour on UStream

The Labour party is now without doubt the most web savvy political party in Ireland. More credit to them. Their conference is on this weekend and they’re using UStream to stream it for web viewers. They’re doing an online Q&A, they’ve got a Flickr stream, they’re using Twitter and of course there’s their blog. I’m well well impressed. Well done to them.

Also best of luck to Neilformer as he goes for the NEC.

* (For the sake of consistency, assume there’s a dig at Labour Kids as well somewhere in this blog post. 🙂 )

Not Enough Hours – RTE program looking for commuters

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Ronan Flood from RTE left a comment on an old blog post the other day about commute times:

I’m actually researching for a new program in RTE called Not Enough Hours. It’s a Lifestyles program based around time management and helping people make a positive impact on it. I’ve been charged with finding a commuter who would be willing to take part… a difficult task because they’re all on buses or in their cars… anywho if any of you are interested in taking part in the program why don’t you give me a call on 01 2084587.

If you want to be involved. Give them a holler.

Science Week Ireland blogging competition – Win a Nintendo Wii each day this week

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

In case you didn’t know it, Science Week is on this week and they’ve gone all blogger friendly by having a competition each day for the rest of the week.

Here’s their spiel:

This year Science Week Ireland explores this theme and illustrates just how much science surrounds us every day. We are constantly surrounded by science, technology and engineering in the modern world. We are woken by talking alarm clocks, dress in man-made fibres, check the TV weather, listen to radio news or traffic reports, use electricity to make our breakfast. And all that is before we have even left the house.

We would like you to tell us a little bit about the role science plays in your everyday lives. We are inviting you to answer each of the following questions:

  • Tuesday – Q What was the favourite invention from your childhood?
  • Wednesday – Q What invention do you want to see most in the future?
  • Thursday – Q What’s the next gadget that you want to buy?
  • Friday – Q Which invention has helped you most with your working life?
  • Saturday – Q In your opinion what was the best invention in 2007?

Easy pickings really! C’mon and get blogging. Link to the Science Week website so they can track entries or link back here. I’m not sure will Science Week allow this, but if people read this blog, don’t have their own blog but want to contribute, I’ll happily allow them to guest post here. I’ll check with the Science Week folks about this.

Also see this other competition from them.

MashupCamp – Do we deserve it to come back?

Monday, November 12th, 2007

MashupCamp Ireland. David Berlind, Doug Gold and everyone else (apologies I don’t know your names yet folks) have put a wonderful International event together and they honoured Ireland by bringing it here. The turnout has been healthy enough and hopefully we’ll see more people on Monday. Maybe even more Irish people because from what I’ve seen there’s been more International people than locals here.

MashupCamp is a very important event with some high-powered people from the biggest companies in the world showing how to make new services and products using their APIs. Mashup Camp could have chosen anywhere in Europe and they chose Dublin. It’s nice to see people from these tech companies fly in to share a lot of information with everyone that turns up.

I would have expected to see more of the people that go to the various Open Coffees to turn up, or more of the Paddy’s Valley people, especially as they’re getting pitching training tomorrow. I.B.M. had a great presence and Microsoft have been there at every single talk over the weekend, mixing and networking and even writing summaries of some of the talks. No official Google presence to show people how to use their APIs yet they have some of the most used APIs about. Good to see an unofficial presence though.

I also would have expected the likes of Enterprise Ireland to have had a large presence or any presence at the event. They’re a sponsor too. Out of interest how many Enterprise Ireland D.A.s rang tech companies on their books and told them about MashupCamp? S.F.A. I reckon. I gave the organisers a small bit of help getting the word out yet the locals here in Ireland should have been clawing to get to Mashup Camp without having to be begged and prodded. Universities should have been aware of the event and telling their students get here and should have gone themselves. E.I. and their grant drawing clients should have been there in force. Any tech startup should have been at the event to mix with the “big boys” and just see how they work and learn about the way they work.

For me, I see MashupCamp as being like a multi-national company wanting to come here and set up. The same way politicians, councils, chambers’ of commerce and I.D.A./E.I. fall over themselves to court these big companies, so should they do the same for events like Mashup Camp. If E.I. and Unis and all the others cannot see a few steps ahead and that Mashup Camp creates the potential for new jobs and enterprises then we really are sunk. We’ve been given a fantastic opportunity with MashupCamp and I don’t think we’ve honoured it enough by the lack of support from the tech community in Ireland. We need way more events like this in Ireland from people more experienced than us but if they come looking at having events here, what can we show to them for us to deserve it? Remember, they can go to India or China where they’ll be treated like gods. Or London or Berlin where they’ll pack many halls and probably make a profit.

Despite all of this I hope to see enough good feedback from the event that the organisers will come back again and maybe next time we can see a queue of Irish people wanting to get in. Well done MashupCamp organisers! Thanks for the event so far. It’s great.

Anyone else getting GreetingCardsCafe.com spam comments?

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Nóirín is. She ranks very well for Christmas Cards on Google and it was a post about these where she got three spam comments from people, all claiming their website was GreetingCardsCafe.com, all recommending the site and ALL coming from the same IP address. I do remember a company on the Enterprise Ireland mailing asking for SEO advice recently. I don’t think anyone would have recommended this tactic. If it wasn’t people from GreetingCardsCafe.com then I’d consider it someone try to give them a bad name by leaving these comments but at least their IP has been logged!

Lucinda Creighton’s Website got hacked

Friday, November 9th, 2007

Have a look here and here and here. If all evidence removed, you can still see how the blog part of the site was hacked by looking at the RSS feed here.

Fluffy links – Friday November 9th 2007

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I’m not really here. I’m in Wicklow. This is a post written on Wednesday.

I’ll be at Mashup Camp in Dublin all weekend, will you? Here’s who’s going.

On Monday I’ll be taking my first trip to Phantom towers to talk about blogging on the radio. Sometime after 2. Do tune in.

Fluffy Links – Thursday November 8th 2007

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I’m off to Wicklow today as I’m up early on Friday morning giving this blog training course. Sign up if you want to learn how blogging is good for your business and what is involved in business blogging. I’m staying here tonight. Pricey but I hope worth it for the location. Can someone cold call them about their site and offer to fix it?

Check out this Irish Craft news blog.

Got an Education blog? Check out the Edublog awards. It’s been suggested I have an Educational category at IBA3. What do you think?

Twenty pitched this as his first book but was beaten to it: Cooking with Booze.

I’ll be at Mashup Camp in Dublin all weekend, will you? Here’s who’s going.

Evil Eamon Ryan is now leaving it up to Junior Ministers to announce the bad news about broadband rollout in the sticks. National Broadband tender winner not announced til mid-2008. I’m betting late 2008 meaning people won’t avail of this scheme for up to two or three years after.

Larry Lessig at TED. How creativity is being strangled by the law.

How do we get Girl Talk to play in Ireland? Speaking of gigs, anyone going to the Final Fantasy gig on Dec 11th? I’m going to Lapland the next day I think. (Not the club. Boo!) A Hawk and a Handsaw are on the same night as Final Fantasy. Gah.

Sick of all this Facebook talk. Hugh drew this.

The N95 has an accelerometer inside, apparently. Would have been nice to know.

Analysis: New Facebook Ad System – faux-permission marketing to your friends? (Twitter finds a revenue stream)

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

But before I give my opinion on this: Microsoft have no input into this at all. Holy Cow. This is a competing ad platform to the existing one running on Facebook that Microsoft manages. While the 240 Million dollars is small change for Microsoft, bloody hell, all they got was access to banner advertising while Facebook has control of a more highly targeted system?

Thanks to the analysis of Jeremiah Owyang on his blog I was able to make some kind of sense of what this ad system actually does.

Executive summary

To me this system appears to be the start of Vendor Relationship Marketing though in a kludgy manner. The new Facebook system allows a company or individual to basically create a profile or group for their brand or product. Instead of “friending” this brand, a person “Fans” this profile and it is listed under their friends listing. The profile owner though can serve ads on your profile. They can also show ads on your news feed when you interact with them on their profile. Also external sites can advertise in your feed when you interact with them e.g. Your feed will say you bought a book from Amazon and under it Amazon might offer you 5% off the same book OR a book that is more tailored to your preferences as with the ad system it caters to your profile. The last bit has the most potential.

The new Facebook Ad Platform is broken into four areas: Social Ads, Facebook Pages, Facebook Beacon and Facebook Insights

Facebook Social Ads:

Very much just an iteration on Facebook Flyers but they allow you to drill down and be even more specific who you can target, age, sex, workplace, college, likes and dislikes etc. Quite targeted but these via Facebook Pages and outside webpages allow you to place ads in the News Feeds of people. They do this by showing ads under the actions of what friends have done with facebook Pages or Facebook Partner websites.

facebook ads 3

This is pretty much your friend giving permission for you to put an ad on their friend’s News Feed. Not permission marketing as such is it? How many friends will you dump on Facebook when this kicks in wholesale?

Facebook pages:

These are profiles for companies or products. People “friend” or rather “fan” your Facebook Page. It works very much like a profile with a few exceptions. When you add a Facebook Page it goes into the Fan section on your own profile.

This is the screenshot of adding Jeremiah’s Facebook page:
facebook ads 1

And this is how it looks on my Facebook profile:
facebook ads 2

All your friends also see this add in their news feed. This is now called a “social story”. When you interact with the Facebook Page by leaving comments and uploading photos and all that, that too goes into your news feed. Just like interacting with a friend. Each of the “social stories” has a link back to the Facebook Page so it is a handy way of increasing traffic to a profile. Then the Social Ads kick in. So you see this on the News Feed and under it is an ad for whatever that brand is BUT it is also tailored, almost sniper-like to your Facebook profile. So people in Ireland might see a different ad to someone in the UK or men see different ones to women.

Facebook Beacon

This is clever. I like this. This is for external websites who want to get a foot in the door of Facebook. Like the example above. Buy a book from Amazon and it gets listed in the news feed of that Facebook member and you can attach an ad to it. Want 5% off the book John just bought? This is good in that to start with it won’t get astroturfed. It will allow us nosey human beings to see what people bought or what they did with external websites while that site can pique your interest with an offer. And that offer is tailored to your demographic.

Facebook Insights

This is just the stats part of the ad system. Seems basic enough for now but bound to change.

Things unanswered for now

Groups: Why isn’t this offered to existing groups? C’mon Facebook people, with millions in some groups you could actually make more cash by allowing those group owners to do the same. Switch it on for them. Allow group members to opt in.

An ad network inside an ad network
If you build up your brand (Hey, remember Ze Frank is a brand) on Facebook and put a lot of hard work building it up, why not be able to make money by selling ads for other people and do it in some kind of automated fashion. If I have 100k followers, it would make me and Facebook money if I can allow some other people to send targeted ads to my subscribers without this advertiser going off and creating their own page and build up a following. Right now it only seems that I can spend money on Social Ads, not make money. Facebook people, yu do remember something called AdSense, right? Allow people to make money from their Facebook pages. Go on!

Where’s my kickback?
If my friends are reading my lifestream and seeing ads built around what I’ve purchased and done. What do I get back? I want a kickback

Will others rip this idea off?
You friggin bet. Now I sound American! Tumblr just got their revenue stream if they hadn’t already thought of this. Twitter too. I think we’ll also see RSS feeds of purchases become standard on all websites and people encouraged to stick them in their lifestreams via some kind of points thing. Get 5 points every time someone clicks on an item you’ve purchased etc. etc.

The future

This will get people and advertisers next to the next step in advertising. Vendor Relationship Management. A post on that another time.