Archive for April, 2009

Fluffy Links – Monday April 20th 2009

Monday, April 20th, 2009

So Lily Collison is yet another Collison family member that’s blogging. This blog post is one of my favourites but there are loads more. Mother , Father and three sons now have blogs, though not all blog.

Tommy meanwhile has started a Youth Discussion forum.

We got Ze Frank a duckie for his talk.

Want a businessy looking Twitter background?

Meanwhile, good post from Paul about a Google Penalty.

Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day is tomorrow. In Dublin. No Cork like?
11.30am / 1.00pm: IFSC George’s Dock
2.30pm / 4.00pm: Grand Canal Dock (near Fresh)
5.30pm / 7.00pm: Near Heuston Luas Station

Win a Wine Course.

Green Party caption competition.

Wilco are coming back to Dublin.

Yeah, very WTF.

Birdhouse In Your Soul – Literal Video Version

Terry Prone – Not a fan of bloggers or journos who blog

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Some amazing alliteration as always.

in setting out to strengthen privacy legislation the government could hamstring legitimate media — which operate under guidelines, internal checks and balances, and have a capacity for educated caution which amounts to some form of self-censoring — while doing nothing to stop the venting of venomous bilge that constitutes the bulk of what’s euphemistically dubbed “citizen journalism”

It must be said, however, that the openness of journalists to examine all sides of possible legislation is currently complicated by their promiscuous fascination with internet-based offerings.

You don’t get orthopaedic surgeons doing knee replacements in their leisure time without charge. Yet you get journalists writing blogs for nothing, their urge for self-expression obscuring the fact that they are undermining their own employers.

Flash Mob at Stag’s Head, Dublin tonight at 8pm – Wear an A

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Flash Mob at Stag’s Head tonight at 8pm. Draw a circle on your hand. #zefrank #sciencegallery

Update:
Have an A on your hand.

Bring on the Overreactions

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

We need more boy who cried wolf stories online and people remembering them.

The recent Easter holiday flareup online about Amazon removing gay and lesbian books was an interesting study on the way people react to things online and the way people react to reactions online. We also saw how one of the largest online companies in the world didn’t react at all. In a world where news spreads through twitter in minutes to the 6 million+ people on it, Amazon took days to react to this situation and naturally the hype got worse as each hour went on.

Fiery Sunset 3
Photo owned by frobo512 (cc)

People started moaning about the fact that reactions are instant online and rumours spread at the speed of light. Really?! About how this is why bloggers and journalists are different and journalists are better than bloggers for this. Kind of like the real world so. Though I’ve found with journalists and bloggers that journalists get more wrong about me when they write about me than bloggers.

People complained there was no restraint and nobody waited to check all the facts.
Kind of like the real world so except people were trying to contact Amazon and find out what was happening and were getting mixed messages. People in the offline world don’t generally ring the press office of Fianna Fail if their friend tells them some news about Brian Cowen do they?

In a world of instant communications everything is going to be you know, instant. The complaints that “people should know better” are a bit rich when the same trend offline happens online. Do people demand restraint in a neighbourhood and community when news spreads?

What was interesting with the Amazon case was that a percentage of the online community were not instantly sold on the idea that there was some conspiracy going on or the reclassifying of Gay and Lesbian books was a new policy. The filtering was real, anyone doing a search saw this. The reasons behind it were unclear even when someone emailed/rang amazon to ask what was happening. Taken to extremes the ever bitchy and wrong Owen Thomas (not deserving of a link) said it was a hacker that did this and he condemned people jumping on bandwagons when in fact this was proven untrue and it was Amazon that did the filtering.

A few days later and Amazon still are not being clear on this and are refusing to explain exactly what happened, perhaps because they don’t fully understand what happened themselves. Maybe they should have said this. This saga was a massive PR fail by Amazon which is a shame because they understand the Internet more than most companies.

If you look at it from one angle, there needs to be more of these over-the-top reactions to train the online population in the fact that everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. There’s almost that threshold where enough members of this online community are trained enough from previous wildfires to know the score. We’re not getting there as some might want because there is no there to get to, but some in the exploding online communities are starting to play the long game as they become more experienced in the way news is spread, just like the villagers of yesteryear got there in the end as did the press.

California Air National Guard
Photo owned by The National Guard (cc)

Remember the Titantic story? All Saved it said on the newspapers, followed a day later by the opposite. Hunches and gut feelings will take time to learn or bubble up but they will.

It looks like bloggers will now ring the press number of an organisation to get some facts, they’ll email contact emails and ask for verification but it is also up to the organisations out there to be monitoring what the web is saying about them and react to it. Unless you’re a very small company, you’re going to be 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. The monitoring tools are cheap or even free for this kind of thing. There’s no real excuse anymore.

Of course you could ignore the online people, there’s only like 1.5Million of them in Ireland or thereabouts.

Fluffy Links – Wednesday April 15th 2009

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

A Yes to Lisbon campaign by the Yute. Unclear who’s behind it. Will there be an RTE investigation into their finances? 🙂

PuddleDucks now integrating the LouderVoice reviewing system. Congrats to both.

A sex blogger? In Ireland? What would Gaybo say? (That’s really gonna mess with my seo)

New blog: Conor O’Nolan

Via Stephen The Cork Economics blog

Elevease also are blogging.

Blog from Mark hayes on his adventures in L.A.

HTAccess files drive you loopy? Try this online editor.

Jay Electronica – Rennaisance Man

Fluffy Links – Tuesday April 14th 2009

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Seán did an interview with a few young chaps who use Twitter.

Nerdcore. Using Mathematica to name Web 2.0 companies.

My post on why Bad Facebook Ads are bad for all of us.

Ian interviews Tony about his time on Dragon’s Den.

Good post from Eoin on why hecklers veto freedom of expression.

Bad security from Bank of Ireland security.

Via Ger, Enterprise Ireland are having some public meetings for people interested in joing their various programmes to start a business.

30 ways to promote your nordy business.

Via Niamh Redmond: Adobe Flex Builder 3 available for free to unemployed devs. Incl. 60-day Safari Books subscription

Are you this business person looking for a coder?

Heard of a McGangbang? It’s food people!

The Black Crowes- Remedy

Bloggers win sex toys!

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Tommy, Enda, Alan and others, avert your eyes.

You won’t get this in Alive magazine…

the always brilliant and insightful and playful and other words ending in ul but not bashful Maxi Cane decided to have fun encouraging people to write about more adult matters and created the Filthy Butt Fun competition. And then a sex toy company sponsored it. Genius marketing. Here are some winning posts from Elly, K8 and Jo.

carrot forest
Photo owned by Robert Couse-Baker (cc)

So Maxi is looking for new er entrants to the competition. Why not have a go? There’s nothing to lube lose. Submit your story.

Loopthing – Irish business service with social features

Monday, April 13th, 2009

I met up with the lads from Cork-based Loopthing a while back when it was in Alpha to have a look at what it does for businesses.

The blurb from the site says this about them:

Loopthing allows every business to come online and network with one another, as well as providing customers with detailed information on their products or services.

The idea is that it will list your business on their site and also add lots of the social features we’re now well used to on the likes of Facebook and other places. People can leave comments, companies can add photos, podcasts and videos and they can network with each other.

Loopthing

Lots of practical features on the way too which I don’t disclose for now. Have a look about and send them feedback. Their blog is here. Right now this is a soft launch I believe. Why not get your business listed?

Ze Frank is talking at the Science Gallery on Friday

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

A genius comes to talk.

Here’s a reminder of Ze who starts off with a song about ugly mySpaces and then riffs on cheap design tools used by the masses scare the shit out of the design gatekeepers:

Bryan Dobson meets some bloggers, thanks RTE!

Friday, April 10th, 2009

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Yesterday RTE pulled out all the stops to give Darragh, Suzy, Alan, John, myself and Tommy a tour of RTE’s Newsroom. Bryan Dobson is dead on too. We got a quick tour of the newsroom where Carolyn introduced us to the many people that work to inform the millions of Irish people about what’s going on in Ireland and around the world. We got to briefly chat with Bryan Dobson and others. I think he’s now subbed to Tommy’s blog. We then went to the gallery or whatever it’s called where the magic happens for the news on RTE television. There we saw the prep for the 1pm news and they showed us how they line up the stories, images and graphics for each news bulletin. From there we went into the news studio and watched the prep from there before the 1pm news.

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Then we left them get on with the news. The Morning Ireland studio is adjacent to news studio and we got a look at that too. Morning Ireland are on Twitter too:
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And then we looked into the studio that does the Late Late (Rumour is Ryan will get the gig but Tommy will take over the TT show, makes sense) and Tubridy tonight, this is the view from above, a hell of a lot of lights eh?:
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After a brief break at the infamous RTE canteen we then headed over to where the Primetime team work and met Mark Little and other team members for a good chat about news and current affairs and the views of the bloggers and Twitter folks on what they’d like to see RTE do online. They seemed very interested in the liveblogging and Twitter feedback.

There’s a lot of talk about the licence fee anytime RTE does something people don’t like but when you see how the (Update: Clarifying that I mean RTE news) News organisation works and what they provide to the public in a efficient manner maybe you’ll consider the idea that they’re value for money.

Oh and on leaving I saw Larry Gogan. Half the visiting party never heard of him. Feeling old…