Archive for April, 2010

Fluffy Links – Thursday April 29th 2010

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

A very biz type Fluffy Links today.

Congrats to Social Bits on their fantastic new site.

Irish music bloggers, IMRO and give us money for giving free publicity to the bands on our books.

Science Road Trip! As part of the buildup to the City of Science 2012, Discover Science & Engineering are looking for a number of participants who would be interested in travelling to Turin on a science communications bus. This rocks.

Into UI? Want to work in the wonderful town of Kinsale? Have a look here at this job spec.

Small business in Wicklow? Why not enter the 2010 Wicklow County Enterprise Awards. Award shows are good for exposure be you longlisted, shortlisted or a winner.

The InterTradeIreland All-island Seedcorn Business Competition 2010 is open and ITI are doing workshops around the country on how to raise equity and develop business plans to try and win the competition. First workshop is May 4th in Cork.

Leviathan are doing a UK General Election Special Thursday May 6th in the D4 Berkeley Hotel, Ballsbridge.

Got an email about this: SmartLeads.ie, a new company offering Irish businesses a way to network online and create leads. Subscription service with a free trial.

Rowan Manahan hacks Ignite

They play in August in Dublin, again!

Fluffy Links – Tuesday April 27th 2010

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Online PR course by me in Dublin on May 4th.

New blog. Confused of Cork.

M.I.A. vid referencing a certain terrorist org.

Colm Lyon finally blogging on the Realex site. Great start too. Worth subscribing to.

And another new blog: The Evening Herault

Interesting concept. Spendometer.

Via Jim C New album out, Between Two Waves.

This Like Button tech shows how much data you’re giving away.

Alan Kelly MEP twitter account hacked or?

ThinkIrish.ie Guerrilla Tagging Session. Needs more Trainspotting running down streets being chased by rentacops.

Fluffy Links – Monday April 26th 2010

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Eolai goes deep on how he sells paintings online. Take note everyone, not just fellow creators.

Great list of hotels in Dublin with free Wifi in meeting spaces.

Bizcamp Limerick is May 8th. Sign up?

Free office, power, net for a startup.

Google employees publicly shut their accounts on Facebook. The latest Facebook announcements are turning FB into the juggernaut and Google into an entity to get out of the way. Pram toys, meet floor.

Meanwhile Google Streetview also scans your WiFi network.

Is innovation nature or nurture?

Using the startup process to change disaster relief.

ITV shows a Facebook commentor calling David Cameron a first class cunt. Ooops.

“Origin Of Love” by John Cameron Mitchell, live

iPads and the future of news and media

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

I’m talking at the Media 2020 conference on Tuesday. I’ll be talking about gadgets and showing off my iPad but here’s my take on the silliness around iPad being the new Christ.

The deathnote for news has been served. So some are running off to the iPad and thinking that will save them and others are looking at paywalls, again. Marc Andreessen suggests burning the boats and going web only. Let management have a viking funeral too.

Newsflash:
A touchscreen interface to your milquetoast content will not save your business.
A paywall to content that is far from unique or of value will not save your business.
Wordpress powered jaded content is still jaded content.
Has 3D saved the movie industry?

We’ve gone from storytelling to writings on parchment to printed missives to audio to audio and video to digital to multi-way interaction to a world now where something that fits in a pocket takes in data, sends out location data, takes audio, video, pictures, is manipulated by us, is shared with the world, shared and taken back into the device. Within seconds. We overshare on Facebook and generate our own news like we always have. “Any news?” we are asked. Do we respond with what we heard on the radio?

News should be getting richer and more multi-faceted every year and instead the past few decades it’s become homogenised. So yeah while starving yourself of oxegen got your rocks off for a while, it has also killed you. Ask Michael Hutchence and David Carradine.

blogipadprintingbig
Photo owned by nDevilTV (cc)

Why are news and media trying to barely iterate on what they are doing when there are devices out there that are not iterations of a previous device but big leaps and you don’t take advantage? The iPad is then going to take what it has now and iterate on that over years. Adapt to change. It hasn’t got multitasking, a camera, USB ports, is certainly not open yet is still vastly superior to anything out there. There are already amazing applications on it. Yet bringing in a new paperboy to deliver the newspaper to the door isn’t going to save you folks, is it?

Popular Science, Coolhunting and that Alice in Wonderland interactive book have been lauded as great so far for iPad but they’re on a device that’s a fraction of one percent of the people that daily consume media. If you wait for all of them to go all iPad buying then you’ll be very broke. Innovate what you’re doing, not how you deliver.

So all these huge news organisations in Ireland, all moaning about crime and gangland bladey blah. Not one has a Google map, mapping out the places where the violence happened. Not one has done interactive timelines. A multimedia world and we’re getting black and white single layer analog content or chirping about RTÉ.ie being a threat.

All could have been iterating their way to the full multimedia experience one gets with an iPad. Nah. Here’s an RSS feed and iPhone app that puts our content in a smaller window. Fa ab.

Look at the big bad content producers online right now. Facebooks, Twitters, YouTubes and all those other places of noise and mess. Look how much Facebook will make this year compared to the New York Times. While NBC or CBS kick their ass, look at the growth rate. Look at how much Apple has made from selling content and apps. I’m doubting the future of news will come from those in news right now or the trail blazing elitists that believe they’re better than their traditional media peers cos they have a blog and better than bloggers because they have a piece of paper that certifies they can type and press record on an mp3 recorder. You’re still the system, you just wear a silly cape around the office. Look to those who caused a stir online already and have a grasp of a business model used this century, not one that worked 200 years ago. Or actually know what a business model is.

At the end of the day the reason for the failure is this: It’s your stupid content, stupid

Start

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Worst recession ever. Banks not lending money. Ireland is all sorts of fucked. Nobody is spending a penny. Stealth redundancies en masse. House prices are plummeting.

And with it…

Office space is dirt cheap.
Every price can be negotiated.
Deals are much easier to do if you are someone with cash.
There are oceans of talented graduates looking for work and who’ll work damned hard to retain their position.
Colleges are throwing interns at companies.
People have more free time (unfortunately for some) to beta test your products or services.
The media want good news stories.

It’s cheaper to fail now.

Some great companies started in a recession, Google wasn’t one.

Fluffy Links – Thursday April 22nd 2010

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Plug! My Online PR course is on May 4th in Camden Court Hotel. Places are available still.

RENT in LIT this Sunday. You may know someone familiar in it.

Love this video summary of the Blog Awards by some of the Brazilian lads.

Glad to report about 60 people have signed up to come along to Measure it! in the Odeon on May 5th. Free event to get the PR/Social Media/Webby/Marketing industries to mix it up with each other and exchange some insights.

Julian video interviews Bill Leigon.

Gardai take away the laptop of a Fianna Fáil councillor. Meanwhile a local paper covers allegations made about said councillor.

Web Analytics 101. Amazing and in-depth post on web analytics. A must read, a must print.

Docs.com from Microsoft and Facebook looks to be interesting.

Old Sufjan Stevens concert with nice string arrangements. Come back Sufjan, we want good music.

DSPCA appeal video (tough images)

Fluffy Links – Wednesday April 21st 2010

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Will McInnes is giving a one day workshop in July in Dublin on social media. He’s the real deal and the best around.

Kev from Fenn’s Quay is doing wine tasting videos. A german wine to start with.

F3 Fundit, a new competition for the next top startup. Nice prize and low entry fee of €120.

Mobileplans.ie – check how much you’re spending on mobile costs.

Bray Jazz Club, I mean festival. Grreat.

Four Lions Trailer

Tribute to PowerPoint

Written on an iPad no less…

Heyday – On April 24th, call for a general election by making noise

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Use of the song approved of my Mic Christopher’s family too:

Facebook Page calling for a General Election. If you support the idea why not blog it, Tweet it and share it with friends on Facebook?

Events event events

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Public events where I’ll be in the next wee while:

Still some spaces for the Branding and Communications workshop on Thursday 22nd with it@Cork. Free for members.

Also a few spaces have opened up for the Online PR Course in Dublin on May 4th.

Measure It! meanwhile is on May 5th in Dublin. Two hour event from 10-12 in the Odeon. For PR people, marketing people and those in digital who want to share practical solutions on issues they are having with social media.

Media2020 is booked out. My 5 min talk on gadgets might have me show off my iPad. Using Keynote for iPad to design the preso.

Social Media for Business with Limerick City Enterprise Board. June 9th. Massively subsidised for members.

Fluffy Links – Monday 19th April 2010

Monday, April 19th, 2010

It’s the name that caught me. Cookery classes for me and you and kids too! UmNumNum

Did a talk recently at the Ballybane Enterprise Centre. This centre was set up by the local Credit Union to support local business. Brilliant idea.

Guy protests with blank placard. Love it.

Charities, beer drinkers and chancers.

Two more Bizcamps are happening soon. No money resting in accounts under this name at least!

Another TwinnerParty with Donal. Twitter, food prep, food eating.

How not to choke. Stage fright/performance type choke.

This follow finder tool from Google rocks.

Crystal Castles new album is out soon, maybe sooner with the leak the past few days. This is one of the tracks: