He says “fuckers” with conviction. I can just see Enda’s microphone being left on and him calling Fianna Fáil “those scallywags”.
Mp3 link hijacked from the Irish Times, it’s the last 5 seconds:
Author: Damien Mulley
Another reason to have a pint with Brian Cowen
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Fair Play to Enda Kenny and fair play to the Greens
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Enda Kenny called out the Church the other day for the insidious funding for a No vote on the Lisbon Treaty. Many right-wing Church funded groups are campaigning for a No vote because it will give European Courts more power to decide on local issues like abortion, equality, children’s rights and gay marriage. They don’t like that as they would prefer the much more conservative Irish Court system to use our dictated by the Catholic Church constitution to knock back anything which the Church is against. Bertie would never make such a call since he was in the pocket of the Church.
Also fair play to the Green Party who yesterday broke ranks to ask for less road funding and more funding for public transport initiatives outside of Dublin. They launched their sudbmission on a bus going around Dublin. My favourite Green Ciarán Cuffe (there wasn’t sarcasm there, he’s cool) was all over the radio talking about their submission to the Sustainable Transport Plan and really it made me harp back to the intelligence and logic the Greens had in bucketloads before the election. The old Green Party were out yesterday. It’d be nice to see plans like this turn into reality though.
A hippy bus, but not the Green Party hippy bus.
Photo owned by BusGreg (cc)
If the news is that important, it will find me
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Welcome to the Bebo generation. If you’re in the news business and the blog post title doesn’t scare you half to death then you’re either fucked or you already knew this and are ready for it. If you are in the news business and you think that statement is moronic then you’re beyond fucked. You’re already dead. The line “If the news is that important, it will find me” comes from a New York times article that created a buzz very recently.
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them.
Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.
I’ve seen a few newspaper people talk over the past few years and listened to some of their private views and they seem to think that people are going to come to them because everyone knows that they’re the people that cover news well. People no longer care who the paper of record is, they’ll listen to a friend or read an email from them about news. They’re the papers of records. As we connect more and more to our friends, they’ll have more and more of that power. Fergal’s blog post about the guffawing of journalists because the Lisbon Refendum Commission decided to advertise on social networks says an awful lot about the disconnect Irish media has with the younger generations:
Feargal Keane reported on RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime that the Lisbon Refendum Commission were spending large amounts of money on advertising on Facebook and Bebo. Keane described the journalistic reaction to this at the press conference as one of guffawing and barely controlled mirth
Photo owned by Sputnik world (cc)
News orgs and everyone else that wants attention will have to be where the crowd is and unfortunately for them it’s not in a newsagents and street corner or on the TV or radio or even on a newspaper’s website. The crowd are always going to be moving now and media orgs and businesses are going to have to be there too.
Here the Indo get it ever so slightly allowing you to use social bookmarks to bookmark stories with Digg, Delicious, Reedit, Google Notebook and Stumble Upon. This is great because people will read what people they’re connected to are reading and these services offer that. (You can subscribe to what people bookmark) Still the numbers that use the above social bookmarking services are tiny compared to the Bebo and Facebook population in Ireland alone. Where’s the integration with those sites? Big fail there from the Indo.
I don’t see integration with Facebook and Bebo either in the upcoming website remake of the Irish Times either. It’ll be social bookmarks and the paywall will come down so it’ll give them an SEO boost, which is great in one way and crap in another as it’s about four years too late for the basics of what the web is doing today. Yes, in case you didn’t know the paywall is coming down.
I think both the Indo and the Irish Times now need to start talking APIs like Reuters are doing and let other people redistribute their content to not just 1000s of people but 1000s of spaces where 1000s people are now congregating. If they were thinking about what to do with the present congregations they’d be doing deals to get into Facebook and Bebo, if they were future gazing they’d be considering at least APIs.
Photo owned by from a second story. (cc)
Still they also need to consider Web 1.0 basics too. How many people subscribe by email and get news alerts by email from the Indo or the Times? Getting your presence into the mailbox of someone have having them read you is both powerful and valuable. Where’s the ability on any of the newspaper sites to subscribe by author? Where’s the ability to subscribe by keyword? There’s another step here to be taken though. These news organisations need to become the premier dealer for all news, not just their own. They should be including news from other publications and blogs as well. The Indo again are kind of getting it with keyword underlining in articles that brings you to articles with the same keywords but they need to improve on this. Then of course there’s crowd sourcing of news with the Business Week blog where they ask the public to send in story ideas.
But with the ground staff guffawing at where the people hang around these days and probably the decision makers too, maybe the last man standing will be the group that gets what the future is about and feed their breed of news to that future.
Fluffy Links – Wednesday May 21st 2008
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008New blogs Certain People and Positive Boredom.
How steroids will give you the body you want and quickly. But take your balls, nips and hair.
Reflections of, the way we used to be. Spying using teapot reflections. Like.
Oprah makes great use of Skype.
Gordon Brown answers questions on his YouTube Channel. Will Brian Cowen get a channel? Sexiest Politician in Ireland Eamon Ryan has one already. But then he would because the last sentence says so.
Some nice tunes.
Check out Paul Graham’s argument pyramid.
The top secret Google Zeitgeist Europe event was on yesterday in the UK, here are the videos.
Velvet Underground – Venus in Furs
[youtube AwzaifhSw2c]
Eamon Ryan TV – The Youtube Channel
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008A selection. Interesting screen caps. What’s the Sexiest Irish Politician (the Facebooks don’t lie) talking about would ya think, just from the screen caps? Yes Minister Ryan has a YouTube Channel and I think it’s a great idea. I think it would really rock if he answered other YouTuber questions on it too. Even some of the tougher ones.
[youtube MI4aP9HVOys]
[youtube tVTf64PTuIA]
[youtube nCyDEqs7FHI]
[youtube _XZRZELl5cc]
[youtube Rn4l-geBMag]
[youtube sHZnORYLiFg]
Internet Marketing – Measuring your Facebook campaign
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008It seems the experts that were at the IIA Congress last week didn’t know how to measure the success of a campaign inside Social Networks. Well here you go folks. For those that are hiring an Internet Marketing company in Ireland to do some social network marketing stuff and they don’t offer stats from the below methods then maybe you hired one of the many cowboy operations that slither around this area.
There are various elements in this and it all depends on which ones were incorporated into your campaign.
Check your website stats:
While Facebook is a walled garden and you can’t see inside it without logging in, they still send a lot of traffic out to websites. If you have set up a Facebook Profile, a Page, a Group or run Facebook “Social Ads” then they can all send users from Facebook to you. In addition so can anyone else in Twitter if they’re talking about you. For a marketing campaign you should have special website addresses tailored for the campaign so you know only your campaign elements are sending that traffic to your site. Google Analytics or any of the clones will allow you to measure incoming traffic from Facebook and you can tell if they are coming from profiles, ads, pages or groups.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook Lexicon allows you to see what Facebook users have been discussing. It’s a keyword trend program that doesn’t show the number of times a keyword is mentioned but the number of people who mentioned the keyword one or more times over a certain period of time. More details on Facebook Lexicon here. For companies you can get an estimate of the number of times your brand or product is mentioned. Ideal to see are there jumps around the time you start a campaign. You can also compare up to five different keywords at the same time. But there’s a big but, it doesn’t give raw numbers so it’s just a rough estimate but it’s still good. Maybe you can purchase them from them though? Big marketing companies would probably pay for that.
Facebook Pages
I recently created a Facebook “Page” which is very much like a profile but for a company, brand, product. Instead of friending this Page, you “Fan” it. The Page was called “Gnéas” as a joke. When you become a fan, your friends also see you’ve become a fan of it as it shows up in their news feed. So a few people saw “Damien is a fan of Gnéas” and the viral element would have encouraged others to join too. The stats that are provided to Page owners are fairly good.
This is the Insights Control Panel (Everyone calls the stats Insights these days):
This is a graph of sign-up activity:
Some demographics of the Fans:
Facebook Social Ads
Read this Blog Post on how to run Social Ads. Like Pages there’s a whole section on statistics for your ads.
This is the Ads control panel. Note that the ads for the Gnéas page got canned because the Facebook prudes deemed the ads inappropriate:
Here’s how you can export all your data to Excel and add more calculations:
Facebook Apps
Many marketing campaigns will include the creation of special applications to get people to learn more about your brand/product. If you have an application created, Facebook will give you a whole load of information about installations and usage. Who, what, where, when etc. Data once again can be exported and presented to you.
Messy Measuring – Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups can be created by anyone and some do well and some stagnate. It takes a lot of work to keep activity going and Facebook really prefers if you use Facebook Pages to do marketing. They supply nice stat tools as mentioned above for Facebook Pages but nothing at all for Groups unless you pay a considerable sum for a sponsored Group. But you can manually check your group and measure it. Measuring it is a case of seeing how many have signed up for the Group and what the activity is like. So for example, the Bertie, Take Enda With You group:
You can see how many members there are. Then you can see what kind of activity is happening by counting the number of discussions, photos and videos that have started/ were added.
And you can also look at the Wall activity.
As I said, nothing that’s automated and more work but still data that’s valuable. Other measurements to take into account are the number of people that respond to messages that you send to the whole Group. See what the response rate is like. Don’t be surprised if it’s very very low.
I hope this was useful. Shall I do one on Bebo next?
Fluffy Links – Tuesday May 20th 2008
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008Yes that was me on Prime Time last night. I blogged about Bebo and YouTube yesterday if you want my complete thoughts on it, not just some.
Primal Sneeze takes Argos.ie to task.
Some nice .ie domains that have not been renewed. Plus Blacknight have a .ie domain sale now on too.
Keith took some great notes at a recent conference on subscriptions. Cog from his blog.
it@Cork have a nice Web 2.0 intro class on next Tuesday. I’m not just saying that because I’m on a bajillion subcommittees at it@Cork
Spaces still available for the Galway Business Blogging Course. Same for the Waterford one.
50 more tickets are going to be released for Interesting 08.
Buckminster Fuller used Twitter, kinda.
Flying penises, once just seen in Second Life are now being seen in real life. It’s all very Matrix-like with stuff from one world seeping into the other.
Fantastic presentation from the Adaptive Path people at Google:
[youtube XXzWeMCTUGo&eurl]
Duran Duran – Ordinary World
[youtube Qxm_cY5jqmo]
Google Health: Now we know that rash wasn’t from poison ivy
Monday, May 19th, 2008Google Health is live. It’s US only but I was able to get in. Terms and Conditions. I’ve written before about Microsoft’s HealthVault and I stand by it. These services are good and if the data they collect can get us better medical advice, better and cheaper consultants and screw over Irish medical consultants. WOO. But I also want a cut on the money that Google makes from this data. As I said before about Microsoft but it equally applies here:
If we can move our money from a money bank, why not move our health data to a health bank? I’m sure HealthVault and the clones will add more features over time to negotiate discounts on tablets and meds for you and everything else that uses the service, naturally with Microsoft getting a cut too. And just like a bank, we should be able to make money from what we store in it. Microsoft will make money from the data from charging access (by charging for the applications that access it) and also from those discounts for what you get, as well as ads when you do medical searches via the site. Why should Microsoft or whoever make all the money? It’s our data they are profiting from, share the wealth guys.
Looking at the service itself:
You can already import your medical records from a host of places, mostly clinics right now but still. Impressive.
Here are some screenshots.
But do you trust Google? Now think about all that data and the fact that they WILL in the future integrate with the 23AndMe DNA analysis company they’re investors in, you comfortable with all your email, chat conversations, word documents, medical records and DNA all controlled by one group? There are many secret laws in the U.S. since before and after 9/11, how do you know Google isn’t complying with one?
There’s also the dervied data that Google has you on you. I wrote about this before too.
More from Google Blogoscoped:
Google continues to ask for your agreement for Google to pass on information about you to entities and individuals you define. As examples, Google lists sensitive information related to e.g. sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, alcohol abuse, genetic diseases and more.
Google in the Q&A later on explains that they may share aggregate, anonymous information from their Google Health records (a statistic like “10% of users with diabetes got a flu shotâ€).
Hmmm. I’ll wait another while just yet thanks.
Can you Digg this? – A Nokia charger cost Vodafone Ireland over 1700 quid
Monday, May 19th, 2008I think this is worth DIGGing. Frank wasn’t allowed collect his phone from repair until he returned the crappy spare they gave him AND the charger. He forgot to bring the charger back with him.
After arguing with the store manager she refused to trust him to return the charger if she handed back his phone first. She didn’t care that he spent over 200 quid a month with Vodafone. Over a charger than doesn’t even work on the latest Nokia phones. So they lost a golden customer.
Here’s the DIGG post
So you’d let your kids play in an unsupervised playground?
Monday, May 19th, 2008There’s been a good bit of talk again of late about Bebo and Facebook and YouTube and the good and evil that happens in and around them.
I’m a proponent of social networks and think like most technologies that they’re a very positive thing but anything that enhances one aspect of humanity can enhance the good or the bad.
Social networks in the Irish context sprung up overnight and became the defacto place to hang online for teenagers and those in their early twenties. This still holds true. It was a new place and a new way of interacting. Our current daily social norms have taken 100s if not 1000s of years to form, Bebo is a new world where these norms are being worked out as we speak by those inside it and those outside must be baffled and scared when maybe they should be bringing their wisdom and experiences into it to share and guide people.
The good:
Relationships are accentuated with social networks. They’re good people management tools. We can store details of dozens and hundreds of friends and acquaintances. The mobile phone allowed us to store hundreds of numbers on our phone that we’d never remember without a physical address book. The social network expands on that. Our friends can update us by just changing their status on Facebook or upload pics of their holidays to Bebo and everyone they’re connected to get informed of this and can look at the pictures. The daysof sending 15 postcards to people is over. A facebook update takes care of it all. Social networks also reconnect us with old friends, friends who we’d never remain in contact with because of Geography. Families scattered around the world can stay connected and informed via social networks. I often chat to old college friends in America and New Zealand. Because of the ability to stay connected over a lifetime and over continents, our friends lists are much larger than before. The Dunbar number with the idea we can only maintain a certain amount of quality relationships with people has been inflated hugely now. I firmly believe humanity is becoming far more friendly because of these technologies.
Photo owned by Annie Mole (cc)
The bad:
With this new Big Brother and American Idol nasty culture, everyone seems to want to be nastier than Simon Cowell and on social networks, blogs and YouTube you see some people trying to outdo each other on how can be most vitriolic. In a normal social situation people like this would be rebuked but online that doesn’t seem to happen. Given the positive reinforcement from mainstream TV shows, it’s only encouarging people to explore their hyper-critical sides. I’m reminded of a free class in school that gets rowdier and rowdier as time goes on and gets calmed down with the teacher next door coming in or the free class ending when the next class starts. Imagine this rowdy class going on forever. Not good.
There does not appear to be much supervision on these sites of the kids. Playgrounds do not necessarily have supervisors but they are within reach of homes and people doing about their business in estates. Sites like Bebo, Facebook and YouTube have report abuse functions and they seem to be working hard at making them better but it’s not that you need adults going “stop that” but you do need people going “Do you not think that? How about?”.
The utterly horrible:
Things can go out of control quite quickly. Like real life there’s bullying and harassment though it can be controlled slightly as you can lock down a profile and deny the bullies access to leaving comments. Like Lord of the flies though, kids without adult guidance could take things down a wrong path and keep going and going and going. Bullies in real life are recording their attacks (what is it with bullies and dictators being some of the earliest adopters of tech?) which rang from tauting, to violence and beatings and uploading them to YouTube and Bebo and distributing these videos amongst their peers. The videos get taken down eventually or sometimes rapidly after complaints but pop up again in new videos that get around the blocking software. The bullies build shrines to their attacks like the way some serial killers takes momentos of their murders. You have terrorist groups doling out punishment beatings to people or covering people in paint as a visual method of ascerting their authority and this tar and feathering is now happening online too. But it’s accentuated. A network of 1000 kids can see a video within hours wheras word of mouth is a lot lot slower than that.
So what can be done?
Don’t ban Bebo or social networks. Parents should learn how to use social networks and take part in them and see where their kids are playing these days. They should be able to dive in and out now and then but without excessively spying on their kids but parents should have the ability to make sure everything is ok. Same goes for teachers. Demanding access to their profile though, I’m not so sure. I do wonder whether the report abuse functions should be better too. Were I Bebo I’d consider the Boards.ie Community model where the community looks after each other with voluntary moderators ensuring smooth sailing. Perhaps if you are under 16 for example you’re profile is always connected to an identified counsellor or team of counsellors who can give advice.
The services do have age restrictions but it’s not like they ask you to prove your age so 8 year olds can just like and say they’re 15 and they’re on Bebo. YouTube is 16 and over, Facebook and Bebo are 13 and over, in line with US data protection laws and MySpace is 14 and over.
The worst thing a parent can possibly do is believe the hype that only bad things happen on these sites and they need to slam them without ever understanding them and I fear that’s what is happening again and again.
A big thank you to Josie Fraser for her advice and thoughts on this area. Here’s a great overview to Cyberbullying and how to deal with it. RTE 1’s Prime Time programme is doing a piece on Cyber Bullying tonight at 2130. It might be worth watching.