Author Archive

The Irish yet again miss another obvious opportunity

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

So this writers strike in Hollywood/America. No shows can be made if they don’t have writers. Heroes, Lost and loads more are going to be delayed. While Letterman has done a deal with his writers, the main strike is going to go on and on. Where is the IDA on this? Why are they not showing ABC, NBC and CBS what we can offer them. Let’s export all the quality shows we have out there and even create spinoffs.

Fair City L.A.
Fair City is SHIT
Bella, Leo, Jimmeeeeeeh and whoeverthefuckelse is on that show take a trip out there. And fit in. But all written and filmed in Ireland. The setmakers already make it seem like Carrigstown is realer than real so L.A. should be just as easy to copy on to shaky wooden frames.

But there’s more!
But hell, with P.S., I’m an eejit doing so well and Irish accents being all hot again, let’s give them quality stuff. Glenroe. Dinny and Miley and Fanny and Biddie and endsinYie and their Billy Barry kids with D4 accents.

Then to feed their habit, let’s unleash Bracken on them. No, not the fella, the show.

And the game shows
Where in the World (book still available for 200 sterling) and Head 2Toe should be exported out to Lala land too. (Aside: I would have thought Fustar had some Theresa Lowe stuff but alas no.)

We have tonnes of stuff that we could ship over. What else could we send over? We’ve not even started on the quality from TV Three.

Phil O’Kane Photography Exhibition

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Phil is doing an exhibition. Go along if you’re about Belfast

Phil O'Kane Photography exhibition

I want this for Christmas (next year) – Tenori-on

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

and I can be the next Aphex Twin or just make the next Radiohead album. If Sigur Ros decided to be all electronica, they’d use one of these on their album and not instruments made out of dead sheep and rocks.

It’s called the Tenori-on

Showreel style demo:

Longer demo:

Blog Awards 2008 – Nominations have started

Friday, December 28th, 2007

Start your engines.

New nomination system, new judging system and a restriction on the number of categories you can be nominated in. This means there’s more chance for smaller blogs to get through and combined with no public vote this year, it means it’s not a popularity contest that gets you to the second round. So, to be clear, all nominated blogs will get judged in round 1 and whittled down and some will go forward to round 2 where the judging gets a lot tougher. Good luck!

Satire once again is more real that reality – Tobacco Industry

Friday, December 28th, 2007

As a Christmas treat I bought Thank you for Smoking:

And then I read this on the tobacco industry going all social-networky and deliciously evil too. They’re making videos of celebrities talking about why smoking is great and building a social network so employees all around the world can exchange ideas on how to market cigarettes.

The first video shows a series of photos of celebrity smokers before posing a blunt question: “And your thoughts on the smoking ban?” A young woman with wispy blond hair gazes back solemnly toward the camera: “It’s brilliant because people will stop smoking as a habit.”

Seconds later, she appears again. “If you smoke,” she adds with a faint smile, pressing a cigarette to her lips, “it’s for pleasure.”

Le Lab, an internal Web site at Altadis, is meant to be part social networking site, part data resource, part virtual pep rally. The intended audience for the site — which started in the fall — is several hundred Altadis brand managers who could use a little inspiration as cafes and restaurants around the world continue to push users of the company’s products out the door.

“The cigarette market is very difficult to work with all the legal restrictions, and we have very few tools to communicate with our brands,” said Karine Boure, the marketing manager for Altadis. “One objective of our project was to bring more insight to our marketing team so that they could be more effective, and we saw the lab as a way to pick up more ideas. That’s why it’s important to find innovative ways of working.”

Read the full article.

Fluffy Links – Friday December 28th 2007

Friday, December 28th, 2007

If you are interested in running an NGO, a charity or a lobby group then this blog post and guide is going to be fantastically helpful.

Check out Patrick James’ very new blog.

Airport security me hole. They left Rick O’Shea on a flight with his …

Using Linux and accessing the IE loving Revenue Online Service.

Want to send your AIB Branch an email? Be nice for someone to autogenerate the email addresses. All Web2.0Ajaxy 🙂

You can now manage your mySpace communications from inside Facebook. How long before we can manage communications of everything inside that or maybe inside GMail or some other universal communications panel. Eh Meebo? 🙂

Cute USB eraser.

God bless Insure.ie, they just saved me 150 quid on insurance.

Via Twenty, this is cool:

The “Dear L drivers, shut the fuck up and take the damned test” Facebook group now has 613 members

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

The Learner Driver’s Facebook group I set up now has 613 members. Let’s see can we get it to 1000.

Ones we watched in 2007 – How did they do?

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Right, before I release the Ones to Watch in 2008 post, how did I do in regards to ones to watch in 2007?

Simon McGarr
A certain wee man came into this life and changed everything for him but he is still ploughing on with the Paper Round. Maybe he’ll have more news for us come 2008? His VoteTube project was a great success, getting him a lot of attention.

The Cedar Lounge lads
Quality, not quantity from these boys. Some great thoughtpieces coming up, during and post the election. I certainly thought differently about some political issues after they went through them.

Piaras Kelly
MacGyver. He brought fucking MacGyver to Ireland. Piaras will forever be a legend for that. Winner!

Red Mum
She decloaked for a while and we saw what she does/did. She’s doing a lot of interesting things the past few months too but we can’t tell you, just yet. 🙂 Will she ever move her blog over to her new domain though? C’mon!

Cian O’Flaherty
80k people visited the Irish Election website on the day of the election results. He was brought on to TodayFM and other stations during the count and some media outlets ended up using the IrishElection count centre results since they were more up-to-date than RTE. IrishElection scooped two Blog Awards too. McDowell losing his seat and a recent redesign saw the site add some interesting new features. Possibly some big news about IrishElection.com in the new year too.

Pat Phelan
Roam4Free, MaxRoam, Cubic Phones, finalist at the TechCrunch 40 and way more news to come in 2008. A massive, homegrown, no bullshit success and things are only going to get better for Pat and co.

Bernie Goldbach
Another person who slowed things down a bit when a bundle of joy came into his life. Winner of two blog awards including contribution to the blogging community who then turned the tables and gave it to me which (I’m biased) I thought was one of the nicest gestures ever. This showed his community mettle. Bernie also co-organised a very successful PodCamp in Kilkenny in 2007 and as usual is a early adopter and evangelist for so much in the tech sphere. He camped early on Twitter and Jaiku and brought us all in too and you can be sure he’ll do the same in 2008. I lock horns with Bernie a lot but still respect the guy and advise people to sub to his blog as he’ll spot trends before most others in Ireland or on the web.

Two Richards and Dick
Richard Delevan certainly made an impression and broke a lot of good stories. His current Ireland Caucus project looks good too. The other Richard was mostly quiet on his blog but was working away in the Daily Mail and Dick O’Brien has been seen a lot of late in the Tribune and Sunday Business Post as well as Business and Finance.

The teeny tiny startups that could and will
Mmmm, not so much. A good few steps forward but nothing of serious note just yet. More time needed. Some of the companies for Paddy’s Valley were good and have high potential.

The unknown blogger
Blogorrah came and went, loads and loads of new bloggers came about and brought new opinions and views into the mix and made things better. The biggest unknowns were the knowns with the Irish Times blogging posse arriving and upping things up a level. None have so far broken a major news story or done something that made the whole country react. Getting there though.

Blog Awards 2008 – Sponsorship details

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

I’ve put a post up over on the Awards website about the Blog Awards sponsorship slots. €300 to sponsor a category this year. Last year’s sponsors pay the same price of €270 if they want to go again. Headline sponsor for the Best Blog post pays a lot more. Top award of night and all that. You can also sponsor the podcast and a few other things and as I mentioned before I’m looking for merchandise for the Goody Bags as well. Remember too that this event is run at cost. All door takings go to charity. No meal or any of that stuff, go to a €200 a plate awards gig for that. 🙂

Fluffy Links – December 27th 2007

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

So Richard is moving away from SEO? Too many damned cowboys in it now in my opinion.

Check out this photo Joe took. Sacreligious.

Offer still open for the free Business Blogging Course from me. Looks like we got a venue too.

I thought this was cute and hilarious. A baby giving the evil eye. Other people did not. Tough Crowd.

Anyone seen any of these movies and recommend them?

But it’s real cashmere. Feck the price tag.

The new Knight Rider teaser.

Wired’s Top Ten startups to look out for is crap I have to say. Old companies and over-hyped ones. Fon, LinkedIn, BitTorrent? Are ye for real? Then this from the Guardian is stupid too. Twitter? Wow, is it 2007 again? Course the Economist is talking even more crap.

Not sure is this at all clever? Anti-drinkdriving ads inside a game?

This guy got Kevin Costner to come to his blog.

Primus – Winona’s Big Brown Beaver: