Author Archive

Mulley.net under massive (manual) spam attack

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Seems someone doesn’t like what I’m saying about Ace Internet Marketing and the person who attacked Daithi’s blog is now attacking this blog too. can you feel the strain on the Blacknight.ie servers? No? Neither can I. They seem to be using IP ranges of Web Hosting companies in the UK and Canada. So I rang them and reported the abuse. Unlike most spam attacks, this is being done manually by some fucking idiot actually copying and pasting stuff.

Update: Seems the hosting for one of these accounts has just been killed. I got this from the hosting company:

The user’s name is “xxxxxxxx” and their account is terminated now.

NEXT!

Update: Bless him, he’s still leaving messages and anyone with half a brain will match the writing style to previous messages. Oh and in his stupidity he first went to Daithi’s site using an eircom IP – 86.43.127.141 Making it far too easy to track him down.

Update: And the uber hacker says he was watching a movie when his automated hacker tool did this. It is mid-term, is this why he has so much time? And his hacker tool was written in Java, the language du jour for the l33t kids. C’mon man, you’d have been as cool if you used .net. Fuck off and learn perl like any decent script kiddie.

Daithí’s Blog gets attacked

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

In a curious turn of events, someone left a message on Daithí’s blog post about Ace Internet Marketing saying they would attack him with spam. Sure enough a spam attack ensued but he bravely weathered the storm. Go Daithí!

Update: I’m getting nasty comments too from an IP address that is also attacking Daithí’s blog.

Mashup Camp Coverage – Want to interview someone from Yahoo!, Salesforce or Programmable Web?

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

So in continuing to get coverage for Mashup Camp, some of those attending are willing to do interviews with the press/bloggers. With Salesforce signed up for Google’s “Open Social” initiative, Mashup Camp might prove to be very timely now with news of this open exchange platform for social networks. Let me know if you want to do interviews.

eircom’s music store

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Update: Website is live. (reviews are imported in from Entertainment.ie, please use LouderVoice!)

Met some nice people from eircom recently who told me about their future broadband plans as well as their plans for content. Not one of them wore a tie by the way. eircom will be relaunching their new music store very soon and from what I’m told it’s being built using lots of web 2.0 goodness. They’re also using a well-known and respected Irish company to design the store. Nice to see young local companies being used. They’ll be launching IPTV next year and are doing deals with media producers to get channels on the service as well as selling/renting movies and videos.

What I’m liking most about all of this is that the people looking after these areas are very enthusiastic and definitely are unlike the old eircom where the attitude seemed to be reject the new and hold on to the old ways as much as you can. Love that they are using the Last.FM engine to make recommendations to people. “If you like this, you’ll probably like this”. Better than Amazon’s recommendations based on purchases alone. They’re also getting the idea of the long tail by going around and trying to get as much local talent on to the store as possible. Perhaps they’ll add a podcast section some day? I asked them the dodgy DRM question and for labels that insist on it, they’ll use it but a lot of their music will be DRM-free. Universal looks to be on the way of getting rid of DRM completely anyway and yeah, they should be able to offer more content than iTunes because of that Universal/Apple spat.

Here’s some of the features:

  • The music channel will carry music from all the major labels, plus international and Irish independents, offering the widest range of products in Ireland – 800k tracks at launch; 7k videos, 27k polyphonic ringtones, 8k realtones.
  • Also features music news, album reviews, plus an Ireland-wide music events guide
  • In partnership with downloadmusic.ie, the channel will include free MP3s, videos, and a 24/7 streaming music player.
  • Music store Includes music recommendations from Last.fm, a media player where users can compile sample playlists, and 30sec samples before you buy
  • Channel will offer the widest range of download types in the Irish market place. Customers can download in multiple formats – to pc, to mobile, dual download (simultaneously to pc and mobile), video, real tones & poly tones and wallpaper.
  • I’d love to see what it looks like at the end of the day. Right now I can’t access the music section on eircom.net with Firefox or Internet Explorer due to some overzealous scripts saying I don’t have the right version of IE and Windows Media player. That’s not good. Lastly, eircom are turning up at more and more tech events like BarCamps and Open Coffees and want to meet local tech companies. Do say hello to them, you might get some work from them!

  • Customers can pay for downloads by either credit card or through premium rate SMS
  • Entire EMI catalogue is DRM-free, so there are no restrictions on usage
  • DRM-enabled tracks can be burnt to CD or transferred to appropriate media players

Facebook Groups – Will they take on Google Groups?

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Google Groups I must say are really impressive. Google made a great service when they bought DejaNews back in 2001. Yahoo! Groups are also another good mailing list and group discussion service but with so many people creating Facebook Groups for anything and everything, you have to wonder will this be the next area of Facebook that will start to be taken seriously by Facebook. Right now it’s awful to use and manage. There’s no wall activity to let you know people have contributed to group discussions without you going off to check it out. A right pain when you are subbed to a lot of groups.

If Facebook get their groups sorted, it could mean even more opportunities to get people to use their service, especially if they allow business people to sub and contribute by email.

Hopefully with this new cash injection they’ll start improving their existing offerings while bringing out new services too. With the MS money maybe they’ll do the following:

  • Messaging service improvements
  • Create a Facebook IM service. A few blogs have mentioned this and it makes perfect sense really. Now, if they based this on Jabber it’d be fantastic. Maybe with their cash they’ll buy Meebo?
  • Roll out a contextual ad system based on ALL of that profile data they’ve been logging.
  • Fix up Facebook groups so businesses will start using them. And then to annoy Google even more, allow selective indexing of the front page of the groups, like selective indexing of Facebook profiles.
  • Enable outside search.
  • Enable outside advertising.

Fluffy Links – Thursday November 1st 2007

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Happy November everyone! Just a few fluffies:

One for the Road now lives here. Update bookmarks etc. etc.

Ace Internet Marketing move on to saying Daithi defamed them. Don’t you feel all left out that you didn’t one of these special emails?

Nice Halloween pics from Red Mum.

It seems more and more companies are blocking me thanks to Webmarshal. I’m banned in schools too.

More foodies. Food Lorists.

The Interesting conference idea goes to Oz.

Irish Blogger stats – Using Technorati, Feedburner and Google Reader

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Justin Mason has a handy service which matches bloggers from the list on IrishBlogs.ie with their Technorati rank. Now either using their Feedburner stats (if they have them) or Google reader I’ve created a very rough estimate of the total feed audience for the “Top Ten” Irish Blogs. Perhaps with the Google Reader API, the Technorati list could also be updated to include feed subscriptions?

1 http://www.mulley.net 883
2 http://www.tomrafteryit.net 534 + 712 (two feedburner feeds)
3 http://www.sluggerotoole.com 59 + 43 + 8 (RSS ATOM RDF)
4 http://taint.org 13
5 http://www.krishnade.com/blog 31 + 906
6 http://www.nialler9.com/blog 727
7 http://www.thinkinghomebusiness.com 8 + 76
8 http://ocaoimh.ie 852
9 http://www.dehora.net/journal 590 + 235 Atom RDF
10 http://www.mneylon.com/blog 415

So it’s called Open Social? The facebook “killer” from Google?

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Via Om Malik, more details on the Google Social Network thingy. The most interesting thing for me is this:

Google will announce its new social networking initiative, Open Social on Thursday. Joining Google and its Orkut social network are other partners such as XING, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning.

Probably the most important one there is LinkedIn.

More on Techcrunch.

Additional comment: Funny how now all the underdogs are teaming up to try and challenge Facebook. Now if only Google’s competitors did the same in the search and ad space. 🙂

Fluffy Links – Wednesday 31st October 2007

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Shite. Tom’s moving to Spain. Best of luck mate. Send me gaspacho frequently!

Galway Open Coffee morning details.

Watch live Wikipedia edits on a map of the world.

Reminded of any org?

German old geezer “playboy” sues 19 year old because she didn’t sleep with him when he brought her out on the town.

France are going to DNA test people trying to bring in “family” after being granted asylum. Who’s next?

I’m giving a talk in Soho over breakfast. It’ll be about social networking. Do come along. November 20th

No podcast support on the iTouch Music store?

Facebook have a platform as does mySpace as does .. Damien Mulley? Nominated for Best Blogging Platform at the Golden Spiders.

Speaking of which. Eoghan does a good analysis of the sites shortlisted. 94% fail to validate to W3C standards? Eoghan should press release his findings. 🙂 This is also funny.

Love this pencil sharpener.

Via Darragh:

Labour, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and the Greens – Where are their samesex employee benefits?

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

So Labour reintroduces the Civil Union Bill tomorrow. (Suzy has a nice post about Ciarán Cuffe rolling over, shame, I thought he was the most transparent Green but what he said today was guff) Just wondering since Labour, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and the Greens voted for the Civil Union Bill in February, whether they have policies for employees in samesex relationships? Healthcare, pension rights, you know, that kind of thing. Whatever the partner of a married staff member gets, I assume they cater for the samesex partner of a staff member too. I am positive they do, leading by example and all that. Right? Can anyone point me to any information the parties have on that? Plenty of fanboys and girls from all those named parties visit this blog so I’m sure you can root out the standard employment contracts from these parties. Or maybe some of the people in the media that dip in here now and then could put on their sleuthing caps and smoke their pipes and find out? Not those pipes, thems are for after work.