Damien Mulley

I was thinking about the idea of Coworking again and previously I mentioned the idea of twinning with another Coworking location but there was something still niggling at me about this and eventually with the way the brain works, the cloud of thoughts got less cloudy and I started wondering would the FON model work for Coworking. FON basically is a worldwide wifi network that gives away wireless modems for free or quite cheaply. When you put your modem online, it becomes part of the FON network as do you. While abroad you can then log on to the network for free since you are hosting a FON modem. People who are not members of FON pay to access the network at a cheap price. You can choose not to partake in the roaming offer also, while still being a member and instead you’ll get half the fee that FON charges someone to access your router.

Anyways, left a comment over on James’ site about the idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to travel the world or country and hop from one place to another for plug in for free in return for you having a Coworking facility that allows a few free seats for the nomad Coworkers?

I like this idea. Some colleges in the States are getting students to blog about the colleges. Cheap and transparent marketing for colleges. The Irish ones should do that instead of spending fortunes in papers, on radio ads and on television asking students to sign up with them.

Meanwhile, Eamo Dunphy considers getting a blog.

“Journalists and prostitutes face the same challenge: competition from amateurs”

Strategic incompetence or the Wally philosophy.

The Dáil Vote 07.:

This blog will predict the results of the race for Leinster House – day by day, seat by seat, constituency by constituency

Jamendo Radio Blog. Handy(ish) online music player for Creative Commons music. New feature allows you to do a LastFM kind of thing where you input mainstream artists and it tries to serve you artists of the same genre from their collection. Currently listening to a rock ballad from some Italian band .. after I asked for BJork-like music. You can even get a widget of it for your blog.

Blaspheme and get a free anti-God DVD atheism DVD ” The God Who Wasn’t There.”

The Daily Politico.

Politics and News from Ireland and the World. Analyse and Opinion on progressive causes from a Progressive, Irish Republican and Internationalist perspective

Via Tim. Christ. Remember that UK crackdown (and Irish one too) where they arrested a whole load of people for downloading child porn from a website that the FBI had infiltrated? Seems the website owners also traded in stolen credit card numbers and so many of those arrested in the UK and accussed of paying for and downloading child porn (yer man from Massive Attack was one) were innocent of such a horrible act and were victims of credit card thieves. 5000 accused, 39 suicides.

Way late on this but Xerox had a bookfair in Second Life. Different at least.

Via Daithí :

Robert Scoble mentioned a new term for this whole OpenLife thing that’s been happening lately, where if you want to, you can subscribe to every single facet of someones digital life. You can read their inane Twitters about what hairball their cat coughed up 5 minutes ago, and how many sugars they just put in their coffee. You can subscribe to what they read in their newsreaders, you can subscribe to their YouTube videos, their Flickr photos, what music they are listening to on LastFM and even what they bookmark on delicious. This is the narcissystem, as coined by Chris Pirillo and it is going to get worse.

Since our analog lives are becoming more and more digital, it is scary what people are sharing and surely a boon for our stalkers. New services are now out there to help stream videos of ourselves wherever we are. Robert Scoble was in his car driving down the highway and you could ring him and chat to him via video while he was in the passenber seat belting down some highway. Robert used the new enough UStream.tv service.

Right now all these lifestreams/vanityfeeds/unifiedfeeds are mostly noise and mostly personal stuff. I don’t think you’d get a lot of subscribers for all of this unless you were famous or were on Channel 4. Big Brother anyone? Look at the sheer number of people who clicked on to the Big Brother live feeds on E4 for the past few years. My god that was boring. Yet, an unknown lifestream wouldn’t get any viewers, but how many viewers would tune in for Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Hell, during Britney’s breakdown I’d be a subscriber. “Next on carcrash TV…” I do agree with Deep Jive Interests in that it is all relative.

In this day and age though, it seems even mainstream news media are obsessed with all this flotam. Last week when I turned on the TV in my hotel room (I don’t watch TV at home) it was wall to wall Prince William and his breakup with yerwanno. To quote Robert Scoble again

Everyone who thinks this stuff is boring. I guess you aren’t watching CNN or the news lately either, right? So, do you find 24-hour-a-day of Anna Nicole Smith interesting?

When blogs started, the personal lives of catladies outweighed business blogs, tech blogs and all other types of blogs. That’s changing quite a lot now. These people, no matter what they were writing about, helped test and improve the blogging platform and made it into another communications layer. I see Twitter doing the same. It’s going to be another multi-way broadcast layer. Same goes for UStream which makes it very easy to be a video broadcaster. (That’s how Scoble broadcasted from the car). YouTube bedroom broadcasters were the same. Nearer to home, I can see MySay helping to create another niche communications layer. [MySay allows you to phone in and leave voicemail which can be marked friends only or public and can be emailed to friends or they can ring in and listen or they can listen in via a widget on your blog.] Another communications layer.

So while all these lifefeeds are chocka with “Ohmygoshness” at the moment, that will change and different and more appealing content streams will emerge. Whereas tech’s first adopters years back were very rich companies and the uses were always business uses (telephone, cars, mobiles, computers) nowadays the first adopters seem to be the always-on social people. Business now moves into the areas where it first started as something social. Correct me if I’m wrong but was email more academic in use when it started? The net was the same I think? Blogs were personal life outlets at the start as were all the social networking sites and now companies are begining to see the uses of them. The inane and personal comes first, then maybe comes that quality that the elitists demand.

Due to very low uptake , the training event from ShareIT on April 28th ShareIT has been postponed. I’ll be looking into how to work with local organisations in future to boost numbers but with just 9 people registered, there was no way I could run the event on Saturday. Apologies to those that did register, the trainers who were doing all of the work for free and to Microsoft for offering the venue. I think for future events I’ll run a register so that an event will take place if 30 or more people register to attend in a given city.

New Irish crime fiction / movies blog from Declan Burke.

USB Boss Pedal.

Judges not reading depositions?

Check out Conor’s blog.

Value for money? Via NYTimes

Skype, which earns money largely from fees to connect users to the telephone system, posted revenue of $79 million, up 123 percent. EBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. “This is a very young business growing very fast,� Ms. Whitman said

Via Mr. Exley, looks like a really good intiative from Labour UK.

Via Metafilter – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

As an EHM, John’s job was to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, international corporations and the aid agencies allied with them were able to control these economies and to ensure that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building the global corporate empire.

Via You Ain’t No Picasso. Nice to hear some of her new songs. Quality is shit though.

Wanderlust:

Earth Intruders:

(To the tune of “The heat is on”)

No, it is not anything sexual but could be classed as dirty as in mud-slinging. Via Coolhunting is news that the Rasterbator now works in colour.

What is the rasterbator? Well to quote myself:

The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 5 meters in size. You upload an image it spits out a pdf which you print off and put together.

Yeah, so, remember these photoshops? Well, you can now make giant poster from a4 sheets with the Rasterbator. Handy way of hacking the real election posters. Look forward to the giant version of Green Ink‘s work. Or Hugh‘s for that matter.

A giant version of this anyone?

And just cos:

The three new blogs from the Irish Times – On the Record by Jim Carroll, Pricewatch by Conor Pope and Present Tense by Shane Hegarty are all quite excellent and all meet the criteria of blogs with comments and proper feeds. (I encourage you to subscribe.)

Not to be outdone the Irish Independent are almost almost there in putting blogs and podcasts on their website too and I even hear videos will be put up. Hooray for content. A few Sunday papers are also messing around with the idea of blogs.

Some people at the Blog Awards this year complained that the “professional” writers were at some kind of advantage because of who they write for. I don’t believe they are and that was reflected in who won. I’m against the idea but do people think people who write for papers or the blogs on the likes of Ireland.com should have their own category?