Damien Mulley

Sky gets into the broadband market in the UK today with an expected free broadband offering for it’s big spending TV customers. While they own Easynet they have done nothing with the company since purchasing it in January and today will come the first Sky branded broadband offer. More from the UK Independent. I doubt they’ll have an offering like this in Ireland.

UPDATE:
From James Enck

Top tier product is 16Mbps unlimited usage for £10 per month, with an optional call package for £14 per month. In Q4 of this year Sky will come to the market with PSTN line rental of £9 per month

Bernard mentions that IrishJobs.ie have finally enabled RSS feeds for job searches. Nice one. Some feedback from looking at it first. I think there needs to be more of an explanation than just the RSS logo. Perhaps have a “Save to Bloglines” or “Save search to Newsreader” etc etc bit of text.

Now all they need is a bit of javascript code that allows bloggers to stick a job search window on their blogs to allow blog readers to search for jobs without being on the IrishJobs web property.

When in Dublin this weekend (for the amazing Hedwig gig, review on way) I started listening to a lot of my Tom Waits stuff and really started appreciating him more when it was just me, my iPod and the blur of Dublin crowds. There’s something to be said for locking yourself away from distractions when trying to indulge in music. Or walk in solitude with headphones. Anyway, the song Martha really really stuck out for me and here are the lyrics for us all to sing along to:

Operator, number, please:
it’s been so many years
Will she remember my old voice
while I fight the tears?
Hello, hello there, is this Martha?
this is old Tom Frost,
And I am calling long distance,
don’t worry ’bout the cost.
‘Cause it’s been forty years or more,
now Martha please recall,
Meet me out for coffee,
where we’ll talk about it all.

And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.

And I feel so much older now,
and you’re much older too,
How’s your husband?
and how’s the kids?
you know that I got married too?
Lucky that you found someone
to make you feel secure,
‘Cause we were all so young and foolish,
now we are mature.

And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.

And I was always so impulsive,
I guess that I still am,
And all that really mattered then
was that I was a man.
I guess that our being together
was never meant to be.
And Martha, Martha,
I love you can’t you see?

And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.

And I remember quiet evenings
trembling close to you…

For lunch, our chef has made this and all for just €7:

West Cork Royal Seafood Platter

Fresh poached salmon
Smoked salmon
Marinated Anchovies
Shrimps
Crab Claws
Marinated Mussles
An Oyster
Calamari Provencale
Selection of salads and sauces

UPDATE: Here’s the pic

Joan Burton’s latest blog post actually comes across as human. And look NO CAPITALS IN THE TITLE this time. No pink suit either. Good. I had heard Blogorrah were going to do an exposé on it soon. I had also heard there was going to be some Google Maps mashup where you could see everywhere the suit went. But back to the main story. It’s good to see the personality come through in this blog post. Keep it up Joan! Here’s hoping that Seamus Ryan’s example of how to do it right will influence the other press release Labour blogs to change.

Lastly, quick note to Labour folks who leave comments on my blog all from the same IP inside the Oireachtas or from the Ely Place IP address. If you are going to go to the hassle of making up names of strangers who just happen by my blog and leave supportive comments about labour, at least use anonymous proxies to hide your tracks. That’s what others do! 🙂

EDIT: I spoke too soon. Or maybe I should say: I SPOKE TOO SOON

Short movie called Lord of the Ring about the underground accelerator at CERN. It’s called: The Large Hadron Collider. Am I the only one immature enough to giggle at the title of the movie and the name of this accelerator?

Very Roadrunner. Watch an anvil fly through the air. Anvil shooting. An American tradition.

Create your own community of blog readers and bloggers.

This week Chris Anderson had the book launch for “The Long Tail”. My review copy arrived this week. I’m off to Dublin for the weekend so I’ll read it while traveling. Yesterday also saw a report from CNN that the previous week had the lowest TV ratings ever. All the networks are blaming the holiday weekend and so forth but how many actually realise it could be the Long Tail in action?

There were 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week in the US. Compare that to how many hits mySpace is getting and it’s a tiny number. But compare it to how many times one YouTube video is watched and it’s back to being a large number. However aggregate all those hits and you’ll probably notice YouTube is getting more eyeballs. RocketBoom’s 250,000 daily viewers might seem nothing to the networks who can get 20.8 million viewers but there’s going to be more and more rocketboom type shows over time.

BitTorrent networks are jammed with people downloading TV content amongst other data. Look at the number of people downloading TV shows via BitTorrent networks. While a TV show might not get the same number or order of magnitude on a BitTorrent network, when you look at the long tail of shows being shared and downloaded the numbers when added up become quite significant. Yet the networks and content producers don’t seem to know how to exploit this newly discovered pattern in consumerism. Maybe to start with, buy the Long Tail book.

Good piece on Irish business bloggers in SiliconRepublic. I think it’s also in their e-Thursday section of the Irish Independent. Well done to Piaras who no doubt influenced his own employer to start this blogging lark.

Marketing 101. Stein Travel exploits the Zidane affair to market their wares. I like these kind of campaigns. Got them a nice bit of attention too. However, email? People still use that these days? If it was me I would have bought one of those badly put together Zidane headbutting games going about the place and stuck my logo on it and allowed people to distribute it.

For all those having bonfires in the North tonight, why not get your own monogrammed steak brand? You can have words like “NEVER” “SAYSNO” “UK4EVR” on your very own steaks.

Send a fingerprint to these guys and they’ll ship it back in a frame, blown up to a much greater size. And only $195

A Linux PC for €75.

The Big Here. How much do you really know about your space? Good questions like: Where is your tapwater sourced from? What time is sunset today? How many feet above sea level are you?

Horse head pillow. For all the godfather fans. Surely I can find someone via the Mechanical Turk to make this for me without paying as much?

Reinventing the mail client.

Sex is essential. Kids are not? Why are so many German women deciding never to have children?

It’s happened. MySpace is the most visited US website. Worth every penny now then?

Jeff Jarvis is still winning against Dell. Their frustration boils over into a blog comment, Dell’s “Reimaging” company then comes out and does the usual “person acting on their own behalf, not Dell’s or ours”. It doesn’t wash with Jarvis. Good.