Author Archive

Article – Irish bloggers risk running the legal gauntlet

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

The growing community of Irish bloggers who freely post personal opinions on web logs must not assume they can defame people online without facing far-reaching legal consequences, a media law expert has warned. The Defamation Bill, due to be put before cabinet this week, will deal specifically with the liability of internet service providers (ISPs).

Karyn Harty, partner and head of defamation in McCann FitzGerald’s Litigation Department, pointed out some bloggers can appear to be immune from defamation/libel laws because they post anonymously and it can be hard to discover their real identity as they don’t have to pay to register a blog site.

Full article here.

Disney puts ABC content onto web for free

Monday, April 10th, 2006

Via Fred Wilson is news that some ABC content will be put online. He points to a Wall Street Journal report that states:

Disney plans to make much of its most popular programming on ABC and other channels available free anytime on the Web. The move could speed changes in TV viewing and help revive the ad business.

Of course the WSJ is behind a pay wall so you can’t read the full piece.

Waiting for the black eye – Web 2.0 is an abusive relationship

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

From an MSN conversation with Dave

Dave says: but it’s a pretty normal human trait, to forget the past
Dave says: or just decide that this is different
Dave says: not because it is, but because they want it to be
Damien M – says: heh, I just thought of something, web 2.0 is like an abusive relationship and the gf going “oh no, it’s different this time, he says he’s changed.”
Dave says: that’s brilliant! blog that
Damien M – says: and we just all wait for the black eye

So yeah, Bubble 2.0, Web 2.0, some of us are waiting for the black eye. Wake up girl! Nothing has changed.

You should be dancing .. yah!!!

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Why Men Won’t Dance. Award winning dancer Steven might disagree.

Gaming the system without being original: The cynical guide to increasing visitors to your website

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

The majority of people who blog do it because they want to cover the topics that interest them. In fact some of the stuff they cover gets them all fired up into a passionate frenzy. It’s great to read blogs like that. If you just want Google love and don’t mind what you write about then you can easily increase web traffic by gaming the blogging system. For many of my regular readers this is probably known to them and for the rest it is common sense but I’ll give my experience on how you can increase traffic to your site by spotting the current zeitgeists and reporting on them as well as some other tricks.

What are the online kids talking about?
If you want to get the attention of web surfers then you need to see what they’re looking for. The best way to do that is have a look at what is the most discussed items on idea aggregators such as Tailrank, Metafilter, IrishBlogs.ie, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Technorati etc and then create some posts about this. The title is almost everything, remember that. Sprinkle the post with some keywords then as well. Once Google visits your site on a daily basis, these zeitgeist posts will show up quite quickly in the Google results. Don’t forget to link to other posts on these zeitgeists too as they’ll appear as trackbacks on those posts. To get people to click on your trackback link but also retaining a search engine friendly blog title, may I suggest that you give the start of a title a nice standard Google fodder string of words and then add a smart alecy text at the end to get the attention of the humans.

Tech zeigeists: Lots of traffic and lots of links
Every time Google or Apple or Microsoft releases a product there is a huge huge amount of chatter in the Blog O’Sphere which is still comprised of a lot of tech heads. A lot of bloggers will do the journalist thing and report on reactions to these products and put them on their own blog but newspaper journos and tech journos do this too. When Google became a domain registrar I blogged about it. Little did I know that the Register picked up on it and within a few minutes of them publishing the piece my traffic went way up. I still get visits on a weekly basis from that Reg article 13 months after they published that piece.

Go Against the Flow
Whenever you listen to radio shows where they have someone on arguing a point they generally have someone else on giving an opposing view. Sometimes you’ll notice the opposition are total nutjobs but in order to be balanced the shows have to find some opposition. Sometimes just going against the flow will get you on the airwaves, same goes for blogging.

If everyone is saying how great the new Microsoft gizmo is then a well constructed counter-post, knocking it and giving valid reasons will probably get you noticed by those who always have to take the opposite view of the masses and it will also get you noticed by journos and bloggers who need to balance their piece. “Not everyone liked this idea though, Damien Mulley viewed this product as just another ploy to ride the web 2.0 gravy train and he thinks the gizmo is overpriced junk.”

Print gets you more traffic then web in Ireland.
Yes yes, we all know I have some weird Aine Chambers fetish and I get a good deal of traffic via Google searches. However when the Irish Independent did a piece on Aine a few weeks back my Monday morning traffic surged. The Indo had no urls in their article but people searching for Aine Chambers landed on my site even though Aine’s site was the top result. Papers still generate a lot more traffic to you because Irish people may surf the web but they don’t write to it and until this changes you’ll see most traffic coming from Google searches as a result of print articles.

For example tomorrow people will still be talking about Bebo, Bird Flu and Denis Donaldson so having a few blog posts about these topics would get you traffic. Indeed, you could log into the online versions of the Irish Independent, the Irish Examiner and the Irish Times tonight at midnight, see what their main stories are, write some blog posts there and then and by the morning Google might have indexed you and those googling from their office computers in the morning will find your opinions.

That’s just some ways of getting traffic to your site without caring what you talk about on your blog. Tune in another time in the distant future when I tell you how to game the A-Listers and how to write original content and get it a massive audience. Or maybe not.

Sunday 9th of April 2006 bits n pieces

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

NYTimes: Abortion in El Salvador – A pro-life country. Another abortion article written by a man. I read recently (can’t find the link) that 70% of the pieces written in the paper were written by men. Is abortion equally a male issue as a female issue?

Redefining Poverty – Article in the Sunday Times discusses how poverty is defined and what the new benchmark will be. Richard Waghorne wrote about this a few months back in Magill.

Sunday Times: Brenda Power comments on the proposed privacy laws. I agree and disagree. She talks about when Haughey was banging Terry Keane (I love being eloquent) and how the media couldn’t report on it or they might have been sued. Defamation/libel laws are for rich people. I agree there. Even when right, if you’re poor you probably can’t afford to defend yourself. Isn’t that right Bernard?

But she then goes on to say that photographing Princess Caroline when she was in public was ok and called her Court victory “peevish”. She also thinks that if Victoria Smurfit doesn’t want to be photographed then daddy should by her a park she can wheel her kid around instead of using a public park. But as Brenda says, rich people can sue, poor people can’t. Rich people can buy a park, poor people cannot. I’m not sure I’d agree with the attitude that you are not entitled to privacy just because you’re loaded but if you are in public office by campaigning aboutyour own perfect morality and you’re being a hypocrite then I’m not so certain that the press pointing this out is wrong. It’s not black and white, there needs to be leeway and in a lot of cases it will be the courts that decide if you have gone too far. I’d like to see privacy laws for all, not just the rich and famous and I’d like to see defamation laws that allow the average joe to defend themselves.

Observer: 7/7 London bombers were not Al-Qaeda trained or linked says (leaked) official report.

Online newspapers making headlines less fun in order to be picked up by Google. Shame really.

eircom twice pressured telecoms regulator on Smart 3G licence before regulator revoked Smart’s licence. Big shock there. I would have expected another Court case like what happened with Orange and Meteor a few years back. Mobile licences are licences to print money afterall. Whatever happens in the currrent Court case, the regulator is going to come out worst again.

Via Dave Winer: Dr Dobbs podcast with Adam Selipsky from Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Via Smart Mobs: Korea considers court interactions via blogs/message boards. I think something might have gotten lost in translation there.

Via Boing Boing – Diet Coke and mentos = mess:

Lovely meeting you all tonight

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

Good to see new faces and some old ones too!

Midlake – Lots of potential here

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

Via Auds I found the Rawking Refuses to stop Blog and via them I found the I guess I’m Floating blog which recommended Denton, Texas bandMidlake who have recently been announced as support for the Flaming Lips.

Midlake

The below video is for the song “Young Bride” the first release from their forthcoming album “The Trials of Van Occupanther”. I love the song. It’s got the melodies, it’s got the great guitars and it has that violin thingy which reminds me so much of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or maybe “Hero”, a nice chinese influence which makes fits nicely with the rest of the song. I’ve listened to some of the tracks from their debut “Bamnan and slivercork”and am very impressed with the album with the strong songs on it being Roscoe and especially Balloon Maker though Tim Smith does sound like a drunk Thom Yorke in parts.

That Girl interviews the Conforming Monkey

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

What a blog post title. Wonder what Google will bring to this post with those words…
That Girl interviews the Conforming Monkey. This is the first time I heard about this blogger. Conforming Monkey blog. Look forward to the next edition of “Cyber Spin the Bottle” as it now seems to be nicknamed.

Sufjan Stevens – New album called Avalanche

Friday, April 7th, 2006

Via Good weather for Airstrikes is news of a new Album from Sufjan called Avalanche. Songs that didn’t make it to Illnois due to time constraints etc. Go to their site to hear the song Avalanche and get an acoustic version of Chicago.

And for your eyes and ears: