Author Archive

The Homosexual Agenda

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Rob helped me get Homosexual Agenda up and running and doing something. I regged the domain ages ago as I loved the way the right wing Christian nuts, mostly in the States, were always on about the homosexual agenda or the gay agenda. So I thought I’d put up a piss-take website. Version 0.2 was a group blog. That didn’t last as we all had our own blogs anyway, so this is version 0.3 and is just a simple aggregator. It’s not about segregating the homosexualists from the straights in the bloggersphere, but merely a way to see what a subsection of the larger community are discussing.

Send a copy of 1984 to all our TDs?

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Via BoingBoing – Newspaper sending all elected reps a copy of 1984. A nice publicity stunt to get attention to the US Govt spying on their people. It’s a cheap enough method of getting the press and the public tuned into issues of Governments abusing the civil and human rights of their constituents.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to do the same here. Have people send in their secondhand copies of 1984 to the likes of Digital Rights Ireland who will then send a book to each of the 166 TDs and 60 Senators in Ireland as a reminder about the Irish and EU Data Retention laws. As well as highlighting the scary data retention law it would encourage people to read a classic piece of literature. No, I don’t think we should send the TDs the cliff notes version of the book itself. Unless we wanted to be exceedingly cheeky.

My bloggers, my friends, thank you.

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

I have to say that 2005 was definitely the year of the blog in Ireland. A community quickly came together thanks in no small part to the IrishBlogs and the PlanetOfTheBlogs aggregators. I’ve made a good few friends and hardly any enemies from this blogging lark. I’ve also found a new play toy called United Irelander. But more of that in the new year 😉

The quality of content coming from the small but growing boggersphere community is fantastic and we need to encourage more people to join this community and be their guides and mentors. We have the like of the lefties interviewing us, so we can learn more about ourselves, even silly memes that fly around the boggersphere faster than UI gets taken to task by the feminazis are good things for becoming more comfortable with each other. We have reporters, academics, artists, politicians, business people and social satirists in the mix and it’s enriching our daily reading. This is such a good thing. We even have a lovely Russian lady giving her views on things. I’m still looking for the elusive Polish bloggers though.

We also seem to be reaching out further to cyberspace and making our presence felt. We had Robert Scoble over here to visit Cork and Dublin and he helped advertise other Irish bloggers. Sites like PodLeaders and Newsroom.ie are interviewing international tech leaders as well as local tech and business influencers. Us Irish bloggers are doing well!

We had a good few events like TechCamp and IT@Cork where the bloggers got together. Most recently being the Dublin blogger meetup where the real TwentyMajor may or may not have appeared.

It was through the Irish blogs community that the Digital Rights Ireland group formed and they’ve already shown their worth with massive media coverage. 2006 is looking like an amazing year for them, but I’m biased being a director. 🙂

Now that I don’t have work for a while, college is over til Jan 3rd and both the lobby groups I have fun with are slowing down for the holidays, I really really really guarantee I’ll do something about the Irish Blog Awards.

So, to get to my point at long last, I’d like to thank everyone who blogs because you contribute a great deal of knowledge to my daily life now and educate me non-stop. Keep blogging, keep your current high standards, keep encouraging your fellow bloggers and try and get more and more people to blog.

Linux as a Windows screensaver

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

Found this via Slashdot. Having Linux run as a screensaver in Windows. Pretty nifty and other words of praise.

Want some cheesecake? – Dossing Times now taking orders

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

Place your orders now for a chocolate orange and rum cheesecake with chocolate chip base. Nice one. I’ll have two please. Do you deliver?

Screw it. I’m off to see Sigur Ros again.

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

March 27th. Manchester Apollo. Anyone else interested in going?

Will the real TwentyMajor please stand up

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

… and say “cunt”. It appears there was a Twenty impostor at the blog drinkies last night. Plot getting thicker than the average comment poster on UI’s blog.

Interview with Ina

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

Another Newsroom.ie interview this one is with Ina O’Murchu.

Especially for Dave Winer

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

Good ole Penny Arcade. Thanks Brian.

Dead .ie domains – On the third day will they rise again?

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

I already mentioned the Blacknight €30 ex vat .ie domain deal and they will be taking orders on the 3rd day of January. Looking at the list of deleted deleted .ie domains I saw quite a few which could be used to produced a cheap site which may get enough traffic to make some money from Google Ads.

mum.ie – I’m sure someone could come up with Amazon affiliate links and so forth to generate revenue for mothers’ day and birthday type presents. An editor’s choice type site which if it starts making money could eventually start selling its own products.

drinklink.ie – Google maps with cash machine locations. Add in paid placements and coupons for pubs in the area and you might make a meager bit of cash for a small bit of work.

autos.ie, autosearch.ie, autotrading.ie – We all have cars. Use you imagination. Should be able to make something out of this, again with little investment.

bestprices.ie – Is there a Froogle API yet? Froogle, Amazon, who else have APIs? An AJAX search box for something likr this would be sweet too.

bookshop.ie – Nuff said really. Again just an Amazon affiliate but with new content via a blog interface. This would be ideally run by people who are cultured and enjoy good books and marketed to people who desire to be cultured. Hardly any of us are big into literature. We’d happily buy or subscribe to someone else’s taste though. If this was run by someone like Sinéad I’d probably buy a lot of books. Without totally generalising America and Americans, this is what they do. They import their culture from other places. The middleman makes a killing. Look at Martha Stewart telling middle class people how to act like snobs. Perfect! No, you’re not a Martha Sinéad.

computerbath.ie – Excuse me while I take time out to say: WTF! What the hell is a computer bath?

familynames.ie – Lots of begorrah, find your family name type stuff out there. Again, add in some Google maps stuff. Maybe the .ie part of the address could market it to appear more legit.

familyplanning.ie – This would be perfect for rightwing Christian anti-contraception groups to use.

homework.ie – Share your homework online. Oh what a fuzz that would generate. 🙂

netcafe.ie – Google maps, locations, sell skype minutes, sell ads for youth hostels etc. etc.

reviews.ieStructured blogging anyone?

What would also be interesting and perhaps JMCC could help out here, is to parse this list through an app to see what the page rank for the domain is as well as how many inbound links there are for the domains.