Author Archive

This Google Print thing – Not so sure about that

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

Google is really really championing the cause to scan in all the worlds books so we can find excerpts from them, which will then allow us to do what exactly? Buy them from a reseller that has a deal with Google? Google are unclear about this. They’re also unclear as to whether they’ll give copies of all these digitized books to the vendors themselves so they can use them. What they really seem to be doing though is disregarding the wishes of those who own the rights to books and do what they want. Clever spindoctoring has the publishers looking like bad guys and Google with puppy dog eyes going “But all we wanted to do is help people find any information they wanted and the band publishing guys are stopping us. *pout*.”

I’d be for this more if they scanned them in with the permission of the publishers first, that when a search lands on a result there will be a link to buy the book from the publisher or a an option to get an electronic copy of the book.

Dave Winer has been one of the few geeks speaking out against Google Print but he makes some very good points.

“The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in,” said Alex Macgillivray, an attorney at Google.

Of course, that makes sense, you nod your head, how true, but then you realize that the analogy doesn’t work. If card catalogs were as good at selling books as Google claims Google Print will be, they’d batch-submit all their publications using the marvel of computer technology (they know how to write scripts in NY too, or in a pinch, they can hire a wizard from California). No one has to “come by” in the age of the Internet. How quaint. And misleading.

That’s the issue. Google is making this opt-out not opt-in. So you have to go to the effort of saying NO or otherwise they’ll scan your content. I guess their attitude is that there are no robots.txt files for books so they can do what they want. Search online is opt-out so they must use the same mentality for everything else. Perhaps the publisher should create a new robots.txt for their web content and exclude all things Google until Google start behaving.

Google are not doing this to be altruistic, they’re doing this to make money, off new content they don’t own and that is NOT in the public domain.

Dave adds more thoughts to the debate.

Why doesn’t Google do a good thing and link to libraries when the search results come back? Though I doubt the publishers would want that either. They’d want people to buy the books. Still, amke it opt-in, plenty of small publishers who’ll take this up and eventually the other publishers might do the same. Or join the Open Content Alliance.

Mogwai Temple Bar Music Centre January 7th 2006

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

2 tickets purchased.

Blockquotes and the lazyweb

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

Wouldn’t it be quite handy that if someone on another site linked to your blog post, and had some of it quoted and anyone that follows the link, lands on your site and sees the quote highlighted? Maybe the plugin is out there already? I know WordPress has the Google search keyword referral plugin, but that only looks for keywords in the URI the visitor came from.

I suppose what is needed is a plugin that does a text comparison of the URI the visitor came from and the one on the current webpage. After the first visitor it can tell what was quoted and adjust itself for every new visitor from the linking URI.

Thursday Linkages

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Apple pays tribute to Rosa Parkes and others discuss other tributes that Apple have done.

Apparently 20% of our genes have been patented. Nice to know that if I ever wanted to clone my eyes I’d have to pay some company.

Via Fiona is news that Chomsky will be giving a talk in Dublin on January 18th.

Sony Bravia ad. The reason they dumped those 1000s of bouncy balls down a hill in San Francisco. Fantastic colours. Grrr to Quicktime 7!

Cool Swedish website that discusses ads. And another Ad site.

IrelandOffline Survey – 66% read blogs , 25% listen to podcasts

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

In the process of writing a press release and tidying up the survey data for the recent IrelandOffline Survey. We surveyed in total just under 1400 people. The survey was filled in online so those doing it would know the web well enough.

Do you read blogs?

  • No – 440 33.92%
  • Yes – 857 66.08%

Have you listened to podcasts?

  • No – 950 74.10%
  • Yes – 332 25.90%

Lots more interesting stuff on the way. Stay tuned for the press releases

Liam Lawlor fiasco: It wasn’t bloggers who jumped the gun.

Monday, October 24th, 2005

The Indo and some other tabloid rag jumped the gun big time. I love how big media slam the likes of bloggers jumping the gun yet now we have the biggest selling Sunday Paper (apart from those tabloids) writing a vile piece of journalism yesterday. At least in the online world of blogs if you get something wrong you’ll have a few 100 bloggers on your ass correcting you within hours or even minutes. The public in essence is your editor.

Is this what Newsroom.ie could be?

Sunday, October 23rd, 2005

A good while back I talked about the idea of Newsroom.ie and the potential to use it for Citizen Journalism. (Comments now work on that post.) 🙂

This evening I happen upon Common Times. From their blurb:

CommonTimes is a social bookmarking community for news readers. Peope like you determine the headlines by adding stories to our site. Become a citizen editor, it’s easy to get started

They provide integration with Bloglines and Delicious.

Read their Ten ways to use Common Times.

Looks fun. Nothing groundbreaking in the idea.

An Irish Bloggersphere Bittorrent Tracker?

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

As I’ve said before the new Video iPod will change it all. Like it did for Podcasting Apple and iTunes will be a massive provider of homemade content. TV as we know it wil cease to be. It’s already started with episodes of Lost available from iTunes at $2 a pop.

With broadband being so pervasive in all but the most backward of countries people will find it easier and easier to put up content on their website and have their friends (from around the world or even friends from just around the corner) download the podcasts or videocasts or whatever they created. If they are a popular blogger or the favourite child in a 1000 strong clan, the 50mb homemade rockgod video they created will soon start to eat up bandwidth on their server and their hosting company could get pissed.

Taking the service Prodigem have where they scan your RSS feed for enclosures and if they find anything create a torrent for it and applying it to the Irish Blog aggregation services, you could have a distributed media library for Irish culture. Homemade videos, live (legal) recordings of concerts, interviews with Irish emigrants, hell you could even have clips from RTE News if given permission.

I wonder could this get an Arts Council grant? To prevent abuse or copyrighted material going on to it, perhaps the content would also need to have a tag accompanying it, otherwise all the fun videos TCaL put on their site would also be distributed.

It would be good though to have a central distribution point of Irish podcasts and videocasts and whatever else is in store for citizen made and distributed media and use Bittorrent to save on server load.

Pimp my blog, kindly sponsored by

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

So you may have noticed that my blog has all been pimped and now has comments and everything. Am also on a new server. This is all thanks to Michele Neylon who bless him worked his ass off all last evening to get the shittiest Movable Type install to move over to WordPress. It wasn’t easy. Now if he asked me to mention the new Blacknight Blogger Offer I would have told him to get knotted (after he did all the work) but he didn’t. He didn’t ask for anything in return. So, anyway, I’d just like to say thanks and if you need hosting with a pre-installed WordPress option then talk to Michele.

A bloggosphere funded start-up?

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005

Kevin Burton needs cash for his Tailrank idea. Instead of getting in a VC he is selling “Golden Tickets” to access the Tailrank beta in order to buy servers.

So screw the VCs, let the community fund this start-up and let him keep his focus.

Tailrank in Kevin’s words is: “A tool for social discovery of cool news” or “A personalized recommendation engine for the Long Tail where you and your contacts control the ranking!”

I’ve added my 20 bucks to paypal. I’m not really concerned about getting a Beta account but more interested in whether this idea works or not and whether people send in the 20 bucks to get a Beta account or as a way of helping a developer get his idea working without having to get VCs involved.

It might be a worthy idea for the Irish Bloggersphere if all the various bloggers contributed either financially or resource-wise to some project that made our Irish Blogging Community better. As I mentioned before, one of the reasons that there will be an Irish Blog Awards is to further the community spirit we currently have and to keep it strong when the ‘sphere rapidly expands.

So, good luck with this idea Kevin!