Damien Mulley

Neil Gaiman will be on Rattlebag. He’ll do some signings afterward. I can’t go, so go in my place.

Tuesday 15th November 2005. Rattlebag Public interview with Myles Dungan
Time: 7 pm
Venue: Studio 1 – RTE Radio Centre, Donnybrook, Dublin 4
Tickets: Free of charge but early booking is essential from 01 2083445

Blogging Prof Fails To Heed His Own Advice. Suggestions that his tenure may not have been renewed because of his blogging. “Academic bloggers interviewed say the most common problem they face is convincing their colleagues that their online activity does not come at the expense of scholarly research.”

IM Federation. Allowing the interconnecting of IM networks. Good plan. GTalk might join.

Looking at who visits me and what phrases they used in Google: 2nd in Google for “activism in ireland”.

4th for “Gay people adopting.”

Via Schneier Police say money-laundering conman is the greatest trickster they have faced. honestly, who here is saddened when someone robs a bank? Got to wonder why our mentality is like that.

I missed this great piece by Richard last week. (My own fault for relying on PoTB and IrishBlogs too much, remedied now by adding him to my blogroll.) It starts off talking about Barak Obama and the way poltics is discussed in the States and the way that the blogging community is quite healthy with political discourse.

I’m going to quote some chunks of text as I think they need highlighting. (Note: I use a lot of my blogposts as post-it notes to myself)

Other than Dermot Lacey and Indymedia, I don’t know of another blog(or disco board)/pol dialogue worth talking about in Ireland … it seems very unlikely indeed that there’s an analogy for the ‘dKos sphere’ here and its potential to influence a major decision – e.g. who should succeed De Bert.

Very true actually. But is this because Irish people are so unenthusiastic about politics and the way politics is played here? We really couldn’t be bothered.

I said to Disillusioned Lefty that the nature of Irish political thought and communication argues against blogs having a prominent role here (rather than being late adopters and/or issues of scale), but I’m willing to be proved spectacularly wrong.

Presently Richard is correct I would think. In the future maybe not, what can be done to prove Richard wrong in the future?

Look at Kos and then look at politics.ie or indymedia.ie or some of the fragmentary blogs with tiny audiences in this State and you see there are deep issues of quality, scale and influence. Ranting undergrads aren’t taken seriously anywhere in the world, nor should they be.

Nice bitchslap. True though. Even with Politics.ie and the Politics Board on boards.ie and a few other boards, there is not a lot of super heavy quality. OR maybe there is and we don’t notice it yet? PLUG: Nominate your fav political blog and post. While Richard goes on about Undergrads, would it not be good to introduce every politics student into the world of blogging. Have it as an assignment to maintain a blog?

There might be one way in which the Irish blogosphere might have a similar role, as a space in which narrative is teased out and unpacked. That is arguably happening in a sophisticated way in a couple of places here, though about foreign subjects. … But as of yet anyway it’s not happening in a meaningful way regarding Irish party politics itself.

So, again, how do we encourage the people and the ‘sphere to do it locally?

Irony of ironies, I wanted to reply to Richard but he appears not to have comments enabled on his blog. Just like me. Oooh, a fitting punishment for someone that does not enable comments on their blog is for them to be denied access to comments on others blogs. It would make me get off my lazy ass and fix comments here.

On a slightly similar note, myself and Dave were discussing the upcoming Irish General Election and that an unbiased and neutral fact-checking site is needed. Monitor all the hot-air that comes from politicos and see does it match what they said and what they did. This might be a way of reeling in those that may not have had an interest until now to get involved in political debate. Certainly would help make politics more transparent.

After doing a search for “The Inside”, I got back the following results:

Notice that it fences off results in the middle of list? These are all to do with fox and it suggests a new search? I’ve never seen new suggestions in the middle of a results list. Compare this to the Chris Pirillo results I got yesterday.

After a major endorsement from 20, more and more people are supporting the idea of the Irish Blog and Podcast Awards.

So it will go ahead, but as yet undecided are:

• Categories
• Location
• Date of event
• M.C.
• How the costs will be covered
• Judges
• Security for Twenty Major
• Security for everyone else in case Twenty does a Twenty

So yeah, only a small few things to decide. Add your thoughts here or if you don’t have a boards.ie account talk to me via email: damien (at) Mulley ( dot ) net

Via InsideMicrosoft comes talk about MSN and Yahoo IM working together to allow their networks to access each other.

This was predicted a while ago in a DrunkenBlog article called 1,2,3,4 — I Declare IM War.

InsideMicrosoft has screenshots of YahooIM with MSN contacts added in.

Next prediction from DrunkenBlog is GTalk becomes (and prob is already) amulti-protocol chat client for Windows. This means you can add in Yahoo and MSN and AOL.

Too stop this it looks like Yahoo, MSN and AOL will try and lock out GTalk by making people upgrade to new clients which will allow the services to talk to each other but not with GTalk.

Specifically, sometime in the near future, all three services are going to be releasing new versions of their software and “Sunsetting” all older versions of their Windows clients.

Nothing like a new war in the tech world to entertain the nerds!

Tour operator will pay for soccer fans’ flights home.

I heard Tony Burney on Morning Ireland this morning where he stated

“Customers are hard to get, but extremely hard to keep. ”

Burney provided hotel accommodation, meals and pocket money for soccer fans who hadn’t budgeted for a few extra days on the Mediterranean island.

That’s the attitude one should have for your customers. Go out on a limb for them. It should pay off for Tony too with all the free advertising he’s getting. The man should start a blog and keep the public updated.

The BBC talks about blogs and marketing scum in a story on their site. Specifically it talks about some utter fucktard (isn’t that a great word?) who commented on a post that the venerable Tom Coates wrote on the immensely personal subject of his estranged father. The fucktard in question was fictional, a character used to market a cleaning product that sounded like something one would be charged to perform on a girl in a brothel.

People call these new guerilla marketing stunts “viral” marketing. A wart is a virus isn’t it? So is herpes? It is vile marketing more than viral marketing.

Anyways… there’s a link to a post on my site with the link text public-spiritedness. Cheers BBC!

Yesterday Yahoo! brought out their podcast section and gave iTunes serious competition. Today Yahoo brings out their Blog search which is integrated with Yahoo! News Search. Yahoo! says the results include blogs, Flickr photos and My Web links. But Tom Raftery pointed out some flaws, big ones really:

the blog search results are hidden away in a sidebar of the main results on the right hand side of the page. This is the part of many web pages which contains ads and consequently is ignored subconsciously by most users.

Yup, they do look like ads. Shame really. Surely they could integrate them into the main results in some way?

Speaking of Yahoo, via Jeremy Zawodny comes information that kids really don’t use Yahoo at all. Google is it for them along with MySpace and FaceBook. Murdoch’s purchase may have been worth it after all.

Nathan Weinberg points out that Google has brought in tagging of a sort:

Google has silently added a Bookmarks feature to My Search History, enabling you to quickly tag and comment any web page you’ve visited.

There is also an auto-complete ability for tags. Trés handy.

I was doing a search for Chris Pirillo so I could link to his blog post on Gada.be when Google returned the results displayed below:

Quite interesting. Never saw this before, well at least not in this format. Blog Post Titles displayed as links. Is this new or am I just not with the times? Doesn’t seem to work when I do searches for other big bloggers.

Anyways Gada.be doth rock.