Damien Mulley

Thank God we’re not as bad as the states yet: Justice Department Censors Supreme Court Quote.

Though we still have high levels of poverty like America.

Research has found that up to 120,000 Irish children are living in consistent poverty.

Also, Via Freestater: Carole Coleman talks more about her famous Bush interview.

I notice more and more of the sites I’m reading via Bloglines are injecting ads into their RSS feeds. Some I’m fine with, others I do not like at all and am getting to the stage where I will hit the unsubscribe button. There are plenty of other sites out there now with good content. Gone are the days when content rich sites about niche topics were rare. The new world web is improving on depth and quality. It will be harder for sites to keep me there, one way to PFO me is to harass me with very disruptive ads.

[Apologies for the shit image quality, only noticed it after I uploaded.]

BoingBoing has ads which aren’t that bad, but I think this is because the average amount of text per post on the site allows a better view. If there were less text per post it would be awful as the same ad is repeated nonstop. I was getting peeved with the ads for A History of Violence of late. Guys, if you only have one ad, do you need to repeat it 20 times in one RSS river? Surely the one ad would suffice?

Engadget have ads too but they are text ads. They’re unobtrusive too. A nice “sponsored by” at the end of every post. Again though after reading it 20 times in one RSS river it becomes annoying but is less annoying than every other ad form I’ve seen out there, so far.

Coolhunting is another offender. It can quite piss off my eyes and brain when I see the same ad in the feed view every few centimeters. Added to that is the adbundance of photos that they use in every post, which when you ad image ads to the RSS river, you get a very busy, cluttered and confusing view. Text ads would work so much better in this case.

The worst offender right now is Slate Magazine. In fariness the posts are only summaries of the stories, not the stories themselves. The ads are bigger than the text most of the time! Awful.

So, what should be done with ads in RSS? Personally I don’t want to see them but that will never happen for a site owner that wants to make money. So, if they were to do them. I think there should be a few rules.

• If you have only one image ad, then space it out to every 4 or 5 posts.
• I’d prefer to see posts which have categories to have category “sponsored by” text ads.
• If you insist on image ads then have some script that does a word count and if a post has less than x words, an ad does not get tacked on. If you have 3 short posts then you’d be allowed to tack on an ad then.
• You could also do what Kevin Kelly does, reviews good meaningful products and link to them via an Amazon Associates link, one book review a day would work, or whatever frequency you do reviews. Just make sure they are genuine reviews of things you like.

SiliconRepublic today did a profile of Digital Rights Ireland. Digital Rights Ireland is the result of a few people looking for an Irish EFF.

Exciting times are ahead.

Details:

• Name will be Digital Rights Ireland.
• Organisation will promote, defend, educate and campaign on civil liberties in a digital age.
• Non-profit company being set-up and articles of Association etc currently being registered with Companies Office.
• Founding members combine legal, technological and public advocacy expertise.
• Statement of intent to be issued at TechCamp but will launch at subsequent date.
• Web site under construction.
• International aspect: will link with groups like Edri and Privacy International.

The Directors of this organisation are: Bernie Goldbach, Colm MacCarthaigh, Damien Mulley, Antoin O Lachtnain and TJ McIntyre – Chairman.

If you are interested in helping out or want to keep informed on what DRI are doing then subscribe to the mailing list here: http://lists.stdlib.net/mailman/listinfo/dri-interest

ResearchBuzz notes that Yahoo has released RSS feeds of their image slideshows. Another step past Google. Google really is slow to bring about RSS feeds of search results, news items and so on. I wonder why? Lost Ad revenue?

Networking on the Network. Nice guide.

The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker. Spotting a trend?

Finding Your Calling. Good tips. Kind of why I’m now a Law student. Civil rights campaigning here I come. 🙂

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. Mind maps.

How to Make Your Speaking Easier and More Effective.

BreakingNews.ie reported on Clinton�s bronze golf ball stolen from Kerry sculpture. But have a look at the damned picture, doesn’t look like a pic of someone taking a piss?

Yeah, I’ll go hide behind my keyboard now.

Lots and lots of stories about the numbers of “non-nationals” living in Ireland of late especially that of the number of Polish people in Ireland. There does seem to be a lot of Polish people about. There’s now a Polish TV show on new Dublin TV station, a new Dublin to Warsaw Bus Route, there are posters for the Polish Presidential election around Dublin and Irish Eagle reported on a Newsweek Article about the Polish in Ireland which gave the impression they endure quite a shock when they get here. No streets paved with gold.

Even in Cork we have Polish taxi drivers, who refrshingly don’t talk about the bloody immigrants coming into our country stealing our dole or other nefarious crap and we have Polish bars in Cork – one on Albert Quay and one in the basement of a bar on MacCurtain Street.

So where are the Polish Bloggers in the Irish boggersphere? 🙂 Are they too busy doing the work that us nouveau riche Paddys refuse to do, now that we have an extra few shillings a week? Surely we should be seeing a Polish section on boards.ie or even Boards.pl being added to Mr. Breslin’s expanding empire? A .pl domain costs about 50 Euros

It would be good to see the views of these new future citizens, especially on their take on Ireland and the Irish. Irish people are biased and we cannot judge our culture or our attitudes to others fairly. We’re part of the system and it is hard to stand outside and be critical. So says Edward T. Hall anyway.

It irks me at times when Irish people demand that new citizens/migrant workers/refugees need to adhere to our laws and our culture. Culture changes and cultural change cannot be governed. Bringing new views and attitudes and new blood to this country is good. Just like the Irish strongly influenced the culture of the UK and the USA, these new visitors to our shores are going to change our culture. Cuchulainn couldn’t fight the sea, Irish people can’t keep their Irish culture from changing.

It’d be good to get an insight into the current views of those moving to Ireland and working for and with the Irish. Bring on the Polish, Nigerian, Estonian and Philipino bloggers!

Michele was talking about making AdSense work on web forums and how hard it is to get regulars to click on ads because they are so used to the site they are just about blind to AdSense. Michele talks about a method used by some of interfering with the river of information in a thread by juxtapositioning ads between posts in a thread.

To me that is just being rude and just a way to trip up and ignorantly disrupt viewing a thread. It would inspire me to just write a greasemonkey script to block the ads.

What I think may work instead is something like an AdSense Ad mixed in with Google Suggest, which brings you to a site search page.

So, on a forum where someone talks about their XP font size issue, they see an Ad from Google stating “Search Google for XP Font Size issues” which brings you to a nice results page with a few Ads. You get a cut of those ads. An example below for a DVD search:

Importantly enough I think they have to say they are Google links since Google is almost a guarantee of quality. As well as ads they are quite a handy tool for those looking for information. So why not make money from those people who can’t find what they’re looking for from your site?

In fact search results too for VBulletin forums and the like should have this as the default. Results from VBulletin lined up with results from Google or an option to “Try Google for the same search.” To me this would be far less intrusive and would be a genuine way of helping users of your site.

Further Edit 10-10-05: Add Podcasts to these awards too? Some people say yes.
(another edit: New boards.ie thread on it.

The Irish Bloggersphere in my opinion is now maturing a bit and becoming a real community. Certainly the addition of IrishBlogs.ie and Planet of The Blogs to the web has made an immense difference to the Irishbloggersphere. Hell even my boggerspere neoligism made it into the Tribune. Maybe it’s time for the Irish Blog Awards?

But this idea isn’t unique. Seems that bastion of balance – the Freedom Institute came up with their very own Irish Blogs Award 2005, way back in urm February. Not sure how the voting system worked. They officially called it the “Liberty Blog Awards for 2005” though, so maybe if another Irish Blogs Awards happened they wouldn’t mind too much? And if they did it would only generate more attention for these awards. Even better.

So, to me it’s obvious that Slugger O’Toole will wipe the boards when it comes to any awards involving Ireland and blogging. When it comes to humour, well then Twenty Major will kick ass. (BTW he comes in the top 10 in Google for just the word “twemty”.) He doesn’t even need a special “Best use of ‘Cunt’ ” in a post. Though (NSFW Link) Mr Bing’s Blog entry tonight might.

But even if Slugger and Twenty clean up, it would be good for the citizens of the blogger/boggersphere to nominate bloggerss and posts and have them line up shoulder to shoulder and be recognized as the cream of the crop. Not entirely sure what the categories should be though. How about?

• Best Blogger
• Best Blog Post
• Best New Blogger
• Best Contribution to the Boggersphere (Tech wise)
• Best Potential Blogger i.e. Someone we’d like to see blogging

Now since comments are fucked on this blog, if you want to comment you’re going to have to post about it on your own blog. Oh and if you do that it means more people will read about the idea. That can only be a good thing.

UPDATE 09 Oct 2005:

Richard from FI emailed me to let me know that there wouldn’t be an issue with using the name Irish Blogs Awards. So there we have it. And now he’s blogged about it too!

Kevin over on Disillusioned Lefty liked the idea and Mr. Free Stater likes it too. Progressive Ireland also endorses this.

Further Update: Should we also include Podcasts?

One has to wonder with some of the greatest minds in the world working in Google, whether they really are going to be working on secret applications for the US Govt or Military. Sure, they can still do no evil, “do not be evil” is just a philosophical viewpoint.

In John Battelle’s post about Google Reader he states that Google is looking into facial recogition. Man. That’s quite interesting. Wonder how long before you have “Search Google personals for guys that look like Matt Damon. ” That’s just one selfish application. Ssssh, I’m allowed to indulge! Here again is the quote:

Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos. This is a first step toward ID’ing faces, then searching by face

Tags: googlereader facialrecogniton irishblogs

Google Reader – simple bloody name. Not a bad interface. The best thing is you can import and export OPML files. Going to import my bloglines OPML now.

What else? TAGS! Well, labels, as per GMail. Handy handy!

More on John Battelle’s site AND a very very interesting snippet which I will post in another post, just to get more Google juice. Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos. This is a first step toward ID’ing faces, then searching by face.

Hmm. Anyone else think the Google site is very slowass? Slower than Technorati at the moment!

EDIT: 15 minutes later and it is still importing my 120 feeds. Jesus this is painful!

EDIT 2: What horseshit. Beta it may be, but Google are the ones that made Beta something so professional that it outclassed release candidate material. Not this time.

Tags: googlereader bloglines