Damien Mulley

John Battelle is reporting that Google is getting into injecting ads into RSS feeds. Dave Winer recently took Google to task on their lack of interest/support of RSS.

Dave said: “To this day Google doesn’t do anything interesting with RSS feeds. It can’t even display feeds in an intelligent way. Perhaps it’s NIH that’s keeping them from embracing RSS as their two main competitors have. Whatever it is, Yahoo is dashing in front, with Microsoft close behind.

Why isn’t Google in the race? To me it remains a mystery.”

I’ve noted before that GMail may be doing RSS integration but who isn’t at this stage in the game ? I would really like a way of searching for all the irishblogs using Google and without resorting to doing a complicated filetype search.

Battelle has also shown some new forms of non-text ads from Google. Seems they are really putting pressure on the likes of DoubleClick and their ilk by offering traditional forms of webadvertising now. Heh “Traditional webadvertising”, we’re getting old.

Continuing the RSS and ads theme comes evidence that Slashdot is now displaying ads in their RSS feeds.

To finish off all my daily Google fetish comes news of a possible new way of getting rid of spam called TrustRank which uses a small seed set of “good” websites and trusts their links more and with some mathematical magic can dump all those spam sites. Handy.

Via MetaFilter. The Editor of the Dallas Morning News was having a bit of fun.

Institute of Backup Trauma – Clever marketing video for LiveVault backup solutions. I might make everyone in here watch this, though with John Cleese in this video I doubt a lot of arm twisting will be needed.

And from the mind of Chris Cunningham comes Rubber Johnny:

Johnny is a hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child, kept locked away in a basement. With only his feverish imagination and his terrified dog for company, he finds ways to amuse himself in the dark.

In the big picture it might not amount to much but Scoble, telling his bosses he thinks they did the wrong thing could very well be a turning point for corporate and employee blogging. Man, to tell your boss publicly that you believe what he did was wrong takes balls and backbone. Well done Robert. No matter which side Scoble took, to do so in public when your boss is Steve Balmer is something else.

This has yet to turn white hot but I think it will and it could really be a turning point for the power of blogs. Scoble was I suppose hired to blog, but will he be fired? Anil said “Nobody has ever been fired for blogging” but will it hold true ? Time is going to tell. Read all the comments on Scoble’s blog. Wow. Everyone is weighing in. Though I’ve not seen any commentary yet on the irishblogs about it I bet there will be. There has been commentary about the MS decision on the discrimination bill alright but not on Scoble taking a stand.

Meanwhile Matt Haughey says this MSM line in sand stuff is bullshit. And I quote You are the media. I am the media. Blogs are a fixture in the mainstream. So when you decry the “MSM” as an imaginary villain, I know I’m done with your site.

Here in the Boggersphere the homophobic Blood Transfusion Service classes MSM as “Men who have sex with men”. It took me a while to figure out that the blog pundits weren’t talking about gay saunas and orgies. I swear I never pictured Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls at it.

Oh I see Efferal saw he was in the Sunday Tribune, I wonder who linked to his piece first ? *Whistles innocently*

Looking around the irishblogs tonight three posts caught my eye. Firstly GMail suspended Dave’s account for 24hours for a some unclear reason and the support mail he got back was a total cop-out.

The other thing is that Ciaran is looking for a Flickr Pro account, anyone want to give one to him ?

Lastly John mentions the Irish Times quotes a user from Boards about IRMA. It’s a pity they didn’t quote some of very intelligent posts some balanced posters made about it. Still good to see Boards get a mention. I was told today that the head of a large ICT company was sending journalists to “The Boards” to have a look at peoples opinions of certain technology products. Boards.ie is growing but will Planet Of the Blogs be more influential ?

This post’s title comes from a Rufus Wainwright song that was playing as I started the post. Oh what a world lyrics. Very catchy and builds as it samples Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and brings it into a big bang of an ending.

There’s been a bit of chatter today in the irishblogs about Ryanair banning staff using phone chargers but to me it’s all hype. It extends the myth that they’re the low fares airline (see I’m even using their own phrase ! ). It just makes people believe think “Wow they’re really saving as much as they can to keep prices down.”

Fair play to them for this idea. Again they get media attention two days after O’Leary dressed as a cardinal. Maybe people should instead talk about the Ryanir employee victimisation case.

Via BoingBoing.

A lecturer who had his laptop stolen goes on a rant telling the thief what is going to befall him. I love what he has to say. I would think a lot of it is a bluff but it’s a good bluff. Torrent of the video of the lecturer getting medieval on his ass. .zip audio copy of the warning.

Google now has a My Search History option. (Found this out via John Battelle’s SearchBlog. About time. This will be hugely useful to me. This should make me work a lot more efficiently online now.

From the site:

My Search History offers you:

I really like this and the calendar way of looking at information is going to prove handy.

Overall, this is good but it could be better. Right now “My Search History” saves your Google activity information such as search queries, the results that you clicked as well as the date and time of your searches.

What it doesn’t do (yet) is keep a history of what happens after you leave the google site and move on to other sites and see what you clicked on then. This could be done via the toolbar though I guess. What would also be of benefit and could be the killer of Del.licio.us is a Google Toolbar add-on that allows you to bookmark sites you visit and tag them. Google could do this quickly enough too with the engineers they have. Bookmarks stored on Google and with a firefox extension loaded on your current browser. Who needs to worry about backing up bookmarks then ?

There’s a lot of talk on irishblogs about the new Pope but hardly any at all from the LGBT bloggers. Exceptions being Fetch on Queer.ie and Efferal who wrote a satirical news piece:

“Welcoming the Election, the Irish government, announced new measures to fall in line with the new totalitarium regime. Attendance at mass will be compulsory and all intrinsically evil bars will be shut down.

The authorities were quick to act on such orders. The raid on the george happened just after 9pm. The patrons were forcibly removed before the windows and doors were boarded up. A lone blonde galwegian sat sobbing at the side of the road, asking over and over “where will I go now.”

On the LGBT forums though there is quite active and angry debate, such as the Boards.ie LGB Forum , Gay Community News discussion of the new Pope. Adolf must be Proud is the thread on GayCork with the thread on Gaire being God Bless Our Saint The New Pope.

Perhaps once they get themselves submitted to the best Irish RSS aggregator or start tagging their posts with irishgayblogs, then we’ll see them pop up more.