Author Archive

Guaranteed to be the most watched video on YouTube

Friday, April 24th, 2009

In Ireland at least

KildareStreet.com – Gamechange

Friday, April 24th, 2009

John Handelaar finally released it after some of us were made aware and were sitting on the edges of our seats waiting for it. What is it? Every word, every phrase, every double-speaking utterance from the Oireachtas since 2004 (for now). All searchable, sortable and subscribable. You can even email subscribe for keywords or phrases and get alerted.

KildareStreet.com, they’re working for you afterall.

Cassidy Donie
Photo owned by Fiona MacGinty (cc)

Fluffy Links – Thursday April 23rd 2009

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Adrian has a nice way of tackling those moaning about Twitter.

Via Fergus: One London policeman talks about the stupid terrorism line.

Via Justin: The Emergency has a blog.

Toilets for aliens. Really!

Zip your Tweetie. Twink is on Twitter?

Yeah I was on Q&A.

Got this from somewhere, RC plane gets a bit too close to a jet plane:

And via Kottke is the bike-fu from this guy:

eircom innovation fund 2009 – Get your idea in before April 30th

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

100k split between four companies/ideas:

1. €16,000 cash sum;
2. One-day business mentoring session from senior eircom execs to the value of €3,000;
3. €1,000 per month for six months post-launch management fee

Full details on the eircom Labs page.

Areas to consider for a pitch:

  • Content (e.g. video, short films, animations, UGC)
  • Movies and TV (e.g. programme recommendations, listings application, information aggregation, content search, fan communities, recommender systems, discovery tools e.g. data visualisations))
  • Games (e.g. Flash games, game communities, platforms, multiplayer games, persistent worlds, avatar-based social networks, game creation tools, ratings, reviews, gambling)
  • News (e.g. personalised news gathering, news aggregation, news submission tools, communities of interest, domain-specific news services)
  • Music (e.g. Internet radio, streaming / OD services, search / recommendations / personalisation, community tools)
  • Sport (e.g. communities, results aggregation, fan communities, results prediction, betting, games)
  • Widgets (e.g. any widget(s) based on the above or additional categories)

Fluffy Links – Wednesday April 22nd 2009

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Loving this. Songs as dialogue boxes.

Great post from Twenty on health spas in Ireland. I think.

Rick talks about the RTE player but Rick *is* the RTE playa really.

Slow to point this out. Another foodie blog: I Can Haz Cook.

So who went to see the MAXRoam racing car?

Via the Enterprise Ireland mailing list, SEO Guide for Irish Businesses eBook from Cube. (PDF)

Check out the Robo Rugby finals.

What a joke, first they shut down a site because it mentioned a football fixture and now they’re going after a Twitter account.

Genius. Asking people on Twitter not to download pirate copies of movies.

Reelgood show themselves off:

Fluffy Links – Monday April 20th 2009

Monday, April 20th, 2009

So Lily Collison is yet another Collison family member that’s blogging. This blog post is one of my favourites but there are loads more. Mother , Father and three sons now have blogs, though not all blog.

Tommy meanwhile has started a Youth Discussion forum.

We got Ze Frank a duckie for his talk.

Want a businessy looking Twitter background?

Meanwhile, good post from Paul about a Google Penalty.

Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day is tomorrow. In Dublin. No Cork like?
11.30am / 1.00pm: IFSC George’s Dock
2.30pm / 4.00pm: Grand Canal Dock (near Fresh)
5.30pm / 7.00pm: Near Heuston Luas Station

Win a Wine Course.

Green Party caption competition.

Wilco are coming back to Dublin.

Yeah, very WTF.

Birdhouse In Your Soul – Literal Video Version

Terry Prone – Not a fan of bloggers or journos who blog

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Some amazing alliteration as always.

in setting out to strengthen privacy legislation the government could hamstring legitimate media — which operate under guidelines, internal checks and balances, and have a capacity for educated caution which amounts to some form of self-censoring — while doing nothing to stop the venting of venomous bilge that constitutes the bulk of what’s euphemistically dubbed “citizen journalism”

It must be said, however, that the openness of journalists to examine all sides of possible legislation is currently complicated by their promiscuous fascination with internet-based offerings.

You don’t get orthopaedic surgeons doing knee replacements in their leisure time without charge. Yet you get journalists writing blogs for nothing, their urge for self-expression obscuring the fact that they are undermining their own employers.

Flash Mob at Stag’s Head, Dublin tonight at 8pm – Wear an A

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Flash Mob at Stag’s Head tonight at 8pm. Draw a circle on your hand. #zefrank #sciencegallery

Update:
Have an A on your hand.

Bring on the Overreactions

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

We need more boy who cried wolf stories online and people remembering them.

The recent Easter holiday flareup online about Amazon removing gay and lesbian books was an interesting study on the way people react to things online and the way people react to reactions online. We also saw how one of the largest online companies in the world didn’t react at all. In a world where news spreads through twitter in minutes to the 6 million+ people on it, Amazon took days to react to this situation and naturally the hype got worse as each hour went on.

Fiery Sunset 3
Photo owned by frobo512 (cc)

People started moaning about the fact that reactions are instant online and rumours spread at the speed of light. Really?! About how this is why bloggers and journalists are different and journalists are better than bloggers for this. Kind of like the real world so. Though I’ve found with journalists and bloggers that journalists get more wrong about me when they write about me than bloggers.

People complained there was no restraint and nobody waited to check all the facts.
Kind of like the real world so except people were trying to contact Amazon and find out what was happening and were getting mixed messages. People in the offline world don’t generally ring the press office of Fianna Fail if their friend tells them some news about Brian Cowen do they?

In a world of instant communications everything is going to be you know, instant. The complaints that “people should know better” are a bit rich when the same trend offline happens online. Do people demand restraint in a neighbourhood and community when news spreads?

What was interesting with the Amazon case was that a percentage of the online community were not instantly sold on the idea that there was some conspiracy going on or the reclassifying of Gay and Lesbian books was a new policy. The filtering was real, anyone doing a search saw this. The reasons behind it were unclear even when someone emailed/rang amazon to ask what was happening. Taken to extremes the ever bitchy and wrong Owen Thomas (not deserving of a link) said it was a hacker that did this and he condemned people jumping on bandwagons when in fact this was proven untrue and it was Amazon that did the filtering.

A few days later and Amazon still are not being clear on this and are refusing to explain exactly what happened, perhaps because they don’t fully understand what happened themselves. Maybe they should have said this. This saga was a massive PR fail by Amazon which is a shame because they understand the Internet more than most companies.

If you look at it from one angle, there needs to be more of these over-the-top reactions to train the online population in the fact that everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. There’s almost that threshold where enough members of this online community are trained enough from previous wildfires to know the score. We’re not getting there as some might want because there is no there to get to, but some in the exploding online communities are starting to play the long game as they become more experienced in the way news is spread, just like the villagers of yesteryear got there in the end as did the press.

California Air National Guard
Photo owned by The National Guard (cc)

Remember the Titantic story? All Saved it said on the newspapers, followed a day later by the opposite. Hunches and gut feelings will take time to learn or bubble up but they will.

It looks like bloggers will now ring the press number of an organisation to get some facts, they’ll email contact emails and ask for verification but it is also up to the organisations out there to be monitoring what the web is saying about them and react to it. Unless you’re a very small company, you’re going to be 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. The monitoring tools are cheap or even free for this kind of thing. There’s no real excuse anymore.

Of course you could ignore the online people, there’s only like 1.5Million of them in Ireland or thereabouts.

Fluffy Links – Wednesday April 15th 2009

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

A Yes to Lisbon campaign by the Yute. Unclear who’s behind it. Will there be an RTE investigation into their finances? 🙂

PuddleDucks now integrating the LouderVoice reviewing system. Congrats to both.

A sex blogger? In Ireland? What would Gaybo say? (That’s really gonna mess with my seo)

New blog: Conor O’Nolan

Via Stephen The Cork Economics blog

Elevease also are blogging.

Blog from Mark hayes on his adventures in L.A.

HTAccess files drive you loopy? Try this online editor.

Jay Electronica – Rennaisance Man