Damien Mulley

Ken McGuire mentions that John Butler is going to build RoadDeaths.net.

I’m all for the creation of a website with a map of Ireland that lists all locations of the road deaths. What I’d love to see is a map that had more details in the popover such as time the accident happened etc. Perhaps additionally over time some stats could be run showing the worst places that accidents occur, per capita etc. There’s lots of stats out there but I don’t think they’re readily available and up to date on a web site. It might take a Freedom of Information request to get hold of the detailed information.

While it starts off with Google maps I’m sure over time that a nice mapping group might provide a free licence to use a more robust map. As we discovered with the broadband coverage map, it takes a while to load a map of Ireland with so many locations on it. Best of luck to John!

Scoble, fire the MS naming guy. Seriously. You said any marketing exec who did not have feeds on a marketing website should be fired. Your naming guy should be fired too. He’d easily get a job in another bureaucracy anyway with that backwards thinking. I watched the interview with MS Legal Army guy Don McGowan and yes I understand the ironic position MS is in. Since they try and utterly destroy anyone that uses one of their trademarks MS now has to keep going and find trademarkable names. Stop letting the lawyers run the company Scoble. Them fucking up the entertainment industry is testament enough that they shouldn’t be let off the leash. The more blood they get, the more rabid they become.

Apple can come out and call an operating system Jaguar or Tiger. They can call versions of their iPod Mini, Video and Nano. They have applications called Garageband and Aperture and OH MY GOD a mail program called Mail! All very common names for applications and versions of products. Creative have a music player called the Zen. Generic enough to be found in a LOT of Google searches. Sorry to be sarcastic but guess what? People are learning to use more than one word when searching. A p p l e Garageband. A p p l e Aperture. But here’s an intriguing idea and yes more sarcasm: The more people link to your page the higher up in rankings it’ll go so your product will appear first over time.

If this naming guy was around a few years back then hmmm, would there be Windows? Would there be Office? Would there be Word? Maybe the same reason that Apple can design a beautiful product and Microsoft can’t is the same for naming products. Creativity and freedom. Stop letting the bureacrats control how you breathe. I’m in total disbelief that you want to promote a “No Fun” rule when naming codenames. Lord almighty. If you are now getting all thought police on the codenames you are in no way going to be able to get down and have cluetrain moments with the general public. The only search test that should matter is “Microsoft products better than Apple products”. Will MS applications be found in that search reult?

Via Dave Winer: Dan Bricklin talks about guiltless systems:

Dave Winer writes that he stopped tagging the categories of blog posts. As soon as he missed one he felt guilty and then as the guilt grew he tagged less. He started just assigning things to a couple of categories and then not tagging at all.

Instead of making you feel bad for “only” doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%.

There are two different Blog4jesus websites out there.

Hat tip to Churchsigngenerator.com

This was what was on the BBC for the day I was born. With a simple URL structure, you took can see what was on the beeb. Goes back to pre-WorldWarTwo. Eventually we may actuall be able to watch what was on on those dates too.

Or whatever you call online video things. Via David Winer. Ze Frank rocks the joint.

Jon Stewart watch out. I was about to say give him his own TV show and replace some of the boring yokels. Nah, he doesn’t need prime time, he has the world and he’s unrestricted. Anyone on broadband can watch Ze and they should.

The only close match here is the widly entertaining Letter to America. LTA in daily 3 min vidcasts would be fantastic.

Go look at Ze Frank – The Show.

HUGE thanks to John Handelaar for making this map.

There are about 1100 exchanges in Ireland. eircom has plans to enable around 400 plus. Eact numbers are not clear but it is believed not more than 450. They want the taxpayer to pay for all the rest to be enabled.

On the top is a map of the current situation with just under 400 exchanges enabled. Below it is the coverage map if all exchanges were enabled. Each yellow circle is where you can get broadband but even then the failure rate is 20%. 1 in 5 chance of not getting it. eircom doesn’t have plans to go much further than the first map.

I have 3 iPod Video covers and 3 iPod Nano covers to give away if anyone wants one. You have to review them for me though and take some pics. I bought a few and want to know peoples opinion on them.

I’ve one now for my iPod Video and it seems good enough but not perfect.

My issues are that it’s not snug enough when fitted, as you an see by the view from the top:

Some of the screen is covered over too:

Although you can still watch video on it:

I’ll still use the cover as I use my iPod mostly for listening to music and even watching videos with it on isn’t that intrusive. The main thing though is that it’s very good for preventing scratches. Question is, would you pay a fiver for something like this?

Pictures of the Nano cover are on the way once my tester gets back to me.

Philipp Lenssen pointed to a guy who had business cards made that look like Google search boxes with his name in them. Not a bad idea but I don’t think Google would be too impressed with their logo on his cards. It might obviously confuse people as to who the guy works for.

Here’s my own idea for a business card: make it look like an ad on Google. Bit too restrictive though if you want to get everything into it but follow the same restrictions as a Google ad:

I created this by actually making a Google Ad in my Adword account and doing a screencap of it.