Archive for the ‘blogs’ Category

But then the brain exploded right there in front of me…

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

Via Google Blogoscoped. Sorry, Gotta Go – a website of wav sounds to use when you are on the phone. Press the Knock on Door one or dozens of others to create an excuse for ending a phone convo.

Connectivity as a utility. I’d been thinking all along about broadband being classed as a utility. Interesting idea.

Google moving into classifieds. Woah. Bye bye yellow pages. Craigslist shows what the yellow pages should be all about anyway.

Microlending in African countries.

Sneaky ways of bringing in the Broadcast Flag.

Not able to see your fav TV show? Rent My DVR will sort it. Simply have someone record the show and send it to you. They charge of course.

Ideal for podcasters! How To Build a Telephone Recording Circuit from an Old Modem. One needs to solder and stuff. A job for Dave.

Esquire submits a document to Wikipedia to let the members edit it. Dozens of errors later, the collaborative work of the Wikipedians have corrected all the errors in the document. Wikipower once again. Esquire were impressed.

I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg

Friday, September 16th, 2005

Just watched My Own Private Idaho. Good movie with an odd ending. The kind I like. Inspired by Henry IV and Henry V apparently and I can see why. River Phoenix is brutally sweet and innocent and hurt in the movie. Keanu Reeves is Keanu Reeves. More wooden than a church pew. The movie ends on a song from the Pogues about the doomed life of a London rent boy. I’ve heard this song numerous times and never paid attention to the lyrics until now. I’m once again reminded of the absolute lyrical brilliance of Shane MacGowan. I think we haven’t appreciated his talent because he comes across as a stupid self-destructive paddy, something the noveau riche Irish don’t want to admit to as much anymore.

Lyrics to The Pogues – The Old Main Drag

When I first came to London I was only sixteen
With a fiver in my pocket and my ole dancing bag
I went down to the dilly to check out the scene
But I soon ended up upon the old main drag

There the he-males and the she-males paraded in style
And the old man with the money would flash you a smile
In the dark of an alley you’d work for a fiver
For a swift one off the wrist down on the old main drag

In the cold winter nights the old town it was chill
But there were boys in the cafes who’d give you cheap pills
If you didn’t have the money you’d cajole and you’d beg
There was always lots of tuinol on the old main drag

One evening as I was lying down by Leicester Square
I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls
Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled
And they ruined my good looks for the old main drag

In the tube station the old ones who were on the way out
Would dribble and vomit and grovel and shout
And the coppers would come along and push them about
And I wished I could escape from the old main drag

And now I’m lying here I’ve had too much booze
I’ve been shat on and spat on and raped and abused
I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg
For some money to take me from the old main drag

D&G Jeans – How low can you go? This low.

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

D

Wednesday morning eyecandy. Not the type of jeans for Irish builders.

Newsroom.ie – Citizen Journalism

Tuesday, August 16th, 2005

*Update* Comments are now open and working.

A few weeks back I registered Newsroom.ie and yesterday I already got my first snailmail spam about it from some crowd trying to sell me hosting. So, why did I register newsroom.ie?

Someone that I’ve read and listened to more than anyone else of late has been Jeff Jarvis. His thoughts on the New Newsroom are to me quite inspiring. Citizen Journalism seems to irk a few people and people worry about the mass amateurisation of publishing or the mass amateurisation of nearly everything.

Certainly the O’Reilly Family fear blogs and amateurisation of a market they rule with an iron fist. While the likes of Citizen Journalism or Participatory Journalism might add a lot more noise it will add a lot more voices too and maybe the new generation of editors will be the ones to pick and choose from all these voices and knit together a professional story.

We may as a total group be amateurs but humans have been professional communicators since the start. This is one reason why we evolved so well.

So then, enough of the build up.

What I want newsroom.ie to be is somewhere which gathers stories from Irish people. Aggregates them, from the mundane to the explosive, from very local to national.

In order to do this, my current solution, which may radically change once I get feedback is a system of local contributors. Split newsroom.ie into areas and split those areas into smaller areas and so on. So we have frontpage stories which are fed by contributions from the provinces, the provinces are fed from county sections, counties from localities etc. etc. It reminds me of the Powers of Ten idea in a way.

So we have the local kid talking about who vandalised the playground and taking pics and we have the local concerned citizen talking about some local planning controversy. At the same time in the greater area there may be some big yet local story, for example lots of Cork people pissed off over water charges and all discussing it.

Now comes the hard part. How do these very local stories filter into the area list, filter into the county list and into the frontpage news? Could it be done by having local “editors” vote those posts into a higher up level, or would it be done by page votes?

Could there be a “Mark as interesting” button at the top and bottom of the story that could be pressed to give the story a vote?

I would hope that Newsroom.ie would be the place to give anyone and everyone a voice. Everyone if they wanted to, would become a reporter. There are many issues though about libel and whether newsroom.ie could get into shit for reproducing content that was damaging.

Another issue is whether Newsroom.ie would work like Planet of the Blogs and IrishBlogs and just aggregate content from blogs and categorize them using Tags as well as how users submitted their site. I would prefer this than a Slashdot style system where you post your story to the site.

So, am I a coder, can I do any of this? Nope. Not a clue of PHP, Ruby or anything else like that. I’ve discussed it with Mr. Breslin alright and I think it piqued his interest. Anyone else wish to comment on this? As usual, comments don’t work on this blog, so just link your thoughts from your own blog and I should pick it up.

Edit: I meant province not provence. D’oh.

Dick O’Brien talks about Newsroom.ie here.

Bernie says don’t forget to allow comments. Definitely comments would be there, forgot to include that above. I’m all for comments* and find that the comment sections in many other blogs inspire new blog entries on the original and reader sites. Comments are essential for a 2-way web.

* The irony of course is that comments here are busted. But to fix the comments means I have to set aside about 3 hours to work on this blog. I don’t have a block of that size for the next while.

Further Update:
The Dossing Times picks up on it too. Zepp (real name?) suggests that importing all blog posts from someone would be just as noisy and spammy as IrishBlogs and PlanetofTheBlogs. He rightly says that blogs are not news sources as such. I left a comment which I’ll reproduce here:

True, blogs are not news sources, but you can post news on your blog. Blogs are a communications medium. When you do have something newsworthy then possibly adding a tag like “newsroom” would alert newsroom.ie to add that into the mix.

I wouldn’t have newsroom.ie just sucking in any blog posts hoping news would be in them. It would definitely need filtering. Tags right now seem the best option. Maybe there’s a better one I haven’t thought of.

I like the idea of categories like IT and stuff too. Never had factored that in to the original idea.

Also, newsroom.ie wouldn’t be a competitor to RTE news or the like. I’d like to see it as a place to maybe grow journalists and give a voice to the little guy in a way. I think allowing the kid down the road to talk about the vandalised playground is just as important as someone getting another story heard.

Hopefully too with people reporting so much online it will become an historical record of the most local of things.

Update August 22nd 2005:

Boards.ie News/Media Forum Piaras made some worthy comments:

Would be very suss of something that just aggregates feeds because it’d end up as another Indymedia – some gems lost in a sea of waffle. I’d be worried about the lack of balance tbh.

The spamming thing is a worry alright. I can see that get sorted by having a flood control of a sort built in somewhere

this:

James Corbett also commented on NewsRoom.ie

The main reason I would advise Damien to implement Newsroom.ie in such a small pieces, loosely joined manner is because it would require very little work for any Irish blogger to contribute. Many of them already tag their blog posts and it would be simple to adapt to a group tagging consensus if necessary.

Yeah, tags and aggregating content look like the easiest way to go so far, but with possibly some kind of spam control put in place.

Tags:

EFF Ireland – not gone away you know

Saturday, July 30th, 2005

Updated Aug 4th 2005. (See additional comments below)

Not so long ago I called for the re-ignition of EFF Ireland and Bernie also talked about it too. Since then there’s been nothing from it as far as I can tell.

I wonder how many people see a need for it and how many would commit to supporting it? What would be needed? Would funding be needed, resources, how would it be structured, what would be its remit? Lots of questions, but not even these questions seem to be asked by others.

There was a lot of good discussion at OpenTech 2005 about setting up a UK EFF and Danny O’Brien weighs in more here about the need for one and what can be done with some money. He talks about pledging a fiver a month via direct debit but only if 1000 others do the same. Good idea that.

What can you do with a monthly budge of 5000UKP a month? … we did some back of the envelope calculations after the talk, and agreed we could do something: Probably two staffers and an office.

The biggest lesson for me with NTK was that your best way to influence the agenda, and generate support, is to generate stories, and point people to the right experts. Just having someone at the end of a phone, handing out quotes and press releases, and pro-actively calling journalists to make sure they know what’s going on, putting them in contact with all the other orgs in this area in the UK, is half the work.

The rest of the job is actual activism (one person can do a lot, if they don’t need to cram all their white paper writing, research, and lobbying between contract coding sessions, and finishing their university degree) and bootstrapping more funding.

Good wisdom there, some that I may be able to use for other projects. So, if the money was there, could EFF Ireland work?

Update August 4th 2005:

Graeme the Irish Liberal says he’d be up for it.
The Freestater (sorry I don’t know your name) is also of the opinion we badly need something like the EFF. I must say I’m quite impressed with that post. Very very well researched.

Further Update: I started an EFF Ireland discussion thread on boards.ie

Dick O’Brien has added his thoughts too.

BTW, I tried to open up comments and it didn’t work for some reason. I’ll commit to upgrading the site over the weekend to get them working.

Participative journalism is a dangerous precedent for our industry – Gavin O’Reilly

Friday, June 24th, 2005

Jarvis reports on a comment by Gavin O’Reilly made at a World Association of Newspapers event recently:

I think participative journalism is a dangerous precedent for our industry. People forget that newspapers have always been an interactive medium, people have always been able to interact with us through the mailbag.

This was in response to a question from the floor, slightly goes against what his his speech where he talks about the Internet being an integral part of their business. Perhaps he means people can email mailbag@dyingnewspaper.com

Surprised nobody in the irishblogs picked this up. Or even the real Gavin. 🙂

To feed a troll…

Monday, June 20th, 2005

Someone posted this on the LGB Forum on boards.ie this evening.

Im interested in working at a adult chat line, part time to earn some extra
money. Where and how do I go about applying for a job with one of them? all
the ads in the papers are for callers only. How much do the earn per hour?
any advice would help hugely. Thanks.

I asked the mods to keep it around but they don’t have a sense of humour. So here is what I tried to post before the thread was deleted:

It is actually quite difficult to get a job in this area in Ireland due to the controversial nature of the industry. There is strict regulation and you have to be a member of the Federation of Entertainment Chat and Adult Lines.

To be a member of this group means attending a 3 day intensive course run by the federation. The course is called “Matters”, it includes how to rationalise a conversation, knowing when to terminate a call, identification of breathing rhythms so you can judge call “completion”, first aid in case a caller has a medical emergency (quite common). The second day has a four hour long course on the special language that is used on these Adult Lines. The course is called the Alphabet and Neologisms of Adult Lines. This is where you use all the various phrases and “dirty” words to stimulate a caller. Remember at the end of the day you have to give the caller good service or they won’t call back or hang up the call early.

The third day is all role playing (but not in the sex game type way though I guess it’s close!) where each participant plays a caller with a specific need and the other person acts as the line operator or “taker” as the industry calls it. At the end of the day is a written test as well as oral. If your oral is good and what you put down on paper then you’re certified can can join the industry. The Federation are the ones who’ll put you in touch with employers.

Good luck with it all!

Sliding down the rankings now …

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

Seems when you search for on Google.com now I’m 23rd. I almost reached the top 10 the other day too. It’s great to see that Google updates itself so often. It’s great that the rankings aren’t so stagnant.

URLTrends – Something for IrishBlogs?

Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

Just found the URLTrends website. An easy way of finding out the pagerank of a website as well as other data. Put my website url in there and got this in return:

Current Rankings:
PageRank: 4/10
Alexa Rank: 2,335,797

Incoming Google Links: 86
Incoming Yahoo Links: 937
Incoming MSN Links: 1,759
Incoming Alexa Links: 408
Overall Incoming Links: 3,190 (Overlap is possible – Estimated 2,774 unique links)
Outgoing Links: 179 (Ratio: 0.480% – Each Link Receives Approx. 0.019 PR)

Might be interesting to use this or the Google API to collate info on the via Planet of the Blogs.

Diarmuid and I

Friday, March 4th, 2005

DiarmuidandI.jpg