Irish Blogger Barbeque in Limerick.
Coming to the FireFox talk in Cork on Wednesday? Register if you want to come along.
Speaking of Cork, Cork people will find this funny: KnockaTV. Not what you think.
I see the VCs behind Imagine Telecom have themselves been bought into. Had anyone heard of Esprit Capital Partners?
Kevin Mitnick’s business card.
It’s our car now, Dave. Kinda.
Via Patrick Collison. You may need to know about Steve Ballmer’s “Developers gorrila dances of old” to fully get this:
1. Keep allowing outside apps to suck in the web.
2. Keep locking in data.
3. Get users to produce more and more content inside the Facebook walls. Buy content creation companies.
4. Index all the data. Buy search tech to make it better.
5. Buy an ad company for ad tech to make Facebook ads as good as Google ads. Right now they’re very 1997.
6. Connect profiles to the ad system, allowing ads far more targetted than Google’s, increasing the cost per click and making more money per ad.
7. Turn on outside search so you offer all the web plus inside Facebook too. Reap the rewards of an ad system that’s based on 30M user profiles and which outguns Google and Microsoft’s ad systems.
8. Buy Yahoo!
9. Remind Jerry Yang of his company trying to buy you, as you send him out to get you coffee in Starbucks.
Going through Facebook and I find the Pat McDonnell Paint Sales Ltd Facebook Group which is populated by students from a University in Maryland.
You can now buy a “green pc” for 99 bucks and 12 bucks a month subscription. Free with your ISP in a few years, I bet.
Gerry suggests outsourcing politics and tribunals to execution friendly China.
I’d love to see Cannibal – The Musical in kilkenny but it’s on at the most awkward time of year for me.
Mary is going for the IIA Board. It should be televised and done in the style of Miss World.
This is oddly cool. Demolishing a building by removing one floor at a time. Starting on the ground floor.
Ambient findability:It’s a trap!
Paddy’s Valley are looking to find Irish ex-pats who they can meet up with when in San Fran/Silicon Valley from December 2nd to December 9th. If you are living in San Fran/Silicon Valley or know Irish people who are, please put them in touch with us.
It also got me searching to see is there an Irish ex-pat business people group on facebook and while there seems to be hundreds of Irish groups for everything, I couldn’t find one specifically for Irish ex-pat business people or at least one that explicitly stated it. So I created one. If you’re on Facebook then please join it.
I’d be inviting these 29 or so bloggers to come to my restaurant or evaluate my food products or come to my food fair. James, you’ll be making an OPML file no doubt? Deborah is wondering whether there should be a Food Blog Category at the next Blog Awards. Not a bad idea and if there are still 30 active food blogs, then yes, it might be workable.
Of course maybe it should also turn into a Ready, Bloggy, Cook?
In case you missed it, The Bitter Pill is back and in fine form.
Rob teaches y’all how to hack the Blogger template to add Digg and Reddit widgets.
For all those interior design buffs, some nice LCD lumin lights.
Beautiful and amazing rice paddy works of art. Been around the blogs this week but finally looked at the page yesterday. Wow.
This is just amazingly weird. An award winning author is far too candid on his break-up.
Wine tasting videocasts. This guy is hyperactive! All good and he is on Twitter and Facebook and all the rest.
If you like David Beckham and wanted to see that photospread with his missus.
And now for some Sopranos music videos:
One is about the relationship between Johnny Sack and his wife set to INXS:
And then Sopranos mixed with Daniel Bedingfield (Graphic violence alert. Violence inducing shite music alert.):
and then there’s this:
Earlier this week I was on the Last Word, as was someone from the Data Protection Commissioner. They have been on a big PR run of late, getting themselves lots of attention for raids and investigations they carried out. Investigations that rarely end in prosecutions due to their catch, warn and let go policy. If they catch you once and give out to you, you get away with it but they’ll get you if you do it again. Their latest press release was about warning a restaurant that SMS spammed their customers without permission. The DPC said it was ignorance on their side and they were not aware it was the law. I pointed out that their current policy means that companies know they can carry out a massive assault on customers and harass them like hell up until the DPC comes in and says stop. Professional, multimillion euro companies. Such as TalkTalk. Read all about it in the Data Protection Commissioner’s report for 2006.
TalkTalk rang 1000s, perhaps 10s of 1000s of people pushing them into signing with them. They were so nice to stop once the DPC told them to. Now read the text of this. These people had stated on many occassions they did not want to be contacted again and they were ignored. The opt-out registry was also ignored. I personally know people who would get 3-4 calls per day from them:
Talk Talk (previously known as Tele 2 which was taken over by Carphone Warehouse and re-branded Talk Talk) was making marketing phone calls to individuals who had already expressly told Talk Talk that they did not wish to be contacted, or who had exercised their right to be recorded on the National Directory Database opt-out register.
And so what did the DPC do? Fuck all:
Given that this was Talk Talk’s first offence (albeit a number of offences were committed at the same time), it was decided to give them one opportunity to take remedial action and to put new practices and procedures in place as an alternative to prosecution.
Examples need to be set and set for more than just a PR stunt. If this were a negligence case, a court would not be so forgiving. “Next time we’ll check the brakes.”
Another example, this time from my old nemesis ComReg who are doing a bit more lately that I’m happy about, but as usual the follow-through is not so good. So after 10 years of complaints ComReg finally reported that eircom were giving preference to their retail customers over reseller customers when it came to fixing the phone service. No? Really?
However, they had a reason why this happened :
It is understood that the problem related to the systems Eircom used to log repair requests from other operators, which meant that these requests were not being escalated if they were not resolved within the initial time period promised to the other operator.
So what happened next? Nada. Nothing. SFA. Now, if you look at ComReg’s history of eircom investigations, they have a half-hearted investigation, find eircom did do what was reported but it was down to a mistake, a bug in a database or a incorrectly implemented system and nothing more than that. eircom calling old customers who left to BT and enticing them back when they were not allowed to or the customers said do not call. “Bug in their database”. Same thing again a little while later. “Different bug in the database” and so on and so forth. With an organisation like eircom being so big, I bet they could have a new bug every day for the next ten years which would accidently allow them to screw over their competitors. How about punitive encouragement from ComReg to have eircom implement a better quality control system for their operations? Such as “do anything like this again and we’ll find you 5% of turnover”. That’s surely the best encouragement for eircom with their past history of bugs?
And of course then there’s the Comptroller. Via 73Man is the attitude that all those involved in the PPARS, e-voting and other over-spending debacles suffer enough as it is without getting further punishment:
But then he is asked about what fitting negative sanctions could be assigned to underperforming public servants when they cock up royally but their political masters move on or are not returned:
In many cases, the public berating of the people involved in controversies is punishment enough, I believe.
Nice culture we’ve got going here isn’t it? But they’ll throw some bin charge protestors into jail no problem.
Club Penguin got purchased by Disney for $350 Million with an additional $350 Million performance bonus if they keep growing well til 2009. Coverage by the NY Times and Techcrunch.
Techcrunch points out that Sony previously wanted to buy the online social networking website for kids but the deal faltered for a few reasons, one being that Club Penguin donates sunstantial portions of their profits to charities and Sony wasn’t easger to continue this after a sale. I guess Disney is happy or else the three fathers who created the site have worked out some other deal.
Club Penguin’s growth has been fantastic and they seem to have decided on a site philosophy early on that they’ve stuck with. They’re not overly commercial looking and tone down rather that harass people with ads. It looks like they got the balance right when so many other websites have failed so badly. They also CHARGE customers which seems to be some kind of vulgar no no for other websites. 700k customers pay $5.95 a month to customize the penguins.
Lots of lessons to be learned from this website and their business plan.
Free webcast: Managing SEO for Big Sites, Big Brands.
Of course:
Anyone going to the Future of Mobile conference?
Blur – Song 2 (Acapella)
Worthy of New blogs on block but thought I’d give it a fluffy link too. The Mood Food Blog is a damned fine food blog.
Never thought cooked veg would make me hungry and want to try them. I hope the owner (Donal) sticks to the blogging. I’ve seen his other past blogs.
Staying with food. Milk is better than sports drinks post-game or post-workout. Who sponsored this?
Almost moving away from food … they’re breeding schizophrenic mice now.
Register for the FireFox 3 talk in Cork.
I love it. A multi-purpose tool that fits in to your wallet. 11 tools in the space of a credit card. All for a fiver. Now now, I know I won’t mention the big end of year event that starts with C but that would make a great stocking filler. Sold out on both sites that are linked to on the Cool Tools blog.
Microsoft gives away Microsoft Works for free as adware. Stupid stupid stupid. Stop trying to copy Google and make a mess while you do it. Put it online, not on the operating system and NOT with ads.
Nice observation by Rob on Twitter, Second Life and Greenpeace.
If they were to stick to their principles fully, of course, Greenpeace would probably have to address the Internet through machines powered by hippies (vegan ones, naturally) on treadmills.
And for the geeks, Rob rants about WordPress and all the calls it makes. In a convo with Rob once I think he talked about writing a WordPress like clone using some other language which was 1700% faster or something? What was it again Rob?
Treasa got me thinking about the Princess Bride. One of my favourite movies ever. One of those movies to test out the other person in your life. If they like that, then that’s another box checked. Well, for me anyway.
Via Writing it down:
“Antony and the Johnsons – You Are My Sister”
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