Damien Mulley

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I got sent these today as part of a PR promo for a device called the speed nanny. Nothing like promoting child safety like having the name of the product displayed on a low cut top of a model while she straddles a fast car. Stick in a few kids wondering what the feck is going on and you have perfection.

Blurb:

Satellite positioning combined with intelligent software gives drivers critical safety information when they need it most; when approaching accident risk locations such as dangerous junctions, bends, schools and pedestrian risk zones as identified by the Irish Road Safety Authority.

But if I read this right, it’s a handy device for warning you where coppers normally operate speed traps:

Speed Nanny monitors your speed and location as you drive and provides an alert approaching dangerous bends or junctions, school or pedestrian zones or a Garda identified accident risk zone. Accident Risk Zones are the stretches of road where Gardai are particularly concerned that people do not speed. The objective of Speed Nanny is to assist drivers in reducing their risk of accident and of inadvertently getting penalty points on their licence.

Speed Nanny retails at €199 is available by calling 1850 930 304 or from www.speednanny.ie. The girl on your hood is extra. Oh that last sentence could be misinterpreted. I should change that.

Update: Via Nat the ledge:

Update: More from Green Ink:

And from Gamma Goblin:

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I’m probably going to be launching a few new blogs in the next few months and I want them to start paying for themselves and from seeing what is out there in terms of revenue generation, I’m frankly appalled at the advertising offerings. Google might dominate contextual advertising and all online advertising (Yahoo! and MSN, what’s the story like?) but god almighty they are the ugliest blots on the web landscape, more like boils than interesting notices and they aren’t very contextual in reality either. I’m sure I’ll offend many people with my views on this but I really have issues with ads on blogs and especially on personal blogs and now I’m listing them

My blog seems to rank well for everything but I got so sick of crowds approaching me to advertise on my blog that I stuck up an “Advertise here” page, which if people read, they’ll realise is me taking money off people and not giving them anything in return if I feel like it. While I don’t have ads, what I do have is a notice that appears above a blog post if the person has not visted my blog before. Just the once it will suggest that if they like what they see, why not subscribe. This is done by a wordpress plugin called “What would Seth Godin do.”

If you want to make money online you need some kind of revenue stream and unfortunately the easiest and laziest route to that is Google Adwords but in my view it also seems to be a route which encourages people more and more to start being “creative” with ad placements. Google used to be a lot stricter in their rules but obviously as the net population got used to the ads and started to ignore them, Google allowed more camoflaging techniques to creep in so they got better clickthru rates. I guess in their views deceptive does not equate to evil. I wonder do the 1000s that work on the Adword systems think they making the world actually better and take pride that people are being conned with the system they are working on? It’s a damned shame as the idea for these ads was supposedly to provide relevant information but why would you need to allow ads to wrap themselves into the genuine content so much if they were really relevant? I’d much prefer standard less profitable ads that I can choose on my commercial site and which look nice besides something obviously designed by an engineer of the Dilbert ilk.

Personal blog and business blogs/websites:

More and more I’m seeing personal blogs infected with Google ads. I agree with Robert Sweetnam on a lot of this. Why on earth if you have a dayjob and earn a living would you impose spam on your readers? To pay for the hosting? Hosting is cheap nowadays. My blog is a place for me to unleash and extract oddities from my brain and stick them on the web. If a friend called over for a cup of tea, I wouldn’t subject them to a charge to use the bathroom, or free usage in return for listening to an ad while they use the bathroom. Yet people do this on their personal blogs. I don’t expect them to have to see ads on my front door so I can pay my rent. If people come along and read my blog, great, I don’t think pushing ads on them is at all polite. True, there are plugins out there that remove Google ads for regular visitors but that still tells new people to the site they are not as welcome as others. I’d like people to feel welcome from day one. Welcome mat on door, come in and say hello and please do come back. Would you come back to a restaurant if the only started being nice if you came back a few more times?

And then there’s these “Get Firefox or fuck off my my site, oh and I make a dollar if you download it from me” ads doing the rounds. That’s telling people if they don’t wear the proper attire they’re not welcome to hear what you have to say. Your loss not theirs. Lovely.

In relation to businesses, why kind of message does it send out if you have your company reception full of advertising, why would you put ads on your own website either? I noticed that the IIA actually run ads on their website. That’s a shame.

Text Link Ads

Text link ads are designed to fool people into clicking links to gain website owners at the expense of making fools of their readers. I’ve seen some blogs that jam them in areas where you think they are navigational links. That’s complete deceptive and totally dishonest and is an awful way to treat visitors to your site and potential subscribers. It’s a total “fuck you” to them. Google doesn’t like them either because these are rigging the DNA of Google search which are links. You are being paid to change the rankings of sites by linking to them. It’s plain bribery. Google suggests adding nofollow and they’ll be happy but it still means you are running a switch and bait scam on visitors to your blog. That’s just bad manners. What impression are you giving to people by cheating them? And Google is well guilty here too. Look at these ads, for the general web user they are not going to realise these are ads before they click them.

Content rewriters/link injectors

We’re slowly moving down the rankings gettting to the more sinister advertising that I’ve seen around. These ads are scripts or plugins that you write and they’ll rewrite your blog post or webpage and add links to words in your text and these links either go to ads or else cause popup ads right there on the page but these “links” are structured to look like proper links. They not only add tonnes of links to a single blog post and make it uglier but they also piss off people with useless popups, all for the sake of a few cents. This is just spyware on a page in my view and is pretty much an assault on a website visitor. Here’s an example of this:

Pay Per Post and their ilk

Because there just isn’t enough ways to be dishonest and deceptive are there? These are the boyos who pay you to write nice things about products in order to boost the Google rankings of products as well as astroturf the net and making it look like there are a lot of people out there who love such and such a product. There has been a hell of a lot said about these guys but I find it very disappointing that people use this service to make a quick buck without thinking of the consequences. This is OUR web that is being polluted by these gangsters. This is the web version of perjury in my opinion.

So what am I going to go with?

Jeremiah Owyang says we have to get used to advertising and get over ourselves if we think it can go away. Funnily enough, if Google gets search to work much better than it is, advertising will surely decrease since the search results will always get us what we want. For me and for the blogs over the next few months, what I’ll go for is plain sidebar ads but as well as that I’m going have sponsorship for the blogs too. It’ll be way more work to get sponsorship but I think I’d rather have happy subscribers and well-treated new visitors than try any sleight of hand tricks for short term gain while losing long term readers.

You can of course just block ads on blogs but I don’t like that idea either since it just turns into an arms race and the spam arms race ain’t going well, is it?

The Next Q+A is on October 19th, which is a Friday at a new venue: The Vaults, Connolly Station.

One of my favourite indy nights in Ireland, always fun and nice to see it turn into something like Freakscene. They now also have a Facebook Group too. Doubt I can make the next night as I have too much travel that week. Ah well. I’m just going to have to move to Dublin. (Oh no cry the Dublin OCCers)

Cheers Dan!

Got a press release on this yest, never heard of this Bolton Trust crowd, but they’ve been around a while. Might be worth going to:

Entrepreneurs to Celebrate 20 Years of the Bolton Trust

The Bolton Trust, which was established in 1987 to encourage and promote new business enterprise in Ireland, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a one-day conference on ‘Indigenous Entrepreneurship’ on Thursday 4th October 2007.The conference will be held at the Docklands Innovation Park on Dublin’s East Wall Road which is currently home to some 70 companies.

A number of speakers including Frank Ryan, Chief Executive, Enterprise Ireland and two of Ireland’s best known entrepreneurs, Chris Horn and Liavan Mallin will address the event. Also attending will be architect and broadcaster, Duncan Stewart, who was involved with the foundation of the Bolton Trust. President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, will close the Conference with a presentation to four of the Trust’s founding members and afterwards will meet with delegates, speakers and members of the Trust.

To register attendance for the conference, contact Cairín O’Connor at 01 2401377, email info at boltontrust.com or visit the website:www.boltontrust.com

About The Bolton Trust

The Bolton Trust encourages and promotes new business enterprise in Ireland. It is an independent voluntary trust actively committed to assisting people to create sustainable business. The Bolton Trust was established at the height of Ireland’s ‘brain drain’ in 1987 by staff of the Dublin Institute of Technology to promote an enterprise culture and to offer young entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop their business ideas in Ireland. The Trust currently has over 200 members. This membership is largely drawn from the various disciplines of DIT, Ireland’s largest third-level technological Institute and also from Ireland’s entrepreneurial community. Visit the website: www.boltontrust.com

I thought ranking first for “Irish Sluts” was interesting but noooo, this is more interesting alright. Number 1 on google that is.

And Irish Technology Museum? Yeah why not.

The first of the free review wine from Sublime Wines was sent out this week. I see Michele got his. You can still apply to be a reviewer by the way.

Black Button, a philosophical question:

I was reading a blog post recently from Jay Rosen about the press people belonging to the U.S. President’s Office who are there to give coverage if nobody else is present for some event. One or two of the more interesting snippets from someone that works on that team:

Well, there are two phrases that I’d like to pass along to your readers. They mean more or less the same thing. “Body watch” means covering an event that will produce zero news on its own because you need to make sure the president doesn’t collapse. The other is SSRO — “suddenly shots rang out” — which is basically equivalent, just a bit more dramatic.

When I emailed this to my friend, he asked whether we were responsible for the president’s safety, so I assume that others will have the same question. What we are responsible for is making sure that, if he collapses, or is shot at, we are in a position to get that information to our viewers/listeners/readers.

Think about how much JFK, RFK, MLK, Wallace, Squeaky, and Hinckley have shaped the logistical reality of White House coverage. The history of journalism is littered with stories of reporters who called it a day a bit too early, like the guy from the New York Times (if memory serves) who decided to head back to NYC hours before Wallace was shot.

This kind of ties into some of the stuff that Jeff Jarvis has been on about lately and supporting Journalism at the source and building new newsrooms etc. He’s spot on that journalists should reference and link to their sources. Blogs work very well doing that. With this idea of citizen journalism which seems to scare the shit out of traditional journalists, I do wonder is there a niche though for people who are like voluntary emergency workers, needed in case of emergencies or times when nobody else is about. Sky and the BBC are kind of doing this with footage and pictures but I wonder could it be done for actual reporting too. It’d be interesting to see media outlets train people on how to report in case they are needed. This works with first aiders and hell Switzerland gives everyone a gun, why not train all citizens in the basics of reporting and build a nation of good communicators. Might make for an interesting knowledge economy.

Arrrrrrr, it be talk like a pirate day, annoy all yourrrrr co-workerrrrrrrrrrs be talking like one. Arrrr.

Also today, the smiley face turns 25.

Check out Gordon’s latest web app, Yell If It Changes. It alerts you by email if a website changes or if their pagerank changes. I want RSS feeds of it too!

As a not so bitter Cork person, this quote on the Kerry slaughter of Cork rings true.

An excellent idea if you want to draw cartoons of certain deities but fear retribution.

Anthony Bourdain rips a new one into the latest trendy “gourment” creations.

Fiest - Mushaboom:

Feist - I feel it all. (Live on a bus)

Gavin O’Carroll sent me an invite to his digital lifestyle aggregator called Rememble.

It’s a pretty simple idea but lots of fun. Upload all your digital data, emails, text messages, music, photos and tag and comment on them, date them and share some or all or none of them. Current supported filetypes are: png, gif, jpg, avi, mpeg, mp3, wav, wmv, mov, mp4, 3gp and amr

You can upload from inside the site, you can email stuff to the site and you can text to the site as well. Additionally you can import from your Twitter and Flickr streams. Like it, love it.

Of course the coolest feature of this is that it builds a timeline for all of these items. This is like a Tumblr blog for all your digital bits and pieces. Scroll through your timeline and click on any object for more details about it. It has a really nice interface too.

I actually think this is a tool I’d use, I’d just like to be able to export it all in some standard format. Is there a DigitalLifeStyleML format out yet? Overall the service is good and I think some minor UI tweaks would make it better again. I hope Rememble gets more attention as I certainly think it deserves it.

By the way, I have five invites to give out for this, as does anyone that’s signed up, so if you want one, leave a comment.