Colbert calls it quits. Fantastic rant.
How men (straight) choose their clothes when getting dressed. Gross generalisation!
Google talks about easy export of your stuff. Where’s the export option in their services again? Where’s the one for YouTube?
Information Politics. From the OfcomWatch folks.
Via Twenty:
Footage of Kevin Federline finding out via text that he’s being divorced. Bye bye millions.
Calm down James. Village Magazine now seems to own another url – Village.ie. I had thought the Village venue owned that. Apparently not. I’m not sure what will go up on it but they have RSS and feeds for various sections of the site as well as OPML. Their urls include “blogsection” but that could be to do with their content management system or might be a clue that they are going to start blogging. Time will tell.
While I was away details of the Digital Media Awards were announced. These are the yearly awards that Ashville Media run. I was asked to judge a new category for the 2007 awards which is for blogging. It was pointed out to me when I was asked to be a judge that unlike the Irish Blog Awards these awards are pay to play type awards. Now I’ve gone on record before and slammed the Golden Spiders for their awards and the curious way that a sponsor of one category ends up winning another category. I’ve also expressed my unhappiness with the Netvisonary awards where if you are shortlisted and want to attend the event, you have to pay.
So why would I be a judge at this awards show? Well first I think the organisers of the Digital Media Awards want to run a respected and professional awards show and that is why they asked a genuine blogger to be the judge of the blogging category and someone that knows their stuff about podcasts to be the judge of the podcasting award. I’m not au fait with the other judges but trust they are experts in their judging areas. I also think there is plenty of room for a full blown blog awards and blog award sections in other awards shows. Lastly, I think that getting podcasting and blogging added to well known award shows will benefit the blogging and podcasting communities which are still small. It is really nice to see blogging and podcasting to rub shoulders with other areas of digital media. Oh and so you know, I am not being paid to be a judge for this.
In regards to the Irish Blog Awards themselves, I will never charge people to nominate a blog. Bookmark this post and remind me if I ever try. 🙂
Now, can we start a fund to get Twenty nominated?
Disclaimer: I’m in no way an AdWords expert so this might be old hat to some people but I found it interesting and also a cheap way to advertise. I run Google Ads and have a few running for PoliticsInIreland. I have them running when a TD’s name is mentioned on a webpage. Google have demanded at least 45 cents per click and up to 8 euros for the likes of Bertie Ahern. I decided to bid 5 cents per click. You’d think then I’d get no ads shown or at least I did. Instead the ad that displays when Willie O’Dea is mentioned had 23,524 impressions in the past week. It tells me the average position for this ad was 5.0. For Tom Kitt the ad had 35,577 impressions in the past week. In total for 64,713 impressions, there were 33 clicks. A terribly low click-thru rate but with the name and the url displayed in the ad, maybe that’s all is needed when the ads are pretty much free.
Anyone got experiences of the same?
It seems if you give an opinion about a concert and it doesn’t fit with the views of others then you are ignorant. I obviously just don’t get that some people like that “fucking screeching zombie” and as a result I’m ignorant. I better go off and complete that thesis in music theory before I ever decide I like or dislike something again.
My journey to my own bed is almost complete. 1000s of miles have been covered and now I have just a few more inches to go and fall asleep in my own bed and wake up readjusted to this timezone. New York is fantastic. Talk some more in a while.
(Ssssh I’m not really here, remember.)
This post is totally reworked from a draft post I wrote just after the 2006 Irish Blog Awards. A good deal has happened since but the pace of change and adoption of blogging and RSS hasn’t been fast enough in my view. While it’s not quite the time for a year in review, this is kind of one. I think so far in 2006 we saw a lot more business bloggers join into the Irish Blogging Community and a heck of a lot of politicians joining in too, thanks in large part to the Labour party who really do seem like they want to be part of this new way of communicating.
In July 2005 Tom Raftery had a post about Irish CEOs blogging and it would be nice to re-examine this because they still are the exceptions in this country.
At the start of 2006 I put a list of things I’d like to see for 2006. I never actually made this public. The list was:
Some things have happened like FF, SF and Greens with RSS feeds and some have remained the exact same. I believe one of the journalists from one of the broadsheets is going to start blogging very soon. I know another journalist who’s blogging (though anon for now) but not about the stuff they cover at work.
Just to stress this, I do not think everyone should be blogging and I do not think that blogging should be hyped as the be-all and end-all for everything. I do think however that most websites should have RSS feeds. I would very much like to see the benefits of blogging and RSS made clear and that people should be given the opportunity to see them. A recent chat with a junior Minister turned to blogging and they said “Everyone keeps telling me to blog but my web people said it was a waste of time.” Jesus! Maybe a cheat sheet is needed about what use blogging is and what use it is not.
Should more be done to promote blogging and RSS?
I guess on one hand you can take the viewpoint “tough”, if they don’t want to know about blogging and RSS feeds then it’ll be their loss or maybe stop pushing this on people if they don’t want/need it, but on the other hand, the more people that use blogs and RSS the better for breaking down the barrier between people and between consumers and producers. A lot of the time when you explain what it can do, people want to try it. Lots of people have told me they’d love to blog, they’d love to get their story out there but they’re not technical enough or need to wear armbands for a little while.
How would you go about promoting RSS and blogs more? The press of late is really taking notice of blogs and using them for sourcing stories or taking something on a blog and expanding it. That’s one area. Do you target the general web population or go for the key influencers in a group? Before Shel Israel and Robert Scoble signed their book deal they got their publisher to start a blog and perhaps in areas where we can influence people, we could do the same.
Who are the influencers in the business community? Hit the PR companies, the PR/Marketing/Corp people in the big companies and the tech people who build the sites? Those that build websites nowadays that have a news and press section without RSS feeds, should we smack them over the head? Should we teach journalists so that they use RSS feed aggregators and get them to ask those distributing the press releases to have them in an RSS feed? Should we encourage them to post the stories their editors rejected and might have been confined to the dustbin due not to bad quality but simply down to space restrictions? How does one evangelise RSS and blogging in Ireland?
(Sssh I’m still not here.)
I’m not sure what this sign meant. But the comments on what people think it could mean are hilarious.
The “View Source” key. Clever idea.
Make your own dot-matrix wrist cuffs.
How to keep good posture at the computer.
Beware of the Homosexual. 1950s ad. Scary.
With Google using Ireland to save 100s of millions of dollars every year, wouldn’t it be nice if they repayed Ireland by making some of their services useful? From an Irish Times article:
An effect of the arrangement is that Google Ireland, the operating company, made an after-tax profit of only €2.74 million on a turnover of €603 million. It had operating expenses of €359 million which are understood to include the royalty payments to the other Irish company. Google Ireland paid Irish corporation tax of €1.6 million.
Yes, wow, they employ people. How good of them. O’Briens employ more people in Ireland than Google right now. With Ireland being their European HQ, you’d think they’d make Google Maps Ireland kind of useful. The minute you look outside the main towns on the map, it all pretty much goes blank. C’mon guys, your bottom line is far far more padded as a result of setting up shop in Dublin, how about using some of your resources and your PhDs to have maps that actually, you know, work? Maps.Google.ie would also be better than going to the UK site to see a map of Ireland. Or how about wirelessly enabling a small town in Ireland? The interest alone on your tax savings could pay for that. How about having Irish versions of Google Mobile? “Do no evil” is one of your philosophies, maybe you should add “Don’t be a scrooge”?
Orbital – The Box
A really cool touch interface.
For the ladies only. You WANT to see the side effects.
Jesus Loves You. 30 foot writing on a hillside says so.
Barack Obama on the Daily Show:
Full 54min documentary on Blade Runner:
Damien Mulley is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).