Archive for the ‘irishblogs’ Category

Fluffy Links – Friday September 5th 2008

Friday, September 5th, 2008

The ICCL’s Electric Picnic Photo Album. I want one of those t-shirts!

Those broadband issues with BT Ireland are still ongoing.

If you were one of the 100s or maybe 1000s of people spammed by Insure.ie yesterday and today, here’s the online complaint form for the Data Protection Commissioner. Commandant Lasard himself will look into this.

Watch your eyes, it’s the website for Gay Pride Limerick. One day gay pride will be something that doesn’t need a parade with men dressed as women. Til then the majority of the gay community will keep focusing their energy at partying instead of campaigning for equality. Live for today folks!

Boards.ie forum posts = messages left on the wall of a public toilet. I love how the Indo reporter threatened legal action if he was named in the article. What a cock.

And on that. Boner wanted.

Via Irish Craft Update: Dublin’s 24 hour comics day 2008

Blog for upcoming actress and writer Pauline McLynn. She’s gonna hit the bigtime. Just you wait and see. I have this hunch.

So what email addresses get the most spam? Fascinating survey.

Via James. Ouch. Ad firm emails all their staff the comms plan for breaking redundacy news to them.

Mitchell and Webb – Wrong side

Who wants to help Amanda Palmer?

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Got this from Olga, can you help?

Amanda Palmer now solo singer of The Dresden Dolls needs a free or cheap place to crash in Dublin for her and her crew. (Preferably with wireless internet.) I think they are looking for a cheap band rehearsal space too, or a house they can sleep in and rehearse in.

This is Amanda: http://myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer

The Dates:
September 9th-17th (need a place for 2 people to crash)
September 18th-27th (need a place for 5-6 people to crash and rehearse)

Let me know if you guys have anything or know of anyone, as they don’t seem to be having a lot of luck turning something up. I think if they’re crashing in someone’s place they’ll also guest list you for shows/give you free merch/and threaten to cuddle you.

Dear person browsing from luas green line

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

We can see you:

Luas Mulley

Luas Mulley

Innovation Vouchers – €5k to help your company

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Enterprise Ireland brought out Innovation Vouchers last year. The idea being that any limited company could apply for a voucher, worth €5000, that could be redeemed at a knowledge provider (University, IT, etc). The knowledge provider would then go off and do a bit of research or development for you. A handy way of getting something done when you don’t have the resources and getting the educational institutions to do something with the real world. Something they rarely experience.

If you haven’t applied for a voucher, do so now for goodness sake.

Saying that, I’ve heard some companies are finding it amazingly difficult to get a knowledge provider to do some work for them. I’m hearing that one firm were laughed out of it and told to pretty much PFO as they wouldn’t consider anything below 50k for them to do any work!

Slide44
Photo owned by MikeBlogs (cc)

On the positive, I’ve heard also that some ITs are well tuned in and are doing their very best to help out companies. Informally it seems companies are talking to each other, recommending some knowledge providers and warning to not waste their time with others. National College of Ireland are having an open night about their work and what they can do with Innovation Vouchers:

Information Session on A New Facility for Measuring User-Screen Interactions featuring the newly installed National E-Learning Laboratory (NELL) at National College of Ireland on Wednesday 17th of September from 17.30 to 19.00.

Applied research can answer important questions regarding screen-based media, usability, design, content development, engagement and task-completion. The session is intended to be of particular interest to organisations intending to apply for an Enterprise Ireland Innovation Voucher.

Interested? Book your place by contacting the Centre for Research and Innovation in Learning and Teaching at 01 4498600

So what works for companies, what should companies be doing to get their vouchers redeemed? Care to recommend some good knowledge providers, are you a knowledge provider and actively want to talk to companies?

Got this great business idea you’re developing the past while?

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Stop deluding yourself and enjoy your brain crack.

I miss Ze Frank.

Fluffy Links – Thursday September 4th 2008

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Congrats to Nooked and their new shopping widget.

FBD Insurance are on Twitter. Welcome folks!

Minister Eamon Ryan to use Bebo and Facebook for consultation feedback? Read that and how eircom had a barney with him about speeds at campbell’s blog.

Speaking of Bebo. It seems it can’t be stopped, even in Irish prisons. Hah. I think that’s good in a way. It should be hard to stop access to the Internet.

eWrite messenger now supports Toddle newsletter templates.

Staying with eWrite, Gordon did some stats on a Facebook campaign he ran for the Web Awards, seeing uptake on the ads he ran.

Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is now free to download or read online. Great book and fun TV series.

Clever. HP are selling some of their latest notebooks without packaging. They come in messenger bags instead. Great idea.

Terry – TED-like talks but done by college students. Please please please do one in Ireland. Students only. Not the academics!

Steven Johnson gives Palin 3 weeks before she’s kicked out. D’ya think?

Some firefighting photo, this.

Using humans to get around blocks made for robots. Seems that it costs $0.002 to solve a CAPTCHA. (those horrible text box from things that are hard to read)

From Terry: Things to avoid when publicly speaking:

eircom via Google’s DoubleClick advertises on PirateBay

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

It seems you can now see eircom ads on the worlds most notorious file sharing website – thePirateBay.org. The site that the music and movie industry wants to shut down is now being serviced with ads by Google’s company DoubleClick. Below is a screenshot of an eircom ad. Click for bigger pic. I very much doubt eircom knew their ad buying company would put the ads there.

eircom ad on Pirate bay

Case study: Irish Businesses and Twitter

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

For those not familiar with Twitter, it’s a text message rebroadcast service, it has about 1.2 million users online.

If you have a look at twitter.com you’ll see SMS sized messages from people telling people what they’re doing or what they’re up to. People subscribe to get updates from your profile more than you sending stuff to your list of people.

When compared to the 100s of millions on social networks, Twitter is tiny, but the current trend is seeing people focus more of their attention on Twitter and way from the traditional social networks. Hah – “traditional social networks”. Those people on Twitter too are the trendspotters and trend makers. I recently put a list together here of Irish Businesses on Twitter and that is of course growing.

Horse Kisses
Photo owned by David Masters (cc)

It’s just one more place where companies can do business. Unlike other “markets” though, this is very very informal and while people are happy for business to take place, they’re more interested in the social aspect of this space. But aren’t people more influenced when they’re relaxed and talking to real people? I’ll harp back again to Recruit Ireland who have recently joined and are really getting the space and very recently Herb Street joined Twitter. Herb Street are a restaurant in the Dublin Docklands and while they only have a holding page for their website, they’re active enough on Twitter, even posting pics of their daily specials.

Irish Businesses are using Twitter in four main ways

Rebroadcast
1. First they just use it as a rebroadcast service so blog feeds or special offers are sent out in 140 character bursts from the account. There is no real interaction with people. Like this special offers account from Dell: http://twitter.com/DellHomeOffers , In Ireland the company might not even do it themselves, there are unofficial feeds for RTE for example: http://twitter.com/RTEnews

Human face of business
2. They human power it. Using an official title they go off and they might auto mention new blog posts but they also answer questions posed to them and join in conversations. Irish company Blacknight’s is like that: http://twitter.com/bksolutions

Active Participation
3. They join in as humans first, business people second. They take an active part in conversations, start them, contribute to them but also give their opinion on business issues and so forth. They use Twitter to show off their knowledge, to network and to have fun. Pat Phelan from Cork based Cubic telecoms is an example: http://twitter.com/patphelan

Monitoring and then interacting
4. They monitor Twitter for their brand and see what sentiment is like and they will also engage directly with a user to help them with their issue or a sale etc. Any company can search for their details using http://search.Twitter.com

When buses took over Market Street - 1948
Photo owned by bobster1985 (cc)

It’s interesting to see some Irish companies being ahead of the curve when it comes to this and there’s a good deal of Irish using the system when it comes to number of users per capital. Also too, a few Irish companies have built other applications and businesses on top of twitter. Cork based Pat Phelan and Dublin company Dial2Do made twitterfone.com, the ability to dial and talk in your message instead of typing and another group in Cork have built a statistics package called TweetRush.com to monitor how many messages go through the system per second, hour, day, week etc.

DownloadMusic.ie USB Album

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

download music usb

Got one of the DownloadMusic.ie USB albums in the post a while back from them for free.

Artists featured include: Saccade, The Rumours, Driving By Night, The Radio, Roberta Howett, The Flaws, OrphanCode, SUDDYN, Ro Tierney, Codes, Justinmanville, Dirty Epics, Jo and the Flood, The Kinetiks, Vesta Varro

I was expecting the usual Irish musical compilation album, you know, one or two good tracks and the rest being shite. WRONG. Very impressed with this. I’ve heard a few too thanks to Phantom but the quality of the bands and artists is really good. I’m now chasing up on some of the bands. There’s a lot of talent on this album. Only issue is I won’t use the media player that comes with it and the mp3s when loaded into Winamp has very messy song titles/names. An m3u file would have been handy.

I remember reading somewhere that the newest bands are influenced by the whole world now. They can connect with bands who only ever had an audience of 60 in their local town but the second their music is online, kids from the other side of the world can sample their work and get influenced. Hopefully in the next few years with such diversity of influence we’ll hear some amazing new stuff. Looks like we’re getting some of it with this album.

Fluffy Links – Wednesday September 3rd 2008

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

It’s not too late to come along to CreativeCamp Belfast on Saturday. Come along. After the amazing support the folks way up there have shown to the Blog Awards and BarCamps, I feel I owe them a few visits.

Suzy Byrne made the Huffington Post. Well done.

Via PhilFBcal – export the Facebook Birthdays to Google Calendar or iCal.

Gay Marriage for all in California. Even prisoners. Makes for some interesting dilemmas…

Love Zebras. Love this poster.

Get your musical goods on iTunes and sell cds too with TuneCore.
Anyone know where I can get this picture?

Nice Guerilla Marketing tips for startups.

$175k a day for an ad on the front of YouTube.

Sarah Palin had a lot of work done to her Wikipedia profile before she was nominated.

Via Kerry: Surveys

Via Treasa – Princess Bride in Lego