Damien Mulley

So CreativeCamp is on March 8th in a castle in Kilkenny. You should go. You should also participate.

So how many folks from Paddy’s Valley are presenting at Creative Camp? Oh, so far one. That’s Joe who is always good with sharing and contributing at every BarCamp/CreativeCamp. Alexia though is on a panel about how sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. (Men are allowed attend this talk but must realise they’re bastards.) 🙂 I would have thought those that went to the Valley learned about the community over there of sharing experiences and knowledge and would have jumped at the chance of presenting. Still time folks. And it doesn’t have to be about tech. I’d love to hear a talk from Jessi on healthy living. Maybe expanding on this article she wrote on getting kids to eat veg. (Not once in it did she mention violence or the threat of it, I can’t see it working :))

Maybe (Blog Award nominated!) Niall Larkin could give a presentation on online communities and how people interact, without giving away the recipe for the Relevant M secret sauce eh? Niall has massive insight to how humans work with tech. We could all benefit from his thoughts on that.

TechLudd was huge with a massive attendance by tech people in January. Maybe Anton could nudge some of those folks to go along too and give some talks?

There are tonnes of people who could give great talks and maybe they need a little encouragement? CreativeCamp is the place for shy people and will be very welcome. It would be a shame to see the old faces once again giving presentations, though while always good it would be good to see new presenters.

Nice to see BarCamp regulars Walter and Bernie do a panel discussion called “How Friends Communicate” too.

The number of unique visitors since June 11th 2005 that came here. Yay. And still no ads here.

Via Pat Phelan is a link to Google’s comment on the Microsoft Acquisition of Yahoo! by David Drummond, one of their main legal guys. It isn’t nice or subtle. Hostile acquisition is mentioned twice. Open standards blah blah blah.

Google is pulling no punches saying this is a very bad thing for openness. Google of course has APIs for everything. Oh, except for their search engine. They do have a fakey plasticy API that throws AJAX gunk search results on your site but not a real API. Google is open when it suits, of course. Google wants open standards in areas they want to disrupt and take over. Fair enough. Will they open their search API now to save the Internet?

The digs come hard and fast:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?

Google hasn’t been done on anti-trust, just yet but after this Microsoft I’m sure is going to be spending a lot of money lobbying for it.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?

Google is worried about their ad revenue more than anything else. The digs are fun though. Why have they not complained about Microsoft and extending unfair practices to the net? Google will still own a bigger chunk of search even if this acquisition goes through. What’s the issue? They still own the ad business, the not very open ad business, what’s the issue there?

It makes me wonder whether Google was waiting to kill Yahoo! a little bit more before they assumed they could swallow them up? The last comment in the statement kind of says they can always jump into the arms of Google or let Google help them.

We believe that the interests of Internet users come first — and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.

Get the popcorn folks!

Update: Microsoft reply with cold hard figures about Google’s control of search and advertising. They also mention privacy.