Bernard mentions that IrishJobs.ie have finally enabled RSS feeds for job searches. Nice one. Some feedback from looking at it first. I think there needs to be more of an explanation than just the RSS logo. Perhaps have a “Save to Bloglines” or “Save search to Newsreader” etc etc bit of text.
Now all they need is a bit of javascript code that allows bloggers to stick a job search window on their blogs to allow blog readers to search for jobs without being on the IrishJobs web property.
When in Dublin this weekend (for the amazing Hedwig gig, review on way) I started listening to a lot of my Tom Waits stuff and really started appreciating him more when it was just me, my iPod and the blur of Dublin crowds. There’s something to be said for locking yourself away from distractions when trying to indulge in music. Or walk in solitude with headphones. Anyway, the song Martha really really stuck out for me and here are the lyrics for us all to sing along to:
Operator, number, please:
it’s been so many years
Will she remember my old voice
while I fight the tears?
Hello, hello there, is this Martha?
this is old Tom Frost,
And I am calling long distance,
don’t worry ’bout the cost.
‘Cause it’s been forty years or more,
now Martha please recall,
Meet me out for coffee,
where we’ll talk about it all.And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.And I feel so much older now,
and you’re much older too,
How’s your husband?
and how’s the kids?
you know that I got married too?
Lucky that you found someone
to make you feel secure,
‘Cause we were all so young and foolish,
now we are mature.And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.And I was always so impulsive,
I guess that I still am,
And all that really mattered then
was that I was a man.
I guess that our being together
was never meant to be.
And Martha, Martha,
I love you can’t you see?And those were the days of roses,
poetry and prose and Martha
all I had was you and all you had was me.
There was no tomorrows,
we’d packed away our sorrows
And we saved them for a rainy day.And I remember quiet evenings
trembling close to you…
For lunch, our chef has made this and all for just €7:
West Cork Royal Seafood Platter
Fresh poached salmon
Smoked salmon
Marinated Anchovies
Shrimps
Crab Claws
Marinated Mussles
An Oyster
Calamari Provencale
Selection of salads and sauces
UPDATE: Here’s the pic
Joan Burton’s latest blog post actually comes across as human. And look NO CAPITALS IN THE TITLE this time. No pink suit either. Good. I had heard Blogorrah were going to do an exposé on it soon. I had also heard there was going to be some Google Maps mashup where you could see everywhere the suit went. But back to the main story. It’s good to see the personality come through in this blog post. Keep it up Joan! Here’s hoping that Seamus Ryan’s example of how to do it right will influence the other press release Labour blogs to change.
Lastly, quick note to Labour folks who leave comments on my blog all from the same IP inside the Oireachtas or from the Ely Place IP address. If you are going to go to the hassle of making up names of strangers who just happen by my blog and leave supportive comments about labour, at least use anonymous proxies to hide your tracks. That’s what others do! 🙂
EDIT: I spoke too soon. Or maybe I should say: I SPOKE TOO SOON
Short movie called Lord of the Ring about the underground accelerator at CERN. It’s called: The Large Hadron Collider. Am I the only one immature enough to giggle at the title of the movie and the name of this accelerator?
Very Roadrunner. Watch an anvil fly through the air. Anvil shooting. An American tradition.
Create your own community of blog readers and bloggers.
This week Chris Anderson had the book launch for “The Long Tail”. My review copy arrived this week. I’m off to Dublin for the weekend so I’ll read it while traveling. Yesterday also saw a report from CNN that the previous week had the lowest TV ratings ever. All the networks are blaming the holiday weekend and so forth but how many actually realise it could be the Long Tail in action?
There were 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week in the US. Compare that to how many hits mySpace is getting and it’s a tiny number. But compare it to how many times one YouTube video is watched and it’s back to being a large number. However aggregate all those hits and you’ll probably notice YouTube is getting more eyeballs. RocketBoom’s 250,000 daily viewers might seem nothing to the networks who can get 20.8 million viewers but there’s going to be more and more rocketboom type shows over time.
BitTorrent networks are jammed with people downloading TV content amongst other data. Look at the number of people downloading TV shows via BitTorrent networks. While a TV show might not get the same number or order of magnitude on a BitTorrent network, when you look at the long tail of shows being shared and downloaded the numbers when added up become quite significant. Yet the networks and content producers don’t seem to know how to exploit this newly discovered pattern in consumerism. Maybe to start with, buy the Long Tail book.
Good piece on Irish business bloggers in SiliconRepublic. I think it’s also in their e-Thursday section of the Irish Independent. Well done to Piaras who no doubt influenced his own employer to start this blogging lark.
Marketing 101. Stein Travel exploits the Zidane affair to market their wares. I like these kind of campaigns. Got them a nice bit of attention too. However, email? People still use that these days? If it was me I would have bought one of those badly put together Zidane headbutting games going about the place and stuck my logo on it and allowed people to distribute it.
For all those having bonfires in the North tonight, why not get your own monogrammed steak brand? You can have words like “NEVER” “SAYSNO” “UK4EVR” on your very own steaks.
Send a fingerprint to these guys and they’ll ship it back in a frame, blown up to a much greater size. And only $195
The Big Here. How much do you really know about your space? Good questions like: Where is your tapwater sourced from? What time is sunset today? How many feet above sea level are you?
Horse head pillow. For all the godfather fans. Surely I can find someone via the Mechanical Turk to make this for me without paying as much?
Sex is essential. Kids are not? Why are so many German women deciding never to have children?
It’s happened. MySpace is the most visited US website. Worth every penny now then?
Jeff Jarvis is still winning against Dell. Their frustration boils over into a blog comment, Dell’s “Reimaging” company then comes out and does the usual “person acting on their own behalf, not Dell’s or ours”. It doesn’t wash with Jarvis. Good.
This is a continuation of a rant from the previous post. I don’t have a lot of love for any party or politician in this country. None of them really care and all of them are now part of a broken system they all first want to fix and suddenly become part of, making it even worse. It amazes me that people who have all these ideals still consider voting for any party and that some voters have this really stupid fucking attitude of “well they’re not as bad as the other party.” “Not as bad” isn’t what or who should be running our country.
Simon has a post on the next election here. Auds has a reply too. Simon says it’s time for change and to vote the current Government out. I think the time has run out on ALL parties. They all need to be voted out of office. Reboot the political system in Ireland. The others will get in and fuck things up just as much. Still I also abhor the fact that voters will keep the Bertie show in office because Enda and Pat are clowns and will make it worse.
Look at all the comments in the blog posts above and how already the lines are drawn and the bitching has started between bloggers. Change will never happen with politicians the way they are and bloggers who debate politics with childish and immature attitudes and who get personal and very pathetic after two comments. Lot of political bloggers have political aspirations whether they admit it or not and want to make changes. They can make things change because they have the key element of passion but until they stop attacking each other, the current political system will remain no matter which party is in charge. Nobody takes nitpickers seriously and yet so many bloggers seriously nitpick.
If bloggers think they have the ability to make changes then they need to mature a hell of a lot and stop acting like jerks to each other and to the greater world. I wouldn’t vote for any politicians and I certainly wouldn’t vote for any of bloggers either to run a country or advise on it. Write as many articles as you want, create as many websites as you want but until as a collective bloggers mature, they have no chance of influencing the political establishment to change.
We may point to Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes and I like how Guido irks so many because of his readership as Jeff Jarvis points out but taking down someone that needs to be taken down is not enough. All that does is make the rest cover their tracks more. There’s less than a handful of bloggers who have actually contributed to real life campaigns and initiatives to make changes. I respect them and will allow them to influence me. The rest I see as spoiled kids stamping their feet when not getting their way. Until that changes then blogging for change will be futile.
Hmm, have I insulted enough people with this post?
Edit: More commentary from: The InFactahnistas, John Timmons, Richard Waghorne , Adam Maguire, Adam Maguire again, Tom Raftery, Suzy Byrne, the lovely Auds ,Simon the Dosser, a great post from Treasa and one from Fergal Crehan.
One of the things that annoys me about IrishElection.com is the fact those that post on it also post their thoughts on their own blogs so you see the same post replicated throughout the Blog O’Sphere. I find it probably cheapens the site as the content isn’t unique. Anyway, now I’m doing the same as I’m replicating comments I wrote on it. Adam Maguire reported that Labour is considering inviting bloggers to their Ard Fheis. Here were my thoughts and I’ll add more to the end of it:
Wow, they’re going to give bloggers doggie treats in the form of invites. Are we worthy? I’d much rather Labour and every other party listen to people whether they be pensioners, craftsmen, yachting folk, bloggers or teens.
however we can normally only invite people from the mainstream press as we know who they are
To me that reads “We’d rather invite people who will toe the line or whose reactions we can predict when we feed them the usual PR shite.” It also seems to me that they don’t understand what bloggers are. Bloggers are not journalists. We are not paid to write stuff on something we don’t give a damn about.
I’m sure they’d rather not invite someone that listens to one of them up at the podium and instantly blogs “Man that guy is just bullshitting”. Labour and all the rest don’t give a flying fig about people though. What they and the rest care* about are voters. Voters are not the same as people in their eyes. How about Labour actually listens to people and not pander to voters? The fact Labour have to make a conscious decision and change some bloody policy to “invite” bloggers means they are well and truly STILL NOT GETTING IT.
Here’s a free consultation: Enable the Ard Fheis with free net access and free power strips for those with laptops. Don’t invite bloggers, enable people to comment via their own laptops at the event, via forums and via genuine blogs from Labour. If bloggers are there then good, if not that’s fine too. But that’s just a start. Engage with people using all forms of media, not just blogs. Blogs you don’t control and forums you don’t control. Listen to what people care about and have issues about. Forums, blogs, emails and so forth. And for the love of christ stop with the Joan Burton press releases dressed up as blog posts and spamming IrishBlogs.ie.
Do what Dave Winer suggested too. Pick a bunch of people and get them to blog about issues they think are important. People, not voters. And certainly not the party hacks/labour apologists who are so blind that they can’t see their party has things that need to be fixed like every other human created organisation.
*where care is the action of appeasing** those that will grant them power.
** where appeasing means using any and all honest and disonest means to placate someone
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Just so we’re clear I don’t hate the Labour party, I just hold them at the same level as the rest of the parties in this country. Low.
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