Damien Mulley

Fantastic time-lapse photo of a plane taking off. Or maybe it’s landing.

Another blog post you wouldn’t see from a politician. Again by Dominic Hannigan. Gotta love the bitchy comment someone left. (I don’t mean the spam) I still prefer the very honest and natural blog posts from politicians like Dominic, Ciaran, Seamus and Damien than other posts from other politicians. I’m even warming to certain posts by Joan now too.

How to create a Cylon Jack-O-Lantern. The new season of Battlestar rocks quite a bit. Lots of Iraq war undertones.

Conor has a quiz. The youth of today ask some very blunt questions don’t they?

Larry Lessig on the ethics of video sharing sites. As in the ability to truely share with some while others lock-in your content. Where’s the download button in YouTube for example?

Dotsy’s Complaint talks about the Joe Higgins Vs David McWilliams debate on the free market.

Bjork – Pleasure is All Mine. (Live) Remember that this song is done acapella

Tenacious D movie trailer. Starts slow but then goes deep into Jack Black livewire territory.

Via Conánn FitzPatrick

Via the Beaut.ie blog is a Joe Duffy version of Sexy Back. Lyrics and song itself are on Bebo Bands.

I’m gonna shave me back (YEAH)
And then I’m gonna wax me sack and crack (YEAH)
I will be smoother than yer man 2pac (YEAH)
‘Cept I’m not dead and I am not black (YEAH)

Gift grub have accents closer to the real thing. Still good though.

Creative advertising.

Google fucks over Ze Frank. I think David not Goliath could win this one though. :Update before this is even published. Google backs down.

Leinster House bans blogs. Hmm. Just as politicians start getting into them.

The Art-O-Meter. Using science to measure the “artiness” of a piece of art.

Convert delicious bookmarks to Google bookmarks. Also staying on this topic. Find out how many of your delicious bookmarks are dead.

Via Tom Coates – A fantastic way of using Moo Cards. Moognets.

Enviro blog Worldchanging is looking for bloggers.

Google Earth is going to have a new layer for congressional races in the U.S.

The Google Earth 2006 election resource tool indicates the country’s 436 congressional districts with stars on the popular 3D map of the country. Clicking on a star pops open a bubble window that has information on the candidates in that race.

Hmm, could Google Earth be used as a resource in this country I wonder?

The Week in Politics is on RTE at 2255 tonight and I think this will be the one that might have Dominic Hannigan from Labour and Cian from IrishElection on it. Tune in if you can.

Update: Apparently not. Hmm.

“Scrap €52m e-voting system, says councillor” runs the headline. Breaking ranks it says too. Damien, you’re a rebel!

Yes, he’s actually in Fianna Fail. Damien Blake on e-voting.

Via Joel Cere. Nissan wins defamation lawsuit against French blogger.

While the tribunal acknowledged her right to self-expression, she published personal data about her colleagues, violating their right to privacy and was accused of defamation.

Howl @ the moon blogs about the Trojan Games. Brilliant. If they did this at the Olympics ratings would sore. Other things would go up too.

Canadian Tory MP booted out of his party for his blog antics.

AllofMP3 goes free. Kind of.

Wanted, Cork crime blogs.

Demigod? Thanks Jeremy.

20 ways to survive the workplace.

Networkers give you their card within the first 30 seconds of conversation. After about 20 minutes telling you how brilliant they are, ask whether they would like your card. Then return their own to them and watch them slip it straight back into their pocket.

Ricky Gervais on creationism and Darwin and other stuff:

Seems the Sunday Times did something old media accuses bloggers of doing: Totally misunderstanding a situation and creating a big hullabaloo about it. Mick has more on this on Slugger. Though Mick just stops short of singing “Wind beneath my Wings” to Richard, he’s right in that the Times got over-tabloid on this. Here’s what Richard actually said.

Really enjoying the Anti Monkstown Ring Road blog. A single issue but lots of great content. This is what bloggers can do. The latest post tells you which councillors voted for the road, who opposed it and who abstained. All will get archived forever too.

And from a previous post:

Do you remember which councillors promised you they would vote against the road?
Do you still have the paper work that came thro your door?
Do you remember the answers you got on your phone call campaign?
Do you remember the answers you got from your text campaign?
Do you remember the answers you got from your email campaign?

Which councillors were unavailable to you for comment all through your campaign?

The election process is just around the corner.
All the local politicians will be knocking on your door looking for your vote to keep them in a job.

What will be your reply to them when they do that?
What will your vote be?

Sounds like a war cry!

Cian has a blog post as an afterthought to the Blogging the Election event. What can bloggers do? It’s a valid question which probably has no wrong answer.

Me? I’d like to see bloggers follow around a politician for a “normal” working day even before the election gets into fill swing. In fact I’d love to see one done for every party and see how things work from all sides. I think it would be good for a blogger to document the average day of a TD and give so many the perspective that we may not have. John Gormley mentions the time poverty most politicians suffer and it would be nice to have someone follow them around to see this. It ain’t an RTE documentary but I think it could be good blog viewing.

What I think bloggers would be fantastic for is fact checking. One person may not be able to consistently fact-check politicans but an army of bloggers could. It would be nice to use blogs, archive.org and much more to run what they said last week, what they’re saying now, what they said four years ago. Or as Guido pointed out at the conference. – what they say to one group about a sensitive subject and what they’ve said about the same subject to a group with an opposite viewpoint. It would be good to see who is pandering and running with the hares and hounds. I think this was the essence of Bernie’s break out topic at the BtE event.

I’d also like to see campaigns for asking politicians some good questions they can’t worm out of and comparing their answers to their fellow party members of even themselves a few days later.

Time poverty or not I’d very much like to see more politicians blogging and especially women and we certainly need to see more Fianna Fail and PDs blogging. Note to the PD advisors, stop telling your bosses that blogging is a waste of time. It is not. Maybe we need to prove how powerful blogging can be for you? Do you require some kind of Guido stunt? Maybe we should make Damien Blake the first Google result for Fianna Fail and the Disillusioned Trendies the first result for Progressive Democrats?

John Gormley also suggests that TDs could have anon blogs where they disclose all the gossip from Leinster House. That’s interesting. Or maybe someone that solicited gossip from there and printed it. But how could you verify this gossip? Actually that’s a very good question we could have asked Mr. Fawkes. On that topic Ethan Zuckerman has one technical suggestion for remaining anonymous while blogging using specialist software.

This would certainly test the libel laws which is a question Media Forum were asking today. Here’s a view on how it works in the States.

Branding would be great too. Would love to see bloggers get invited to politcal events and seeing laptops with Aspoke.com designed skins with IrishElection.com on them, as well as IrishElection.com on the polo shirts worn by the bloggers attending.

So what do you think bloggers can do?

Update: Cian’s view.

Well that was fun.

Red Mum took some fantastic photos. I really like this one of the four of us organisers:

Sorry to the vegetarians for the lack of food for you guys. I’ll take full blame for that. It won’t happen next time. BTW, thanks to Wrappido who did the food and beverages. They gave us a massive discount and were very professional. Much cheaper than O’Briens. You’d think after showing Brody’s vid we’d get cheap sambos! I’d heartily recommend Wrappido if you need catering for events around Dublin. I might use them for the blog awards actually.

Good to talk to some new faces as well as familiar faces from BarCamp and the Blog Awards.

Kevin the Disillusioned Trendy still needs a haircut. Now that he’s a PD it should be a far more severe haircut really. BTW lads, congrats on joining the PDs and pissing off so many people. Everything you do is carefully considered and this I’m sure is no different. Well done on making a choice.

The more I know Elly the more insaner she seems. Her future hubby on the phone telling me “No Jaegerbombs” was cute. And there wasn’t because the pub had no jaegermeister.

Richard Delevan, thank you for taking time out of a busy schedule to start the whole thing off. Appreciated.

Damien Blake is dead on and fair play to you for coming all the way from Letterkenny after traveling all the way to Cork the weekend before too. Thank you too to Ciaran Cuffe and Dominic Hannigan. Very much appreciated guys. Thanks for taking a saturday off for us bloggers. We need more politicians that see blogging and bloggers as worth setting aside time for, even a small amount. It’s not that blogs are going to be the be-all and end-all of everything, they’re not, but they’ll be part of politics and so many other thingsfrom now on. It’s a shame that some politicians would only come if they got on the platform but the rules were there, you had to blog and so some politicans wouldn’t come and be in the audience.

We definitely need more women politicians who blog and hopefully we can pressure people into doing it. Hopefully some of the advisors might change their mind and stop saying that blogging is a waste of time.

Guido is a professional shit stirrer. And none of us were surprised when he took out his Irish passport. Seriously man, well done, you’ve changed the media landscape. Your talk was very educational and personally I found it inspiring. Gave me a few ideas for sure. Guy News. Love it!

Simon McGarr’s talk on libel sufficiently scared the shit out of most people. Are we all safer now that we know to be very safe we should turn off the computers, cut the cables, melt the keyboards, lock ourselves in a concrete bunker and cower in the corner? I think Simon’s section drew more questions than anything else. He should have handed out cards. It might be nice to have a follow-up with a Q+A session or something like that.

Thanks to Antoin for the FOI talk and valid examples. Hopefully we’ll see more bloggers use FOI.

Shame more people couldn’t come along. We’re a good few hundred euros in the red but hopefully we’ll have another event before the election and carry over the costs into that. That is if people want another event.

Big well done to Mick, Suzy and Cian who I was glad to assist to get this going. Cian was the shining star at this and it was nice to see notme running about the place making sure everything was going well. Someone should nominate him for some blog award or something…

Sponsorship slots of EUR250 have now opened up for Blogging the Election. We’re still in the red for the conference and some unplanned costs are the reason but are part and parcel of events. The ERU500 slots are too rich for some companies so we’ve created new EUR250 slots.

What do you get for this?

Your company name will be mentioned at the start and end of the event in the thank yous. Your logo will be on the screens behind the podium during the intervals between speakers and your company name and logo will be mentioned on the IrishElection.com website.

A EUR500 slot will get you the above plus you’ll be the sponsor of a section and this will be pointed out before the section starts. Of course we also have the EUR2000 venue sponsorship slot still available.

Thank you to Sensorpro, Digiweb and Technofutures who have sponsored the event so far. It’s very much appreciated!