Damien Mulley

Ed Byrne was on to me about setting up Tech Camp Ireland and at that uri is now a Wiki for others to sign up to it. What is it? Who is it for? *Shrug* Go look.

Tags: Ireland techcamp IrishBlogs

In March 2004 I posted about the Four Principles of Interpersonal Communication and I completely forgot about them, so here they are again:

1) Interpersonal communication is inescapable
2) Interpersonal communication is irreversible
3) Interpersonal communication is complicated
4) Interpersonal communication is contextual

Esquivalience – Via MetaFilter is a link to the New Yorker about the Oxford English Dictionary adding a fake word to the dictionary in order to catch people ripping off their content.

But what is this fake word supposed to mean – Esquivalience-n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.

InsideGoogle mentions the talk.google.com domain which if you connect to using a Jabber client will talk back to you:

Inquisitive Neowin member Tom Servo, taking a que from member CarlNewton tried to connect to talk.google.com using his Trillian client.

What he got was a secure XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, alternatively known as Jabber) server waiting for connections.

The same site also points to comments in the New York Times: Google executives say they plan to unveil on Wednesday a “communications tool” that is potentially a clear step beyond the company’s search-related business focus.

The NY Times speculates about the possibility of a Smart Phone: A Google-branded smart phone has long been a pet project of Mr. Page, and earlier this year Google invested $2 million in a project by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, to develop a $100 wireless laptop. The smart-phone idea, which the company has not talked about publicly, would be a way to extend Google’s reach and give it a more extensive connection with its users by offering Google on a multipurpose mobile device.

What I’d like to know is whether it is going to connect with Google Desktop. It would make sense really for an IM Client or Smart Phone or VoIP communications device to use the Desktop client. Desktop is really taking the daily tasks performed on a pc and putting them together into one client and running the services off their servers. Poor Microsoft.

I really would like to see some innovation in the IM Sphere. Nothing has changed or taken a significant step forward in years. Emoticons are not progress! I’d really like it if it worked with MSN Messenger and other IM Clients. Redmond would be a tad more than just pissed then but I don’t know would Google have the balls to hijack the service and try and convert over MSN users.

Rowan Nairn has some good advice on his blog which I found via a comment on James Corbett’s post about an Irish Geek get-together. So yes, Rowan advised:

Put your ideas out there. They are worth more to you as advertisements or previews of what you can do than they promise hope of single-handed exploitation. You want a patron who recognises your brain’s capacity to generate new ideas as a more valuable commodity than any individual idea. It’s hard to get someone to pay you to start having ideas from nothing, but someone may pay you to stop telling everybody else your ideas.

Nicely said. That’s why I sent out the NewsRoom.ie idea. Get some feedback and if some hacker wanted to take the idea and run with it, then more power to her. I’d even be happy for the domain to be used. I’ve got loads of ideas and I cannot use for work or for pleasure or for any campaigning work I do. Maybe someone will end up here via a Google search, find the idea and use it.

Anyways, not seen Rowan’s blog before but I’ll keep tuned now. Hey Rowan!

Mozilla Mouse Tips. Some quite handy ones here.

Via Kottke, using Excel to search for jobs when in work. When will IrishJobs or RecruitIreland provide an API to their DB. In fact, when the hell will they bring out RSS feeds for my job preferences? Email is so bloody old.

Overshadowed – Fantastic photos from Japan. I wonder can Ryan or Donncha produce something like that?

Seth outlines how he wants to sell his next book. His marketing of ideavirus was fantastic.

Gmail Conversation Preview Bubbles

Death by Caffeine. How much of your favourite caffeinated drink would it take to kill you?

Jarvis on new news sites. Something for Newsroom.ie to model itself on?

The title says it all. Boards.ie is down and so with all this spare time available to people they have gone about their work in their jobs. Quarterky profits will be up everywhere!

James Corbett suggests we have Irish versions of Foo Camp and Bar Camp. Not a bad idea. There are the usual IIA and IT@Cork style meetings but they generally are very formal with very high suit to seat ratio. Tom Raftery invited Scoble over to talk about blogging at the annual IT@Cork conference and there is a geek dinner after.

You have the Cork Linux piss-ups which are at the opposite end of the scale where everyone goes to drink and happens to be a geek. So how are Foo Camp and Bar Camp run, how would one set this up in Ireland James?

I’d be all for something like this and I’m sure the usual characters would be too.

Update: The IT NorthWest guys are interested. and Dave is too.

Inside Google reviews Google Desktop 2. Some interesting quotes.

Okay, it is getting a bit scary how this program somehow knows a lot about me. Despite that I received this computer from the factory 9 days ago and never previously installed any Google product on it, it has indexed something on my system to determine some websites I’ve been to recently and added their RSS feeds.

Desktop 2 also has a timeline, viewing all the pages you’ve been to and emails and chats you’ve received, in order. It even digs into the past nicely. You can add networked drives to be indexed.

Looks like Google Desktop Search has turned from a search program to a fully featured “Dashboard” offering everything to everyone. Lets hope it got the mix right. Automatically adding in RSS feeds of sites you’ve visited is quite interesting. Are they going to compete with bloglines directly with this kind of thing? Getting there well ahead of Vista too should help to get more control of the RSS aggregation market.

IrelandOffline have released their 2005 survey. There’s about 50 questions in it and hopefully if we get enough people answering it, it should give a good snapshot of how people feel about Internet access and Internet issues.

It was launched around midnight tonight, I emailed the membership list about it today and so far 200 people have filled it in. We’re going to run this for another few weeks and launch the survey results at our AGM on Sept 10th in Buswell’s.

Most of the questions relate to internet access and prices, but at the end we tagged on some consumer trends type questions.

Some interesting results so far:

Do you download favourite tv shows?
No – 61.86%
Yes – 38.14%

Do you download audio books?
No – 72.96%
Yes – 27.04%

Do you have a portable digital music player?
No – 25.76%
Yes – 74.24%

Do you have a digital still camera?
No – 12.69%
Yes – 87.31%

Do you read blogs?
No – 31.00%
Yes – 69.00%

Have you listened to podcasts?
No – 71.28%
Yes – 28.72%

Have you used Skype?
No – 47.50%
Yes – 52.50%

Have you used VoIP?
No – 44.78%
Yes – 55.22%

Blogs, Skype and VoIP are all popular.