Damien Mulley

Off to Dublin in the morning. Will be meeting some journos and then on to meet with the Digital Rights Ireland group about our little talk at TechCamp Ireland.

So, a few extra posts tonight and some thoughts.

Ok, in case you missed it, television died yesterday. Without exaggeration the iPod video is going to free people from rushing to their TV to watch an episode of tv, now you can record it and take it with you wherever you go. Bring that episode of Lost to a friends house and watch it, or watch it on the bus on the way to school. Yeah the PSP and the iRover had it too but iPod is for the non-techy. It is a consumer device for the consumer not a nerd. The new iMac is shit cool too with the remote. With iTunes used by so many and already reselling cheap episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives it has already obliterated the Microsoft Media Centre. Bye bye MS.

The iPod whipped the music industry into line and has become quite a force. Remember what it did for podcasts when it added support? Google Video look out, you have serious competition now, not that you were much good anyway. So, it reshaped music downloading in a way, through nothing very innivative and it will do the same now for video. But I doubt it will stop at video. The bigger screen might hopefully allow EBooks and RSS aggregators and so on.

Adam Curry with his idea of plugging in the iPod going to bed, unplugging it in the morning with it filled with new radio shows and podcasts, can be added to with videos such as the best funny videos from wherever, the latest newsfeeds from your copy of bloglines, the local TV news from your home country and the latest pics from your friends Flickr account.

James Enck talked previously about how Ebay could use Skype as a delivery platform for anything electronic. Music, videos, software, services. So, could Apple do the same with iTunes? Anything and all could be shipped via iTunes, could it not? Not as distributed as Skype is a given, and a massive amount of servers would be needed too, unless they upgrade to a bittorrent like structure, which can be done. How many installations of iTunes are out there? How many desktops can Steve Jobs access?

Could iTunes and the iPod be the new Digital Lifestyle Aggregator? Right now probably not, since Apple like to lock people in using DRM but maybe in the future when the backwards thinking megamedia producers get more crap kicked out of them, then Apple might start becoming more open.

But, what’s stopping someone now from creating an iTunes clone that will work with the iPod Video? Apple built the route, build a better bus to get there, more comfortable seats, better AC, smoother tyres.

TV is dead. I won’t be missing it.

Jeff Jarvis (a hero of mine more and more) gives his own views. And here’s more on the iPod disrupting life as we know it

And the iPod porn enthusiasts have already started. I was right.

It’ll be 6 weeks on Sunday since I had any meat or fish. If anyone knows me they’ll know I challenge myself now and then, such as when I gave up alcohol for a year (Oct 2003 – Oct 2004). It’s not a new idea you know. :)I wanted to see how long I lasted without any meat or fish or flesh and so far it has been easy enough. Except when it comes to eating. I don’t use the word hate much, I feel the word is too powerful for regular use, but jesus christ I’m almost hating pasta and pasta based dishes now.

Irish Mammys know how to cook when it involves roasting some meat from an animal in the oven and throwing veg around it. Try asking to make a meat free dish. Want spuds with that mash?

My body I thought might change but it hasn’t. I started taking the super-power vitamins in case my iron levels go down. Don’t think they have.

When do I go back eating meat again? I’m not sure. Do I miss it? Yeah, hell yeah, it’s so easy to eat with meat. And I really miss the burps from eating burgers.

Porn just went very mainstream and very portable. iPod video – download, convert, get the kleenex. The new logo should have one hand on the iPod (like below) and one down the pants.

Neil Gaiman will be on Rattlebag. He’ll do some signings afterward. I can’t go, so go in my place.

Tuesday 15th November 2005. Rattlebag Public interview with Myles Dungan
Time: 7 pm
Venue: Studio 1 – RTE Radio Centre, Donnybrook, Dublin 4
Tickets: Free of charge but early booking is essential from 01 2083445

Blogging Prof Fails To Heed His Own Advice. Suggestions that his tenure may not have been renewed because of his blogging. “Academic bloggers interviewed say the most common problem they face is convincing their colleagues that their online activity does not come at the expense of scholarly research.”

IM Federation. Allowing the interconnecting of IM networks. Good plan. GTalk might join.

Looking at who visits me and what phrases they used in Google: 2nd in Google for “activism in ireland”.

4th for “Gay people adopting.”

Via Schneier Police say money-laundering conman is the greatest trickster they have faced. honestly, who here is saddened when someone robs a bank? Got to wonder why our mentality is like that.

I missed this great piece by Richard last week. (My own fault for relying on PoTB and IrishBlogs too much, remedied now by adding him to my blogroll.) It starts off talking about Barak Obama and the way poltics is discussed in the States and the way that the blogging community is quite healthy with political discourse.

I’m going to quote some chunks of text as I think they need highlighting. (Note: I use a lot of my blogposts as post-it notes to myself)

Other than Dermot Lacey and Indymedia, I don’t know of another blog(or disco board)/pol dialogue worth talking about in Ireland … it seems very unlikely indeed that there’s an analogy for the ‘dKos sphere’ here and its potential to influence a major decision – e.g. who should succeed De Bert.

Very true actually. But is this because Irish people are so unenthusiastic about politics and the way politics is played here? We really couldn’t be bothered.

I said to Disillusioned Lefty that the nature of Irish political thought and communication argues against blogs having a prominent role here (rather than being late adopters and/or issues of scale), but I’m willing to be proved spectacularly wrong.

Presently Richard is correct I would think. In the future maybe not, what can be done to prove Richard wrong in the future?

Look at Kos and then look at politics.ie or indymedia.ie or some of the fragmentary blogs with tiny audiences in this State and you see there are deep issues of quality, scale and influence. Ranting undergrads aren’t taken seriously anywhere in the world, nor should they be.

Nice bitchslap. True though. Even with Politics.ie and the Politics Board on boards.ie and a few other boards, there is not a lot of super heavy quality. OR maybe there is and we don’t notice it yet? PLUG: Nominate your fav political blog and post. While Richard goes on about Undergrads, would it not be good to introduce every politics student into the world of blogging. Have it as an assignment to maintain a blog?

There might be one way in which the Irish blogosphere might have a similar role, as a space in which narrative is teased out and unpacked. That is arguably happening in a sophisticated way in a couple of places here, though about foreign subjects. … But as of yet anyway it’s not happening in a meaningful way regarding Irish party politics itself.

So, again, how do we encourage the people and the ‘sphere to do it locally?

Irony of ironies, I wanted to reply to Richard but he appears not to have comments enabled on his blog. Just like me. Oooh, a fitting punishment for someone that does not enable comments on their blog is for them to be denied access to comments on others blogs. It would make me get off my lazy ass and fix comments here.

On a slightly similar note, myself and Dave were discussing the upcoming Irish General Election and that an unbiased and neutral fact-checking site is needed. Monitor all the hot-air that comes from politicos and see does it match what they said and what they did. This might be a way of reeling in those that may not have had an interest until now to get involved in political debate. Certainly would help make politics more transparent.

After doing a search for “The Inside”, I got back the following results:

Notice that it fences off results in the middle of list? These are all to do with fox and it suggests a new search? I’ve never seen new suggestions in the middle of a results list. Compare this to the Chris Pirillo results I got yesterday.

After a major endorsement from 20, more and more people are supporting the idea of the Irish Blog and Podcast Awards.

So it will go ahead, but as yet undecided are:

• Categories
• Location
• Date of event
• M.C.
• How the costs will be covered
• Judges
• Security for Twenty Major
• Security for everyone else in case Twenty does a Twenty

So yeah, only a small few things to decide. Add your thoughts here or if you don’t have a boards.ie account talk to me via email: damien (at) Mulley ( dot ) net

Via InsideMicrosoft comes talk about MSN and Yahoo IM working together to allow their networks to access each other.

This was predicted a while ago in a DrunkenBlog article called 1,2,3,4 — I Declare IM War.

InsideMicrosoft has screenshots of YahooIM with MSN contacts added in.

Next prediction from DrunkenBlog is GTalk becomes (and prob is already) amulti-protocol chat client for Windows. This means you can add in Yahoo and MSN and AOL.

Too stop this it looks like Yahoo, MSN and AOL will try and lock out GTalk by making people upgrade to new clients which will allow the services to talk to each other but not with GTalk.

Specifically, sometime in the near future, all three services are going to be releasing new versions of their software and “Sunsetting” all older versions of their Windows clients.

Nothing like a new war in the tech world to entertain the nerds!

Tour operator will pay for soccer fans’ flights home.

I heard Tony Burney on Morning Ireland this morning where he stated

“Customers are hard to get, but extremely hard to keep. ”

Burney provided hotel accommodation, meals and pocket money for soccer fans who hadn’t budgeted for a few extra days on the Mediterranean island.

That’s the attitude one should have for your customers. Go out on a limb for them. It should pay off for Tony too with all the free advertising he’s getting. The man should start a blog and keep the public updated.