Archive for May, 2008

Those that can do. Again and again – Twitterfone

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

(Disclaimer: I helped Pat out with the PR for this)

Arrington calls him a serial entrepreneur and he’s bang on. Pat and a few more folks from the Telco 2.0 world have just launched Twitterfone. Or maybe Arrington said it was launching and they had no choice? 🙂

twitterfone

What is it? It’s a voice to text message service using text message rebroadcast service Twitter. I ring a Dublin number, leave a 15 seconds (max) voicemessage. It knows who I am from my caller ID and posts to my Twitter profile with a text version of what I uttered as well as a link to the audio message. Here’s my dulcent tones. And here’s how it showed up on Twitter.

Well done to Sean O’Sullivan and Ivan McDonald from Dial2Do who were involved in making this. It’s some of their core tech that powers Twitterfone. Sabrina’s design work at play too which is really fun I have to say. Love it.

Great to see yet another project from Pat launched and the same from Sean and Ivan. I can’t see young Phelan ever stopping.

Perlico sending out deceptive flyers to try and win new customers

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Got the below flyer in the letterbox this morning. It was only when I got to the very end that I realised it was a Perlico flyer. It was designed like it was some kind of service announcement from eircom which got me to read it thinking my service would be going down or something. I don’t think it is very wise to try and trick potentially new customers and I really think using eircom colours and branding too like eircom’s is in any way kosher. Complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority and ComReg lodged. Win my business with pricing and service not fraud.

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Fluffy Links – Tuesday May 6th 2008

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

The people of Cuba are allowed to purchase PCs at long last. I’m sure many played around with homemade ones anyway and nicked ones. I’d love to see what they created themselves, it’s amazing what they have done with their cars from the 1950s. Ingenuity, it seems, thrives in environment where there’s scarcity.

This Niall McElwee thing is full of twists isn’t it?

Loving the new and free Nine Inch Nails album. Loving the way they are marketing this even more. Pay attention record industry.

Read this piece about Gary Vaynerchuk. Fascinating guy. A total energy bunny and a very rich man thanks to blogs and videos.

Not a sitcom a SATcom. A comedy you download to your GPS device set on a motorway journey. A really interesting blend of technology and art.

So someone already made an open source of Microsoft Photosynth and it looks like an open source version of their surface table thing is available too. Imagine if Microsoft themselves open sourced their model? Better yet, the Zen, it might sell more than a million!

Uh gawd. Barbie’s makers try and spin a “green” campaign from leftovers of the most eco-unfriendly toys in the world. This will not end well.

New Irish blog called Scumberculosis. Pithy political and cultural commentary?

The “Bertie, Take Enda With You” Facebook group now has almost 400 members. There are 50 people around the country sporting the badges too.

Meanwhile another tribute to Bertie.

Via You Ain’t No Picasso, Tom Waits announces some US tour dates. Ireland to follow?

Jesus

Death Cab for Cutie – All is full of love

Family Guy

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Well that seemed to be a prank vid so here’s a real one:

Defrosting a fridge chez Mulley

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Defrosting a fridge takes too long. So bring in a hairdryer. But standing around with a hairdryer is not efficient when you can be doing other things while that’s happening. So tie the hairdryer to a chair and set it off. Today’s OCD moment is brought to you by carbon footprints and rising sea levels:

Ain – Sunday

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Aindriú Conroy aka Ain is a young lad from Kildare with a nice folky sound to his music. Sounds much older than he is. He plays Whelan’s on the 7th, 13th and 22nd of May as part of their residency series.

You can listen to his tunes on his mySpace. Check out Sunday. Great tune.

The Ocean, The Sun, and The Sky
Photo owned by Chance Gardener (cc)

Fluffy Links – Friday May 2nd 2008

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Eamon Ryan’s biggest fan (not me) has her own blog now. Yay.

Maybe it was herself then that paid for this statue of Eamon.

Pre-experience design. Fantastic post from Russell Davies.

This is interesting. A house from IBM’s master inventor that Twitters its energy usage.

FatFreeCart – free embeddable shopping cart for your website or blog

April and May seem to be some kind of season of data breaches. Hospital records now.

While in Italy a pissy Govt published everyone’s income levels before they left Govt.

Via Jazz Biscuit, the new Carlsberg ad:

How to listen to/monitor what people are saying about your company online

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Will try to get Fluffy links out later today! Meanwhile. Have this:

It’s the new world of communications where the web has gone all cluetrain (which means it’s not broadcast it’s conversations) so it’s not enough to fire out a press release or write a brochure website and leave it at that. Statements are no longer respected.

Ears
Photo owned by anjrued (cc)

Conversations and soliciting feedback is where it’s at and now that the customer is starting to get spoiled with that, many companies will have no choice but to start engaging with the public where on the public’s patch such as blogs, discussion forums and social networks.

But you can hardly just connect to a lot of people and see what they say. This is where technology comes in. Gee whizz! (Internet on computers joke inserted here)

This is another blog post on an ongoing (it seems) series about communications. I previously covered Blog Crisis Management, Corporate Blogging and Community Managers.

How does a company see what is said about them online?

So where does a company start?

Google.
You can just use basic Google search to see what is being said about your company and your products. Do searches for the company name, product names but also for the company domain name and even the main staff in your company.

Google Alerts:

Google Alerts

Go to Google.com/alerts and sign up via email to get web search, blog search, news, video and Google Groups results sent to you for your searches. Google Alerts is fantastic and very useful BUT you only get results via email. Google killed their search API and there’s not an RSS feed for the main Google Search Engine.

If you have a feedreader such as Bloglines or Google Reader or others you can get searches sent via RSS feeds to you for Google Blogsearch, Video (inc YouTube), News, Groups etc. Everything except the main search engine results.

Google Blogsearch:

Go to: http://blogsearch.Google.com and bung in your search and look at the left sidebar on the results page. You can subscribe to the search using via email, RSS or Atom.

Google Blog Search

Bloglines:

Bloglines search
Bloglines is a web based feedreader and if you have an account with them (which is free) you can also do searches like Google Blogsearch. I use both just in case one spots something the other doesn’t.

YouTube:

YouTube is a little more difficult to sign up to. If you want to subscribe to an RSS feed for “Bertie Ahern” then the search feed is http://youtube.com/rss/tag/+Bertie+Ahern.rss. They don’t really advertise this and there is no quick link at the sidebar of search results.

Twitter:

Like it or who cares what you think 🙂 Twitter has a huge and very active community talking incessantly in small bursts of text. Twitter is a text message rebroadcast service and a lot of the usual first movers are on it. There’s a very healthy community on it now.

twitter Scan

You can now subscribe to searches on Twitter and see who is talking about your name, domain name etc. etc. and what they are saying too. Tweet Scan is a service which allows you to monitor Twitter for various words and phrases and you can be notified via email RSS or even Twitter itself when people mention you. With people moving some of their conversation on to Twitter and away from blogs, this is definitely another place you should have that virtual glass up against.

Yell If It Changes:

Yell if it changes
Yell if it changes is run by Gordon Murray. Yay Cork! It can notify you when

* a website is updated
* a website changes Google Page Rank
* a website receives more incoming links
* a website changes position on Google

This is good just to let you know about new links to your site and if you go up and down in Google rankings but this is much more important for monitoring your competition. You should be watching what your competitors are doing and know when and what they update on their website.

These are some of the free tools available to monitor the net but there are good private ones too. However unless they are using old API keys for the main Google search engine then they might not be as good as the free ones. Enjoy stalking yourself.

Good ole Irish Rail

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Once again the Cork to Dublin train delayed due to “technical difficulties”. That wonderful catchall that covers everything from train being broken to staff still being drunk from the night before to the staff once again having yet another fight with the station master.

Irish Rail – Getting there when they’re good and ready and if you’re not happy about that then they’ll strike.

Update: 8.05 and everyone is on board, 35 mins late so far. Not letting anyone else get on-board but not leaving either. Oh, minds changed, letting people on again.

Tip: Seats 5 and 6 on the Cork to Dublin train have power points.

PaddyPower looking for a blogger – Want a job?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

This was passed on to me. It might be of use.

Bloggers Wanted

Are you a financial blogger – or want to be a financial spread betting
blogger – interested in discussing stories about assets trades: (the
good, the bad and the ugly) and other areas of interest to financial
spread bettors?

You may have your own blog or you may take part in discussions on
other blogs or forums.

You must be passionate about the financial markets; particularly
equities or individual shares in the UK and Irish markets. Writing
experience and a keen sense of humour are needed.

You don’t need to be a blogging expert, but you should understand
blogs and know how to make comments and add hyperlinks.

Possible areas of interest:

• Equities

• Indices

• Forex

• Commodities

• Economic indicators

• Stock broking fundamentals

• Education

Contact us, indicating your area of interest or expertise and include
a paragraph or more about your experience or the reason you would like
to get involved.

We will provide you with useful and valuable tools and information.
The site is already up and running. We also pay a non-commission based
competitive basic salary.

So if you think you have what it takes. Email the following
information to blogs@paddypower.com

• Your Full Name

• Email Address

• Phone

• Country

• Region

• Area of Expertise

• Your Blog URL if you have one – otherwise a sample of your writing

• 2-4 paragraphs about what you’ve done before

• Anthing else you think is relevant