Author Archive

Fluffy Links – Friday August 29th 2008

Friday, August 29th, 2008

I actually feel guilt when I don’t get my Fluffy links out first thing in the morning. Happy Electric Picnic Friday!

Nominations for the Irish Web Awards close in a few hours. Get last minute nominating!

Nialler’s Electric Picnic Mixtape. Go get it!

Rhymes With Porridge – Daithí Mac Síthigh has a new blog.

Via Annie MoleSteve Guttenberg is in the Cinderella Panto this year! Mahoney!

What a clever business card for a fitness instructor.

Who Is MSNBC Anchor Joe Scarborough?

John Maeda on the simple life

I like it, what is it?

Via Sizemore Dark Knight gets darker – Cut scene which may feature in the DVD extras:

RTE’s Recipe For Success wants foodies to contribute

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

RTE Cork are currently in pre-production for a new food and business programme called Recipe for Success where they invite amateur cooks to submit their original recipe ideas. The best ideas will then be selected and participants will be invited to present their recipes to a well-respected Irish food businessman who will over several weeks select a winner. The winner will then have their product sold in the Supervalu.

The closing date for applications is 26th September 2008

Receipe for Success

For further information please email the show at recipeforsuccess@rte.ie

Or write to them at:
Recipe For Success?,
RTÉ,
Father Mathew Street,
Cork.

Fluffy Links – Thursday August 28th 2008

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Murphy’s Ice Cream did champagne sorbet at the Rose of Tralee. Check out the great pics.

Meanwhile the Crossanator talks Rubix and Roses.

Great pics of damaged and baked computer goods from Joe in PutPlace. Geeks may cry.

Light from heaven. Anthony has a lovely post about the Media Training I did in Cork yesterday but his pic of the urinals in the Cork Airport Hotel shows how the lighting almost looks like rays from heaven directing you to go for a pee.

The hotel is also the venue for the Digital Media Island event tonight. Come one, come all. It should be a good evening with a few tech demos and lots of networking.

SoundCheck is hosting a pre-Picnic party @ Spy, South William St, on Thursday with DJ sets from Adrian Crowley, Sinead Ni Mhordha and the SoundCheck DJs. Should be great fun, and a good way to start your Picnic weekend!

There’s also a tweetup too at Electric Picnic at the Pink Boat!

Hugh has a great post about living on the edge. Well worth reading no matter what type of business you’re in.

Beckham got his eyes done? Apparently so.

Seth Godin says click on ads to say thanks. Jesus, he’s getting it less these days. Ads = not tip jars.

Nice jump in Internet usage in Ireland.

Hands free cigarette what? WHAT?

Fluffy Links – Wednesday August 27th 2008

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Very late but what the heck!

SoHo Solo, the West Cork business network has a new blog/website. I do blogs. No need to give them my email to get updates now. Good man Calvin!

I like this from OFTR. Dell Boy.

I love FFFFound. What a cool image.

There’s now car pooling/hourly car rental in Cork.

Senator Mark Daly now has a YouTube channel. No need for ambien for those sleepless nights now.

For those that like their statporn in graph format.

And then Debz points out StairPorn.

Propose Live on TV with WillYouMarryMe.ie – I expect a sister site called RejectedGobshites.ie to pop up any day now.

This is marketing. Clever Burger King.

The Scottish are coming. Hard Working Class Heroes lineup announced.

So the Sunday Times want to know about every communication between Independent News and Media since 2006 and that od the Dept. of Comms. At the same time Smart Telecom want to know about all comms between the Dept and everyone else when eircom cut them off the telecoms grid. (This resulted in all of Smart’s phone customers being left hang and had to move back to eircom or another porvider.) All this and more in August’s Dept. Of Comms FOI requests.

This is my rifle. There are many like it.
Green Rifle
Photo owned by davidwhitewolf (cc)

I dunno, it was in my head and I was looking for a picture with colour in it.

I’m going to Creative Camp Belfast – What about ye? – Saturday Sept 6th 2008

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Creative Camp, Nordyland, Saturday Sept 6th 2008.

Creative Camp

Never been to Nordyland. This should be interesting. I marked myself down as not doing a talk but I do have one I’d like to try out after thinking about it more. I won’t say what the talk is but I hope it’s entertaining. For me. Maybe the audience will like it too but getting a reaction is the goal. One hint: It involves air travel. I won’t say anymore.

The Wheel of Belfast
Photo owned by kyz (cc)

I’m reminded of this and stereotypes for some reason:

Want to start a business in the South East?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Via Eugene (and Keith covers it too)

South East Enterprise Platform Programme

SEEPP – the South East Enterprise Platform Programme that’s run in the WIT Centre for Entrepreneurship starts again in September.

They have a few places left for this programme that starts in September so if you’re thinking should you/shouldn’t you/maybe I might etc. why not give Eugene Crehan a call or email and have a confidential chat. He’s on 051 302953 or email ecrehan < at > wit.ie, hurry though. You just have enough time.

ComReg: The problem to telecoms solutions in Ireland

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

ComReg are the telecoms regulator in Ireland. Their job is to make competition in telecoms healthy which should result in better offers and great pricings.

Recently they had another consultation and decided that eircom’s wholesale price for a wholesale broadband product (we’ll call it that for now) needed to come down in price. This was an extensive consultation and was really drawn out. So they decided on a new price. All the competition of eircom said “Yay”. But eircom didn’t like it and went to Court about it, which they are well entitled to do.

Even before they went to Court, ComReg’s own staffers were fairly open in thinking eircom would win in Court. But the Courts are on holiday now so we’ll all have to wait. Except we don’t.

ComReg have now decided their very extensive and detailed consultation and deeply considered consultation was in fact bollox. See, here’s the trick to ComReg, bring em to Court and you own them. They always give up. They always settle on the steps. Settling normally means negotiating but ComReg again and again just throw it all away. Here they decided to reverse another of their decisions and it cost 5 Million in legal fees as they had to pay their costs and the costs of o2, Vodafone and Meteor.

Which is what they did yesterday.

Citing the cost of contesting the appeal, the resources it would have to devote to it and the probability a judgment would not be delivered “until well into 2009”, ComReg said yesterday it had “decided to set aside its decision”.

The new price directed by the regulator was an interim one and would have been in place for a year. “A more detailed expert analysis has been furnished to ComReg since the announcement of the interim price which will enable a process whereby ComReg can propose a specific and substantive price to the market in place of the benchmark price previously proposed,” ComReg said in a statement.

More here. Magnet the only telco to give out about it.

I keep calling ComReg the telecoms poodle. Someone needs to put this mange riddled creature down after years of failures.

Apricot Miniature Poodle
Photo owned by charkesw (cc)

Heads should roll for either them being totally incorrect on the initial consultation or being devoid of testicular fortitude to fight this out in Court.

Update: I see once again that the Consumers’ Association (who are on the payroll of ComReg by the way) have blamed eircom for this. More misguided bullshit from them:

Dermot Jewell, chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, has called on the European Commission to intervene if necessary.

“Comreg is being frustrated by one provider just because it’s in a position to do so,” he said. “There are other players out there ready to roll up their sleeves and get competitive and this is just another stumbling block for them.”

Tuesday Push August 26th 2008 – Crewger – Bringing Film Crews together

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

So you have an idea for a film, then what? Well. Crewger might be able to help.

Crewger - Irish Film Crew Discovery

Crewger helps bring people together to create films. Simple idea and apparently very much needed in Ireland. The more official blurb states:

Crewger is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of the Irish film community by facilitating the production, promotion and exhibition of original content by film-makers of all ages and backgrounds working in Ireland today.

While there are discussion forums out there, there’s nothing much webified about the Film Industry in Ireland. Crewger offers a nice way of finding crews for films with their search facility and building a community and forging links. In short Crewger is a social object for film in Ireland.

You can also check out the Crewger Twitter account to get news updates. Please help promote Crewger on your blog and website. Don’t forget you can submit your app or website or company to be on the Tuesday Push too.

Gastronom.ie – Sinéad writing for us / sponsors sought

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

As you may or may not know, I run Irish Food and Drink aggregator Gastronom.ie. There are about 45 Irish Foodie blogs that it aggregates and it gets about 110 visitors a day and has a few dozen people subscribed to the feed. If you want to get emails updates of the posts then there’s a subscription box towards the bottom right of the front page.

Aggregator, what’s one of them? Yeah, it’s a single place online where you can get the latest content from a load of other sites. Gastro is structured so that it only takes summaries of the blog posts and so the original owner gets all the Google rankings for their content.

Local fare
Photo owned by Phillie Casablanca (cc)

The site is going to be rejigged in the next few weeks and we’ll ramp up the homemade content. We’ve already started though and the wonderful Sinéad from Inkheart has come on board to write summaries of what Foodie content was covered in the Sunday papers. We decided to call it Post the Roast. Go and have a read. She’s a great writer isn’t she? You’ll see a new Post Roast on a Monday morning. With enough sponsors we’ll have new content daily.

Speaking of which, if you want to sponsor sections of the site, let me know. There’ll be regular sections a sponsor can have their name on. Our main sponsorship route right now is the sponsored blog post. See, we dislike pure ads. We think they’re bad for the advertiser and bad for the reader. A sponsored blog post means the advertiser/sponsor has to do a bit of work and create something useful such as a competition or a blog post with recipes or a sample chapter from a book or something interesting for the readers of the website. Our readers get value and our sponsors engage more with the readers as a result. Well, that’s the idea anyway… Email me at the usual (see contact page) if you want to be a sponsor. It might work well for companies that work in the Food business.

Fluffy Links – Tuesday August 26th 2008

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Time is running out to nominate sites for the Moviestar Web Awards. Get nominating!

David points out a handy app that can be used to subscribe via email to blogs, even if they don’t have that function set up. Handy for those that like to get emailed copies of blog posts.

Win a website for your small business via Boards.ie.

Another Labour Councilor is blogging. One day all their blogs will be on the Labour website, where they should be. I hope.

Meanwhile Barry from Eastenders is after joining Fine Gael.

Simon shows how you can win a logo tender got the Government.

New blog: Philip McCusker.

Don Norman:The Psychology of Waiting Lines. Nice essay.

A stupid filter. The YouTube comment filter. Removes dumb.

New video from My Brightest Diamond. This woman rocks.

Between a rock and a soft place. Cushions that look like rocks. More.

I’m reminded of The Wire. Italian drug dealers using Skype and other tech to avoid the cops.

Loving this Obama T-Shirt.

Two Ronnies – Ardware store