Damien Mulley

So it seems the NUJ of UK and Ireland have called for a boycott of Yahoo! for their complicity in having a Chinese journalist jailed. Simon reminded us yesterday that it was the anniversary of the guy who stopped Chinese tanks with only the belief that freedom was worth facing down the killer machines of the Chinese Government. Now if only Yahoo! felt the same instead of being the co-driver in those thanks. Tom Raftery asked Bradley Horowitz before about Yahoo!’s bootlicking in China and he has also asked Vint Cerf about Google in China. Both gave bullshit answers in my view but these really are questions the top guys in Google and Yahoo! need to be answering.

Terry Semel tried to defend Yahoo! recently and then someone asked the Nazi question. Would Yahoo! have done business with the Nazi’s if Yahoo! was around in that era and the guy said he didn’t know. I only just looked up Terry’s profile. He’s the damned CEO and he doesn’t know? You can forgive Bradley Horowitz but the guy where the buck stops doesn’t know. Dumbass. I guess their corporate philosophy is just some ornament to hang in the boardroom. Jeff Jarvis makes the usual sense but also tears big strips too.

But lets not let Google away with this either. Check out the big difference in Google searches for Tiananmen Square on Google China and Google.com. It’s not rewriting history. It’s using invisble ink for some paragraphs, right?

Update: Linked to Simon’s site, not the site on making landing pages. Sorry.

Via Waxy Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack.

Via BoingBoing is the Mobile thong.

Fecking great photo from Ryan.

Keith Bohanna’s domain auction made €366.95 quid for IT@Cork. Nice nice nice.

Dave Winer on Web 2.0:

the web is a platform for idealism. It’s not a conversation, it’s not a business model, it’s so big it’s basically everything having to do with human knowledge and communication, at least for the forseeable future. Let them have Web 2.0â„¢, it’s not important. What is important is that the users are running the show, and if you want to get behind that, be a user, and leave it at that.

Watch your posture at the PC.

Via you Ain’t no picasso. 35 bands on 3 stages over three days. All this for $24. Fecking hell!

Eunoia – beautiful thinking.

Gatorade Raft.

Antoin mentions Aspoke will give you a free laptop skin for less than the price of your first born’s soul. The offer ends 1 August 2006. You can avail of these skins in two ways. Go see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” or link to Aspoke’s offer and link to the movie website. That simple.

I don’t use a laptop but I do have a fridge and a washing machine. There’s a crowd out there in the digital world that do skins for fridges. I’d love if Antoin had skins for those or even skins for those cheap mini-fridges. Have a competition for the geeks offering a skinned mini-fridge packed with gatorade and redbull for some of the start-up companies and give them skins for their laptops too. Nice pimpage for Aspoke when these kids go all around the country/world selling their product and demoing at conferences.

Antoin, are you coming to the IT@Cork gig? Might be worth coming down now with some sexy skinned laptops.

Sept 19th Update. For today’s fire go here.

Somewhere on the Northside.

Update: Donncha provides more details and photos.
Scrap yard in Dublin Hill apparently. Donncha’s photos should be published in the Echo. Very artistic for a scrap metal fire. 🙂

The smell of rubber and other ghastly burning smells is invading Ballintemple at the moment. Seems like a big bloody fire alright.

RTE Web coverage.

Karole Cuddihy gives an excellent analysis of the Mr. A case, I’m quite surprised we don’t have more academics getting online and explaining how the legal system works. There should be a few classes in final year law on how to write for the public and break down the barrier between the stuffy legal clichés and the general public, especially at a time when the trust for lawyers is decreasing even more. The A case was a great lesson on how the legal system works and the whole idea of separation of powers. It’s a pity there wasn’t more outreaching to the general populace to explain the beauty of the system, although Joe Duffy led hysteria might have put lawyers off.

Doc Searls presents at Reboot8.

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings – and our reach exceeds yor grasp. deal with it.

Sinéad is tempting me to buy more books and dvds.

Seth Godin: How to get traffic to your blog. Rajesh Setty has a less tongue-in-cheek list.

Wanted: Arch Nemesis.

I posted a video before about Diet Coke reacting with Mentos, this is the chemical reaction taken to artistic extremes with 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints.

Machine Gun Mania:I went to a driving range today for the first time in about 15 years or so. I need to toughen my skin. Both hands are covered in blisters. Anyway, here’s an amazing hole in one. It hits the rough and then then then slowly rolls on to the green and into the hole:

Installed almost exactly 24 hours ago and askimet has stopped 3,317 spams. God bless it. For some reason my spams went from 100 a day to 1000 a day and now see how many I’m getting!

Heading into the Sun soon but first.

Nelly Furtado cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”. She has a fantastic voice and doesn’t get as much attention as she should.

Ciarán Cuffe’s blog. The party policy bullshit quota is fairly low. Almost non-existant. I really like his latest post. You won’t find that on a media release. Compare it to other blogs by TDs that are out there which seem to be committee approved, peronality out / blandness in, brochures. Seriously, if you’re going to rewrite press releases you’re in it for the Google ranking, not to interact with people. It’s disappointing to see some politicians who obviously are passionate about politics and community issues and yet the person talking from their websites or blogs or dinosaur newsletters seem like some heavily medicated patient in a psych ward. It’s kind of sad. Guys, you can get into the Dáil bear pit and slug it out with the Government Ministers, why not do the same with the broader community? Challenge beliefs, make people rethink.

Someone mashed up that video of Bjork going fucking ape with a reporter. Remember that famous vid? Well now it’s mashed up into a Streetfighter game.

Eternal Sunsets. Watch sunsets from all over the world.

Just Giving – a website that allows you to collect money for a charity event that you do.

Brian Greene highlights the evangelising work of Bernie Goldbach which has pushed blogging and podcasting further into the collective consciousness of the Irish digerati and who will in turn push these “movements” into the mainstream.

As Brian testifies to Bernie’s visonary skills:

Bernie sent me another hat tip in 2001, rss was going to add enclosure tags, it was only talk and demo but it was coming, and BFG told BHG to get his darn radio shows on to rss enclosures – aka podcasts today

There are blog aggregators, podcast directories, blog awards and podcasting awards in Ireland in 2006. I’m sure both blogging and podcasting wouldn’t be as popular in 2006 if it wasn’t for the previous years of evangelising by Bernie. He’ll have my vote when the nominations for Net Visionary come out this year. And he’s not even a Corkman!

How to spot a liar.

Liars avoid making eye contact and will look to the left when asked a question

I’d disagree with that one as when someone asks me something and I think about the answer it’s like I read from a book or webpage and see the information structured like that, so I’m staring in mid air and moving my eyes from left to right.

Some interesting bits of art:

The Zipper Orchestra.

The screen is filled with 9 video clips from different people zipping and unzipping their clothes. By moving 9 physical sub zippers and 1 main zipper attached in a canvas, users can control the individual zipper motion in the screen as a conductor

Project giant speech bubbles on walls and allow people to text messages into the bubbles. Well cool.

Who’s Britt? This is his Bio. Amongst other things Britt was senior advisor for Internet strategy for the Howard Dean Campaign. He also wrote a chapter for the Extreme Democracy book called “The Revolution will be Engineered”. I asked Britt would he be willing to meet with people and give his views and experiences of using technology as an aid in politics/elections. He’d be happy to. He met with some folks in Dublin today and will be down in Cork on the 7th and 8th of June. He’d love to meet interested people on the 7th. Who’d like to meet him? Time is roughly the afternoon of the 7th. Location unknown yet. All depends on numbers etc. It can always happen in a quiet pub 🙂 I may not even be able to make it myself but I’m sure someone can be there to host this.