Damien Mulley

Kevin Breathnach mentions that both Fiona and Richard W are giving talks in colleges in the next while. He mentioned were they giving the talk at the same time, which is an interesting idea. There’s been some good debates on the Irish Blog O’Sphere in the past while and maybe we could have an actual in-person debate on certain subject matters?

Bring Bloggers together and have them debate Gay Marriage, Feminism, Iraq and Bush, Google in China, Open Source Vs Microsoft. One blogger on the for side and one on the against side. They will be allowed to prepare in advance and the subjectmatter would be topical. Host it in Dublin for now and maybe have this on once a month followed by some socialising after the event. Each event can be sponsored so it is free admission.

Thoughts?

EDIT:
Sinéad and Richard like the idea. Fiona does too and makes some suggestions. Simon in the comments has a good suggestion too.

From the Examiner

A hotel yards from Government buildings was tonight at the centre of a major Garda investigation into IRA money laundering.

There goes my venue for the awards I thought. But then I exhaled.

The Earl of Kildare Hotel, which is less than 100 metres from the Dáil, was searched by detectives from the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) last week.

Not Buswells. Thank feck.

In the past 3 hours I have gotten 21 nominations all for the same blog for the best technology category. The reason the Blog Awards are not all about a public vote is for abuse like this. Emailing all your friends who don’t read Irish blogs so they can nominate you is not impressing me at all. I’m now going to set up a filter to autodelete anything that comes in with your blog name. One nomination will do.

As for everyone else, get nominating blogs you would like to see win, not blogs you were asked to vote for.

Bernie talks about this experience with US flights and the difficulties trying to prove that those Shannon planes are torture flight planes. I wonder what the budget on PR and Spin is for the US Govt. because they have the sweetest sounding names for the most horrible of things.

Fiona pointed out this Irish Blog on Torture flights the other day. Worth a look.

“The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped.” – Hubert H. Humphrey

The National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) said Irish spending on the elderly is the lowest in Europe, at almost €6,500 per person compared to €19,500 in Denmark. Course we’re the same country that was illegally taking money off the elderly, and when caught changed the law and tried to find a different method to judtify their robbery of money. Luckily our President got the Supreme Court to examine it and it was ruled unconstitutional.

The NESF would want to update their website though. Nothing on it about this press release which is printed in the Examiner. Also in the same paper is concerns from the Ombudsman for Children that not enough care/attention is being given to child abuse complaints and investigations.

The Ombudsman for Children has reportedly expressed concern that the health authorities may not be responding adequately to reports of child abuse.

A Best Technology Blog/Blogger category has been added to the awards so I have opened nominations for a week for this. Then public votes start.

I was also thinking about the iPod prize. Would it be a good idea to put a collection of all the recent Irish podcasts on to the iPod for the winner to listen to?

Fiona’s writings over the past few days have been nothing but exceptional.

Via Smartmobs comes news that the Dublin Tourism site is offering podcasts of various tourist walks around Dublin. About time. I suggested Soundseeing tours of Cork a while back with the timings and maps of the tour being “open sourced” so people could mash-up the audio files. I still think something like that would have a lot of potential.

John Battelle asked Google what details they store and I think this has stark implications for Ireland with the new Data Retention Spy Law.

These “server logs” typically include your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser
type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser

In other words, yes, Google does record this data. But, does it KEEP that data, I asked? The answer:

Yes

Kind of on the same topic, via Google Blogoscoped is a mini video on why the L in Google is green.