EDIT: He booked Avalon House
Phil is trying to find a cheap hotel so he can come along to the blog awards. Leave some suggestions on his new blog.
EDIT: He booked Avalon House
Phil is trying to find a cheap hotel so he can come along to the blog awards. Leave some suggestions on his new blog.
I love the above logo!
Digital Rights Ireland now have T-shirts for supporting their campaign about the “mp3 players are bad” sillyness from IRMA and their ilk. Give your support to the DRI folks.
Was invited to the launch of the new Oireachtas Report on Broadband which happens at noon today. Stay tuned to their site. Flying up with Ryanair. I will of course bring photo ID. Oh and I’m not 28 anymore. No homework for me today!
Phil the wonderful Photo blogger is now going to make art using words.
Captain Crunch is doing videocasts Dunno who he is? Just a bloody legend.
AOL instant messenger now has open APIs. 70M users. This is kinda not so little.
Dave Winer goes into greater depth about unconferences.
Someone sent Michele All About My Mother. Fan fricking tastic movie. Spanish drama is so damned good.
Alan is selling Blog Awards T-Shirts.
Vote Rebecca for Vice Auditor. Anything to make my ex-wife happy.
Get your recorders out. Ainé – Behind the music. 10.45pm RTE 2. Shame really. Euro Star was on last night, right?
That Girl suggested we have a Bloggers’ Workshop and it’s a fine idea and something other bloggers mentioned before. An actual face to face, get your laptops out for the boys/girls workshop would be fantastic and I think the cost of room and net hire would be covered by a sponsor or else on a very low entrance fee. But before an actual face to face meetup we should find out the most common questions and get people to contribute answers. So the Blogging Workshop wiki has been born. Post your questions and provide answers there. The password to access it is jamtart.
What’s a wiki you ask? Just like a shared blogpost really. Anyone can edit the page they’re looking at. It’s easy to edit and add text. Not as easy to make it look pretty and format it but there are a few tools to help you along.
If you are scared of the Wiki but have questions you want to add. Just post them here in the comments and we’ll add them to the list. Where “we” is not me but some other nice blogging angel.
When we get a lot of questions and answers we can make it into a nice pretty guide and then we can have an event for those that still want to talk to someone in person and have a techy work on their blog. The techy should be fed with coffee and gummy bears. I myself like Cheesecake.
Invisible people have invisible rights as my tagline goes.
Extracted from this blog post:
While waiting for the next report to start the DJ took to the microphone to take a request. A young man was on the line and the DJ asked him his name. “Sean�, he replied. The DJ asked him what song he wanted to hear and who he wanted to dedicate it to. He said he wanted to hear The Door’s “Light My Fire� and he wanted to dedicate it to his boyfriend Josh. The DJ said “no problem Sean, and where are you and Josh tonight?�. Josh replied “Hamilton� and the DJ then said “You guys have a good night� and with that the song began to play.
The blogger cries after hearing this. I just smiled cos I’m a bloke and my mates and I talk soccer and stuff. A real manly thing to do. Grrr and rarrr.
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear more things like this on the radio? I don’t listen to the radio that much but when I do hear people ring in requests I have never heard one dedicated to a samesex partner except once ever at 630am on TodayFM when a girl asked for a song for her girlfriend and the amount of males that rang in afterwards doing the equivalent of rubbing their thighs and going “phoar” was quite high.
Richard might think that political gays are more visible in the blogging world than the stats suggest they should be, but when it comes to daily interactions such as the trivial things like requests on radio shows and so forth, gay people are still quite invisible. Even less invisible if you don’t go to hair salons and buy your clothes in Top Man. I’d much rather see the odd mention that gay people exist like via requests on radio stations than having to suffer Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will and Grace – a show then years old and where the main gay character has kissed a guy once or maybe twice on-screen and the best supporting gay is the most vapid creature on earth. Though they exist in real life, I admit.
There was meant to be a point to this post I think, hmm, oh yes here it comes around the corner now: It seems quite disappointing that society is now coming around to the fact that gay people exist yet most are still out of sight. Tony Cascarino was on the sports section of the Last Word on TodayFM on Friday talking about gay soccer players and his advice was they should stay closeted as it would be too dangerous for them especially sharing a dressing room with other soccer players and the taunts they’d get from the crowds. Bit of a way to go yet then.
So before I start on my overdue contract assignment I have a few more things to blog about.
Conn Ó MuÃneacháin has a new blog. One which ignorant mise can read. Yes Conn, you are an Edge case.
The Google GDrive is coming closer to launch. Wow and stuff. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
How Robert Scoble enabled a company to sell 1.3 million dollars worth of software in three days. One man, one blog, one good idea, one million dollars though they didn’t make one dollar. So the deal was they offer their software for 5 dollars. The 5 dollars would be donated to the Red Cross. They wanted to see how many units they could sell in a 4 days. They sold 2,642 units. That’s a lot of new customers and customers who are techy in nature and might all have blogs. Very clever idea. Who’ll try it in Ireland?
Speaking of which. Hugh mentions Sprint giving free phones to bloggers and says they’re not doing anything new or interesting. He thinks his idea of giving free wine to bloggers was better because he himself blogged as well did the Stormhoek folks. It wasn’t just push marketing. Stormhoeks was a two-way thing. o2 gave me free phones of late to give to those at the Blog Awards without any conditions but I have asked all winners to blog about the phone. o2 might get themselves even more credit/kudos if they had their own blog for their i-mode products. I’m actually considering only taking sponsorship next year from companies who blog whether it being an official blog or an identifiable employee that blogs.
IR Free Stuff – give away stuff for free or get stuff for free. Isn’t the word “stuff” great?
Markham spotted an Irish ice cream blog. Mmmmm. Again I say: mmmmmmm. Nice find Markham and it’s a great blog.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get more and more people blogging and getting more companies using blogs and RSS/Atom/(whatever feed technology) and how to convert as many as possible into using this medium*. I suppose one should go with the easy wins first. Go with those most suited for blogging and encourage them. Let them be the first ones to dip their foot in the news rivers and tell the others the water is great.
Murphy’s Ice Cream are the perfect company for blogging. If someone is passionate about their job/work/product then a blog is a great outlet for conversing with the public. For them a blog is probably a natural extension of what they already do which is telling the public about their passions. Small companies would naturally do this more than larger ones. All levels in the Murphy’s probably work with the consumers on a regular basis. Could you say the same for larger companies? I couldn’t but from now on this will change.
Microsoft are probably the biggest company to encourage blogging. Look at how many people in there are blogging now. Look at the blogs for all the various products they make. Even supersecret Google are clenching less and working with their public more and I’m sure their products will be all the better for it and thank goodness because the most of their latest products are bland and many are just lame.
So, I’m going to start looking out for passionate people and passionate companies. My friend Stephen is a candidate for blogging. As is my friend Allan. Same definitely goes for the guy I get wine off of in Bubble Brothers, as I mentioned previously. How many people do we know who are passionate? Why not make a list and have our own tupperware conversion party every few months to try and convert them? The Cult of the Blog O’Sphere. Why am I thinking about that Simpsons episode where they converted Homer by going “ne ne ne ne ne LEA-DER”?
And now I’ll try and find some Murphy’s Ice Cream in Cork and follow their recipe for hot chocolate.
* I may have something to announce on this in the next month or two
Sinéad gives a summary of those recently posting about their book obsessions in the Blog O’Sphere. I actually would think everyone is into books. They do seem to go hand in hand. My book reading is suffering but the amount I read daily now outweighs the amount I ever read when I was not blogging and into books.
Sinéad thought I might come up with some tech/geek suggestion for this. I’m more thinking why don’t we all bring a book to the Blog awards, one we have that we haven’t read but we would like to, and maybe do a secret santa kind of thing? How non-geek is that? 🙂