Category: irishblogs

60% of Irish people have never used email

Friday, November 25th, 2005

The JNLR figures came out this week and as well as having the usual Radio listenership stuff they had other trends on Internet usage and gadget usage. I unfortunately don’t have access to the data (you have to pay for it) but was told by a few friends and journalists about it. The biggie was that 60% of people have never used email and that only 45% of people either at home or work have access to the Internet. 14% of people surveyed have DSL at home and 37% have regular Internet access. I’m waiting on clarifications on these figures especially the “never used email” bit. Anyone know TNS MRBI people who could clarify these figures?

Piaras briefed us about the last JNLRs which showed 14% of people had an mp3 player. The most recent figures state that 8% of adults have an iPod. That’s quite surprising to me. Very high.

The low usage of Internet reflects an IrelandOffline press release on the digital divide we sent out earlier this week which quoted ComReg figures showing only 37% of households go online and only 1/4 of them use broadband. The big issue with the figure apart from being low is that it hasn’t changed in two years.

I’m genuinely shocked at this email usage figure and the fact that when you add work and home net access the usage figure is only 45%. So much for knowledge economy, so much for the digital hub.

UPDATE: Sunday Times piece on this.

MSN addons via Robert Burke

Thursday, November 24th, 2005

Robert Burke talked about MSN activities here and there are some interesting apps for MSN. He also highlights the Ask Encarta MSN add-on.

So, I added it to MSN and had a chat with Encarta:

Damien M: Is Open Source Good?
Encarta® Instant Answers says: I don’t think I know Open Source Good.

Damien M: Is Google evil?
Encarta® Instant Answers says: I don’t know. Do you think it is evil?

Thursday 24th November bits

Thursday, November 24th, 2005

More Google videos:

Barney to a 2pac soundtrack.

Family Guy, horrible ugly puking clip. Highly entertaining.

Via BoingBoing:

A woman named Mary Van Deusen creates videos for old pop songs by recutting footage from the old Sherlock Holmes Granada TV series starring Jeremy Brett.

View her art here.

Only in America:
A bike with a treadmill. So you can jog on a treadmill while touring around outdoors.

Antoin talks about the new Blueface.ie user interface:

So I can set it up so that when a customer rings my Dublin number, both my phone in the office and my mobile phone (and my home phone as well, if I want) all ring, and the call goes through to whichever phone is answered first.

That’s shit hot!

Coolhunting talk about the work of Cindy Wright. Beautiful art and photorealistic.

Wednesday Videos

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005

Fantastic Virgin Atlantic Ad

Speaking of videos. All the revulsion that happens when Americans see little kids with AK-47s in the Mid-East. Via MeFi is the video of Americans getting their kids to use machine guns to fire at targets. Big and clever.

Adsense for Angel Funding, Adsense for Charity

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

Kevin Burton ups the ante on community angel funding by discussing how supporters of his (like the ones who donated a few quid a few weeks ago) could leverage their website to host AdSense ads that he’d benefit from. That’s fantastically clever and very easy to implement way of making some cash.

I actually didn’t know that you could host your AdSense ads on another site not owned by you. This is quite interesting. It could be quite a good way actually of funding new initiatives in various suburbs of the blogosphere. I’m just thinking that if everyone on the IrishBlogs list or on Planet of the Blogs list added an Adsense ad to their main page, it could help to fund a dedicated programmer to work on a project that would benefit everyone that blogs in Ireland or maybe the ad money could be used to donate money to a group that protects online civil rights.

Then again coming up to Christmas the ads could be used for the boards.ie secret santa project or given to a worthy childrens charity.

Tuesday Linkages and quick comments

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

Thirsty Work – Wine Book with hip attitude. Jamie Oliver’s wine guy. Wine without the pretention?

Another view about Google Print. This is more in-line with my thinking. Why doesn’t Google make it opt-in and not opt-out? Why don’t they join the Open Content Alliance?

Suzy on same-sex partnership rights. Even Labour are now backing away from supporting equal rights.

Tony Bowden on issues with FOI requests. I’ve done quite a lot, though none in the past while, some orgs are quite helpful and some will interpret the guidelines for their own agendas and refuse to give anything away. One great excuse I heard was that I was not provided with details of how much the statutory instrument payed consultants as this would harm the business of the consultants as their competitors would know how much they were payed and could undercut them the next time. In fucking fairness!

Who would have thought working on a Trawler could be so interesting?

Top Thirty facts about Chuck Norris. Chuck doesn’t sleep, he waits.

Bytecasting – Cooking up compilations

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

Robin comes up with the idea of bytecasting. And I like:

Ingredients:

  • Asterix Server
  • Mobile phone
  • An event
  • RSS Feedreader

How to cook: Take a mobile phone user, mix with an event like a conference, phone the asterix server, do a thinly sliced podcast, decorate with newly created tags or ones you’ve prepared earlier and serve to the feedreading public.

In english, what am I on about? Podcasting via mobile phone at an event. Allowing multiple people to send in podcasts that all get wonderfully served out as one podcast as a medley or compilation of views of the event. As a bonus you could subscribe only to specific tags and in doing so skipping the podcast from that eejit who is always negative. So, you can get the podcasts of everyone that went to an event in one big podcast delivered to you, or the podcasts of the people who are just talking about the talk on Web 3.14.

Clever idea and has some interesting uses I’d say.

MEPs say sharing flight data is bogus – EU Legal dude agrees

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

RTE Reports that the Advocate General said sharing flight data with the US is illegal. Well done to the EU Parliament for protecting EU citizens by trying to get this stopped. Typical that this was pushed into Law when Ireland had the EU Presidency, like they tried to do with software patents.

An agreement by EU governments to give the US Homeland Security Department details of all passengers flying between the EU and the US has been cast in doubt by one of the EU’s top law officers.

The Advocate General, the top legal advisor of the European Court of Justice, says that last year’s air passenger data agreement must be annulled because it breached EU law.

Boards.ie – Busiest site in Ireland

Monday, November 21st, 2005

1212 users online at the same time. Woah.

SSE – Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML

Monday, November 21st, 2005

Winer goes all fanboy on the new Microsoft Simple Sharing Extensions Initiative. Posted in irishblogs | 1 Comment »