Damien Mulley

Via BoingBoing comes details of songs created from speech samples from George Bush. george Bush sings Imagine and Sunday Bloody Sunday. It’d be nice to see more of this in the irishblogs arena as we get closer to the next Irish general election. Hopefully we’ll have our own EFI/EFF up and running by then as well as an Irish version of They Work for You. I’d happily donate a few hundred quid for something like that.

Speaking of EFF, Danny O’Brien is the new Activist Co-ordinator for the EFF. He’ll still be writing his Irish Times piece though and doing NTK.

And in RSS news The BBC is going all out RSS ka-razy after the general election. Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News website gave a summary:
So in May we’ll be happy for outside websites to dip in and take our headlines. We’re also adding new feeds, like one with the most recently published stories, and still to come will be an RSS search telling you when reports have been published about particular topics you are interested in.

May sound a bit much to get your head around, but it’s the way ahead for lots of people. In March, we registered 16.5 million click-throughs to reports from RSS feeds, and our target is 10% of our traffic driven by RSS by the end of this year.

Come on RTE, get the party started !

[EDIT 11-11-05] Hello to BBC readers than came from this article.

UPDATE: John’s listing has been restored. Hooray !

Tension in the irishblogs? John Breslin was dumped from the IrishBlogs.ie listings. If this was more than an administrative oversight then I think I’ll be asking them to remove me from their listings too. This is a community of bloggers where the attitude should be inclusive not exclusive. The WikiPedia is the perfect example of an open and inclusive system. It’s become huge because it welcomes everyone. Adding and removing blogs from your listings because they do not fit your hidden criteria is a great disservice to the whole community. We are all Irish Blogs but are some IrishBlogs more Irish and Bloggy than others ?

An Italian coffin maker markets itself with a sexy calendar This is the very interesting April photo:

I wonder what the new Pope will say ?

Top Coates starts a conversation about trackback and whether it’s dead in the water. He states “I don’t think this problem can be solved by engaging in the arms race” and I have to agree that once you’re a spammer target you’re well and truly fucked. My activity logs for each day show I get absolutely pummeled by attempted spams from various bots. Even though I have comments and trackback turned off they still smack themselves off my server daily.

I do think though that comments and trackbacks have been very beneficial to starting and sustaining conversations and some better system is needed. Perhaps Tom’s post will bring Trackback Version 2.0 or something like this. I do find trackbacks are a marvellous thing. They’re an immediate way of letting the person you’re reading know that you’re sending them link karma for their latest post. We need to keep letting know they’re being read without having them resort to server logs and we need to let them know what we think of what they wrote too.

I don’t have comments or trackback enabled as I said above but I manage to see what the irishblogs are saying about me via Planet of the Blogs and via a pubsub rss feed.

John Battelle is reporting that Google is getting into injecting ads into RSS feeds. Dave Winer recently took Google to task on their lack of interest/support of RSS.

Dave said: “To this day Google doesn’t do anything interesting with RSS feeds. It can’t even display feeds in an intelligent way. Perhaps it’s NIH that’s keeping them from embracing RSS as their two main competitors have. Whatever it is, Yahoo is dashing in front, with Microsoft close behind.

Why isn’t Google in the race? To me it remains a mystery.”

I’ve noted before that GMail may be doing RSS integration but who isn’t at this stage in the game ? I would really like a way of searching for all the irishblogs using Google and without resorting to doing a complicated filetype search.

Battelle has also shown some new forms of non-text ads from Google. Seems they are really putting pressure on the likes of DoubleClick and their ilk by offering traditional forms of webadvertising now. Heh “Traditional webadvertising”, we’re getting old.

Continuing the RSS and ads theme comes evidence that Slashdot is now displaying ads in their RSS feeds.

To finish off all my daily Google fetish comes news of a possible new way of getting rid of spam called TrustRank which uses a small seed set of “good” websites and trusts their links more and with some mathematical magic can dump all those spam sites. Handy.

Via MetaFilter. The Editor of the Dallas Morning News was having a bit of fun.

Institute of Backup Trauma – Clever marketing video for LiveVault backup solutions. I might make everyone in here watch this, though with John Cleese in this video I doubt a lot of arm twisting will be needed.

And from the mind of Chris Cunningham comes Rubber Johnny:

Johnny is a hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child, kept locked away in a basement. With only his feverish imagination and his terrified dog for company, he finds ways to amuse himself in the dark.

In the big picture it might not amount to much but Scoble, telling his bosses he thinks they did the wrong thing could very well be a turning point for corporate and employee blogging. Man, to tell your boss publicly that you believe what he did was wrong takes balls and backbone. Well done Robert. No matter which side Scoble took, to do so in public when your boss is Steve Balmer is something else.

This has yet to turn white hot but I think it will and it could really be a turning point for the power of blogs. Scoble was I suppose hired to blog, but will he be fired? Anil said “Nobody has ever been fired for blogging” but will it hold true ? Time is going to tell. Read all the comments on Scoble’s blog. Wow. Everyone is weighing in. Though I’ve not seen any commentary yet on the irishblogs about it I bet there will be. There has been commentary about the MS decision on the discrimination bill alright but not on Scoble taking a stand.

Meanwhile Matt Haughey says this MSM line in sand stuff is bullshit. And I quote You are the media. I am the media. Blogs are a fixture in the mainstream. So when you decry the “MSM” as an imaginary villain, I know I’m done with your site.

Here in the Boggersphere the homophobic Blood Transfusion Service classes MSM as “Men who have sex with men”. It took me a while to figure out that the blog pundits weren’t talking about gay saunas and orgies. I swear I never pictured Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls at it.

Oh I see Efferal saw he was in the Sunday Tribune, I wonder who linked to his piece first ? *Whistles innocently*

Looking around the irishblogs tonight three posts caught my eye. Firstly GMail suspended Dave’s account for 24hours for a some unclear reason and the support mail he got back was a total cop-out.

The other thing is that Ciaran is looking for a Flickr Pro account, anyone want to give one to him ?

Lastly John mentions the Irish Times quotes a user from Boards about IRMA. It’s a pity they didn’t quote some of very intelligent posts some balanced posters made about it. Still good to see Boards get a mention. I was told today that the head of a large ICT company was sending journalists to “The Boards” to have a look at peoples opinions of certain technology products. Boards.ie is growing but will Planet Of the Blogs be more influential ?

This post’s title comes from a Rufus Wainwright song that was playing as I started the post. Oh what a world lyrics. Very catchy and builds as it samples Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and brings it into a big bang of an ending.