Damien Mulley

There’s been a bit of chatter today in the irishblogs about Ryanair banning staff using phone chargers but to me it’s all hype. It extends the myth that they’re the low fares airline (see I’m even using their own phrase ! ). It just makes people believe think “Wow they’re really saving as much as they can to keep prices down.”

Fair play to them for this idea. Again they get media attention two days after O’Leary dressed as a cardinal. Maybe people should instead talk about the Ryanir employee victimisation case.

Via BoingBoing.

A lecturer who had his laptop stolen goes on a rant telling the thief what is going to befall him. I love what he has to say. I would think a lot of it is a bluff but it’s a good bluff. Torrent of the video of the lecturer getting medieval on his ass. .zip audio copy of the warning.

Google now has a My Search History option. (Found this out via John Battelle’s SearchBlog. About time. This will be hugely useful to me. This should make me work a lot more efficiently online now.

From the site:

My Search History offers you:

I really like this and the calendar way of looking at information is going to prove handy.

Overall, this is good but it could be better. Right now “My Search History” saves your Google activity information such as search queries, the results that you clicked as well as the date and time of your searches.

What it doesn’t do (yet) is keep a history of what happens after you leave the google site and move on to other sites and see what you clicked on then. This could be done via the toolbar though I guess. What would also be of benefit and could be the killer of Del.licio.us is a Google Toolbar add-on that allows you to bookmark sites you visit and tag them. Google could do this quickly enough too with the engineers they have. Bookmarks stored on Google and with a firefox extension loaded on your current browser. Who needs to worry about backing up bookmarks then ?

There’s a lot of talk on irishblogs about the new Pope but hardly any at all from the LGBT bloggers. Exceptions being Fetch on Queer.ie and Efferal who wrote a satirical news piece:

“Welcoming the Election, the Irish government, announced new measures to fall in line with the new totalitarium regime. Attendance at mass will be compulsory and all intrinsically evil bars will be shut down.

The authorities were quick to act on such orders. The raid on the george happened just after 9pm. The patrons were forcibly removed before the windows and doors were boarded up. A lone blonde galwegian sat sobbing at the side of the road, asking over and over “where will I go now.”

On the LGBT forums though there is quite active and angry debate, such as the Boards.ie LGB Forum , Gay Community News discussion of the new Pope. Adolf must be Proud is the thread on GayCork with the thread on Gaire being God Bless Our Saint The New Pope.

Perhaps once they get themselves submitted to the best Irish RSS aggregator or start tagging their posts with irishgayblogs, then we’ll see them pop up more.

EDIT: This seems to be a concept only. Click the first link and read the comments.

43 folders talks about Glenn McDonald’s iTunes customisation which allows him to auto-pay artists he listens to. This is a fascinating description of how his system works. Very elaborate, clever and balanced. This could be used as the best payment model around for paying artists for their music.

If this was plugged into the likes of Indy and any artist who submitted had to have a paypal account, then it might be a good way of sending them micropayments. It’d wreck the record labels. I wonder would IRMA survive if this idea became popular ?

Tangent:

EirePreneur suggests Ian’s Blog be added to PoTB, seems it already has been. That’s the irishblogs community at work !

Ian Clarke Meathman and the founder of Freenet has released Indy a p2p app for listening to and finding independent music artists.

Blurb: Indy uses an advanced collaborative filtering system to predict what kind of music you’ll enjoy hearing. As you rate songs, Indy finds out what you do and don’t like. It compares your preferences with the ratings of all the other Indy users. For example, if you rate a song highly, and another user also likes the same song, Indy guesses that you’d probably like other music that they enjoyed.

Nice application and a great way of giving artists a boost. It’d be nice to read more about it and how it works. as this grows I assume there will need to be a way of automating music submission.

It’s be handy if there was some way of going through your existing music collection and scanning in that to better predict what you like besides having to go through swathes of new music before there is somethng you like. Or else a way of submitting a list of fav bands/genres that the app is already preconfigured for. Would be a good headstart I think. Still, I’m looking forward to the growth of this.

Social network sites gone extremely local. Social networks built around a single WiFi hotspot.

Fantastic Chris Jordan photography.

The best places in the world to get sick.

Hockey MotherFucker, do you play it ? Jules from PulpFiction does Hockey coaching.

The Marketing Industry’s coming disaster. New media gonna whip theys ass.

Listening to the new album from Rufus Wainwright. A few tracks are touching me. The opening track on the album Want Two is “Agnus Dei” (lamb of god) and really shows off his voice. I’m deffo going to see him live. Vicar street here I come. I swear to uhm er God I’d attend mass every Sunday if the church had someone sing “Lamb of God” like that.

Another track which I think could get put into my top ten is “The Art Teacher”

Rufus Explained the lyrics:
The Art Teacher – “It’s a song about a guy I met at the gym who of course was straight. He’d tell me stories about his female students who were ravenous for him. So I put myself in their shoes to write the song. I played it for him and it went totally over his head

Lyrics to The Art Teacher:

The Art Teacher

Jape has a new album out and I really like it. €7.95 for an mp3 copy of the album and I can download it DRM free. Or €14.95 delivered. That’s clever. I got the album from a friend. He loaned it to me. By MP3. I await the battering ram on my door when the Team IRMA World Police come bursting in for being a terrorist funder or something. I’m going to buy the album now because after a few listens I think I want this as part of my collection. I don’t see why I have to buy an album after hearing one preview of it. Same way I’m not going to buy a house my just viewing the kitchen. IRMA seriously would want to cop on and stop blaming just piracy for the drop in worldwide music sales.

From IRMA in 2005:

Massive illegal file-sharing is undermining the livelihoods of everyone in the
creative chain involved in making music, from composers and music publishers
to performers, musicians and record companies. Abuse of copyright on the
Internet has contributed to a €28 million drop in music sales in Ireland
between 2001 and 2004, a decline of 19%.

From IRMA 2003:

‘ The association, which represents the Irish music industry, says
sales in the first half of 2003 are down from the same period last
year, although official figures will not be published for another three
weeks. “It’s almost entirely attributable to piracy, between people
downloading off the Internet and people burning CDs,” said Sean
Murtagh, Irma’s head of anti-piracy. ‘

Get a grip lads.

Woah, was just about to post this and I see Bernie is talking about IRMA on his blog. I’m not cogging you Bernie I swear !

By the way Bernie, how did the EFF discussion go on Saturday ?

EirePreneur adds to the earlier idea of a GPS opensouce map of Ireland which got me to thinking about all the recent Ajax hacks and tweaks of services and APIs. One such example is the Google maps integration into Craigslist which even the Google folks gave kudos to. It won’t be long now before someone does the same with GeoUrl so we can see a Google Map of our area with those little balloon thingies showing local Bloggers and GPS co-ordinates.

Bernie gives a good summary of what the Tribune is saying about IrishBlogs The BoggerSphere idea got a mention and praise was heaped on Slugger O’Toole’s election coverage and rightly so. The energy that’s put into that site is nothing short of fantasitc. Keep reading the Planet of the Blogs feeds as I’ve a feeling a whole new group of journalists are going to be poached from there in the next few months and years. If done right the irishblogs could be the breeding and training ground of the new wave of journalists. as well as other forms of media and it was great to the most powerful man in media embrace the future.

Free Audio download of Murdooch’s speech.

Full text of speech

I love this bit: “But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

And with the growing proliferation of broadband, the emphasis online is shifting from text only to text with video. The future is soon upon us in this regard. ”