Damien Mulley

After a week of meetings in Dublin for IrelandOffline it’s time to start getting back into blog reading and blogging.

Podcasting:

Podish is an idea from Liam Burke which allows Irish people to podcast and not worry about where to upload their content or worry about paying for it. Blurb:

Podish involves Irish people embracing podcasting without having to pay to upload their items, all they need is their mobile phone. The mobile allows people to easily record an item/issue in the news that they want to express their opinion on, or maybe be adventurous and interview somebody or do a sound seeing tour of their town area. The possibilities are endless.

Podish will make a nice edition to the irishblogs sphere. Would be handy if it could get some space on a sidebar on Planet of the Blogs.

Keeping to the Podcasting theme Tom Coates talks about the much anticipated BBC podcasts and how the BBC has put up an easy guide to podcasting up on their site.

My own opinions on podcasting is that it’s a fascinating area of citizenship jouranlism and we’ll see this become more popular. It’s very rough right now and I’m sure it could evolve into something more complex or quite different. What I’d like to see is people able to upload their own podcasts as audio comments to news stories on websites along with a written summary or transcript of what they saw. Stick in a few tags too while we’re at it for the tagging enthusiasts.

Speaking of tags, Feedster are adding the ability for readers to add tags in their feeds. Handy to see a “Tag This” form at the end of posts on some blogs. It doesn’t feed into technorati though. I’m sure a little bit of greasemonkeying might allow interaction with technorati or del.icio.us.

I too can dance the funkey chicken with my iPod.

As a follow-on to my commentary on Russell Beatie’s post saying Microsoft will win the DRM war, Engadget is now rumouring that the PS3 will support iTunes. This would make sense but I feel it would need to be a necessity anyway, no new thinking went into it, more a self-defense mechanism. It must be a huge humbling experience for Sony who invented the walkman and made music totally portable and personal and now they have to become the bitch of the iPod and iTunes. I hope they learned their lesson in complacency.

So IBM has met the year 2004 and is pushing for blogs. Not really a consolation for all those they are laying off in Dublin though. “Here’s the key to your blog and here’s your pink slip”.

The IBM blogging project is being run by Jim Finn, the former chief of communications at Oracle, and now number two in the corporate communications team at IBM. “We’ve got a lot of experts in their fields and we want to encourage them to become involved in blogging and online discussions,” Mr Finn told SiliconValleyWatcher.

By the way, check out the genesis of Silicon Valley Watcher. Definitely an interesting model. One I’d like to see adopted for the irishblogs.

From Russell: Napster, Real and Yahoo! vs. Apple… Winner: Microsoft. Sounds odd? Russell does a run-through of the various online music structures and shows that despite Apple dominating the hardware section of music players and iTunes doing very very well, the fact that Yahoo! and Real are using Redmond’s DRM plus a truckload more companies and that the XBox360 is going to be a games console and a media centre means that MS is gonna kick serious ass very soon. They’ll control the routes for accessing our media. Russell himself is a Yahoo! employee so he isn’t being biased on this.

Choice quotes:

Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and soon they’ll have a monopoly on everything else as well: not the OS, but the DRM on which all the media is based.

and:

As the OS diminishes in importance going forward in time, the only thing that’s going to separate one system from another is the DRM which is laid on top of it

and:

It’s like 1989 all over again when everyone was begging to license the Mac OS. Two years later Windows 3.0 showed up and Apple is now at 2% market share. If you don’t think the same thing is happening in the media space, you’re dreaming.

Yeah, this is one of those “Oh Christ we’re fucked” moments.

Ben Hammersely discovers FireFly and like everyone else that’s sat down and watched it, he loves it. He gives a very English review too

It is, as you all know, fucking brilliant. I mean, really. It’s about as far down my personal trousers as a tv show can get. A Futuro-Sino-Cowboy aesthetic, with courtesans and gunfights? Hold me.

Damned right. My mother was pissed cos they cancelled it. That’s how big an audience reach it has. I look forward to the movie.

Kind of on the same theme. Well no not really. A cool project using jars of artificial fireflies. Shake the jar, the “fireflies” come to life and get noticed by the other fireflies in the other jars. Sweet.

It was hugely futile to try and ignore that Microsoft is everywhere. SunRay Thin Clients will now support MS Applications. Sense is good.

What is a bollixitician ? Well I suppose it’s a professional who talks bollox and puts a PC/politico like slant on it. It’s bad enough that our politicians have become adept at non-apologies and answering questions with answers to their own questions but now it is creeping into other realms. We’re seeing it more and more in business, it started with big players doing it as they had whole PR Departments behind them, but now it is trickling down to SMEs and even one man operations. It’s only going to frustrate the general population more.

What’s fun is that it is going to backfire, it’ll reach a tipping point and then people will be shit sick of all this. The people who are going to avail of the backlash are those into open, frank conversations with people. Who be they ? Bloggers I think. Companies and SMEs who start availing now of Blogging and open conversations with customers and people in general will outlast the rest with their 30 person PR team.

Let’s hope that the Blogging for Business Talk in Cork can convince people of this.

Nokia comes up with the sensor idea. 2 years or more after bringing out bluetooth they come up with this? What’s the big deal? This is very very unimpressive. A belated welcome to 2002 there lads.

Fold a dollar bill into a shirt. Can it be done with Euros?

Dutch comedy duo who make good use of props. Work safe.

Firefox and Thundebird for USB memory sticks. Handy for net cafes and college computer labs.

Bad Wolf in Doctor Who. Just what does it mean?

Students make their own audio tour guides for museums. This would make a really interesting irishblogs project.

Noka Zoo Watch. Very sexy.

Christian Telco telling you how evil AT&T are. Scary when you think about it. “United American Technologies: Okay. Verizon, what they do is they train their employees to accept the gay and lesbian lifestyle.”

Fandom shows that file sharing can create “gained fans” not “lost customers”

An upcoming irishblogs related event is the IT@Cork talk on Business Blogs. On the panel will be Tom Raftery, Maura McHugh and John Breslin. Now will there be free WiFi at the event so someone else can blog it as it happens, while wearing a “I’m Blogging This!” T-Shirt. I’m kidding. Hopefully Bernie might come down to Leeside for this too.