Damien Mulley

Via MetaFilter
Amazing pictures of a wooden train bridge on fire and collapsing with a train on it.

The BAD NEWS to this is that the train just happened to stop with its hot weeels on top of a wooden trestle bridge built with creosoted ties, bents and trusses.

This is the power of the Internet. From a persons camera in Sharon Springs, Kansas to my blog in Cork, Ireland. Citizen Journalism all the way.

I actually woke from sleep thinking about this. Funny old world in my funny old brain.

Via Bookslut is the Independent Online’s piece on Richard Chalmers giving away his book as a way of driving word of mouth and the possibility of actual sales due to this word of mouth.

Someone give this man a Creative Commons license and have Cory talk to him how he got word out on his brilliant book.

My own thoughts on this are go the route of releasing it under a CC license like Cory did, but if your publisher refuses that, then offer a free book to all the bloggers and ask them to review the book on their blog and ping back your own blog when a review is done. Accept all reviews not just positive ones. Make sure there’s a “buy this” link somewhere so you can sell the thing online. Your audience is global online, not country specific.

This could actually work very well for the book market in Ireland. Have local Irish Publishers like Cork University Press offer anyone in the irishblogs world a book with the sole condition that when they’ve finished reading it they review it and put it on their blog. Planet of the Blogs now has about 500 bloggers listed in the Boggersphere. 500 independent reviews of your book, all online would certainly generate traffic and trade.

“Hello, you are through to NTL customer services,” they were told. “We don’t give a fuck about you, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just fuck off and leave us alone. Get a life.”

Guy gets pissed off at NTL service, hacks their voicemail system, is arrested and found not-guilty. Heh. Wonder were the jury sympathetic? Watch out Irish ISPs and TV rebroadcasters.

Jason Kottke was in Ireland recently and thought the place was really green. Irish people don’t realise how true it is until they leave home and visit other countries. Even from space our special island appears to be the greenest. The photos in the link above are fantastic though. Sometimes it takes a thirs-party to remind you to appreciate what you have.

James Enck on his EuroTelco Blog has been giving coverage to the Yahoo! buying Skype rumour that Engadget has also been reporting about. This would make a very interesting purchase and would put Skype on a hell of a lot more desktops than it is already.

However it appears Yahoo! already has a deal with BT to use them as a VOIP carrier for Yahoo! IM voice traffic. What will Yahoo! do? Maybe they can buy off BT by using them as a backbone carrier. They can still move forward with this even with the BT deal. Afterall they bought Flickr even when they had their own photo sharing application created.

Lots of negative comments on the Engadget blog about it. Many don’t want a Yahoo! bastardisation of their smiple Skype interface. Expect this rumour to grow for another while before Yahoo! comments, if the Flickr purchase is anything to go by.

UPDATE: Om Malik gives his views.

Steve Pavlina uses the shareware trials idea as a way of starting a new diet plan or exercise plan. Only do it for 30 days and see how you go and whether you want to keep going. Interesting idea but is it too simple?

Seems the National Parent’s Council kicked up a fuss because of an essay title in the Junior Cert Exam. The school bus tragedy is over, can you not move on? They’ll be calling for the “Wheels on the Bus” to be banned next. The Council should maybe concentrate on matters more important to their kid’s education instead of trying to sustain their moment in the spotlight.

Discussion on boards.ie about it.

Matt Webb came up with a nice new RSS Aggregator feature. An aggregator that randomly hides a feed and if you notice then it’ll unhide it, if you don’t notice then you didn’t need the feed and it wipes it. Good way of handling information overload.

Don’t you just hate obnoxious people?

Washington Post confirms Felt was Deep Throat. So the Washington Post confirms it was Felt. What is inspiring is that they kept the secret all of these years and even as news broke about it they still refused to confirm until they were quite sure that it was ok to do so. That’s integrity. What seems useful to this modern age is whether anonymous sources are still useful and whether news organisations today have the same standards.

The story of Watergate is probably unknown to most people under 30 at this stage but they all seem to know what the big scandals have -gate appended on to them.

And now for the geeky angle on this: I would love to find out how many people bought All the Presidents Men as a direct result of this breaking news story. This leads me on to the idea that Amazon and other online stores should have a Google Zeitgeist style frontpage where people can buy merchandise based on today’s and this week’s main news stories. Of course I don’t think it could be fully automated like Google news in case Amazon sells something insensitive. Would have been funny but PR damaging if Robbie Coltrane’s “The Pope must Die” was for sale when JPII kicked his clogs.

So far All the Preisdents Men has not shown up in the top searchs in Isohunt.