Damien Mulley

Predictions of the upcoming IM war. Everyone else Vs GoogleTalk. Looks like GoogleTalk will become multi-protocol and try and have people use their service to access AOL and Yahoo and MSN. GoogleTalk will take on Trillian?

Talking about GoogleTalk. It’d be great if this Userfriendly cartoon on GoogleTalk were true or had something which made people type and spell correctly.

BBC Radio allows listeners to bookmark and tag songs. People power. Another great project from the BBC. Aunty doesn’t seem so conservative now. Saving TV and Radio. Good use of public funds in my opinion.

So says Robert Scoble. I’m just posting this to beat Tiernan.

Google Blogoscoped comes the idea from Biz Stone about Wikifiction in Print. Says Biz:

A real book made out of paper and all the rest of it; but it’s coated with e-ink and has a wireless receiver in the spine that activates when the book is closed.

The story inside the book is collectively edited online just like Wikipedia. The on-board receiver picks up the signal and the e-ink makes the necessary edits. The result is a kind of living book.

That’s a pretty nifty idea. You could also do the same for authors who write a series of books like Wheel of Time and so forth. When a new book comes out it is pegged on to that book. Or one could have a serialised book where every two weeks a new chapter is written and added to the book. I’d love to see a kids book that writes itself as the child reads through it. You can’t skip to the end of the book then!

Just found The BlogPulse tools today. Very handy things.

BlogDay is on August 31st and it asks bloggers:

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2005
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
5. Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2005 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

The blogs I’ll pick are probably ones I wouldn’t have normally picked. Most of those in my blogroll are males so for a fresh view of things I think I’ll go pick a few female blogs. No, gender shouldn’t matter but there is a difference between female bloggers and male bloggers. To open my mind I need to read more opinions of those who have different thoughts to my own and different interests.

However, maybe we should do more than just link to these 5 blogs. Perhaps we should also add them to our blogroll? That’s what I’m going to do anyway. If I don’t like them I can unsubscribe.

Tags: blogday irishblogs

Sinéad tagged me with the 7 things blog meme.

Seven things I plan to do before I die:

Get Broadband for All
Learn french.
Change Irish laws to make society a better place to live in. (The reason I’ve decided to do a 4 year evening Law degree.)
Visit the Antarctic.
Have kids. Possibly via adoption.
Fall in love and have the same person fall in love with me.
Run a marathon.

Seven things I can do:
Research things well.
Argue my point.
Understand people and their motivations.
Piss people off intensely.
Charm the pants off both sexes.
Network. I’m a pretty good people person.
Enjoy my own company. (Only child.)

Seven things I can not do:
Live without music – nicked from Sinéad but so very true.
Keep my mouth shut for long.
Tolerate bullies.
Art. I’m shit at drawing and painting.
Play music.
Dance.
Cruise through life without trying to make a difference.

Seven things that I find really attractive about the same or opposite sex:
Most but not all of these could be gender neutral.
Has a brain AND uses it. The AND is very important.
The ability to understand other people.
Open mindedness.
Outspoken for the right reasons and not to garner attention.
Modesty.
Does unpredictable things. Spontaneity I guess. (I did not rob this one from Sinéad)
They’d also need to be physically attractive to me if I’m to be honest. Though they need not be Brad Pitt.

Seven things I say the most:
Like – It’s a Cork thing.
Though – Actually I write it more than say it.
Cunt – Sorry ladies, for some reason this is my most used curse word.
Broadband – How very fucking sad of me.
Holy motherfucking fuck.
No problemo.
Not a bother.

Seven books I love:
Kicking and Screaming by Ivana Bacik. It carries a bias but she makes you aware of this. Really good read about what needs to change in Irish Law to bring Ireland into the modern age.

Neuromancer – William Gibson. This was my first introduction to SciFi and what a great way to be introduced. Fantastic book with some very good future predictions when it was written in 1984.

Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks – Sci-fi epic. And so very fantastically dark.

Emergence – Steven Johnson.

Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk. Managed to read the book before the film came out. To me this was very fresh and had themes I hadn’t read about before. What happens when angry young men become adults.

The Dice Man. Fucked up. Funny. Fucked up.

Unsure of another one. Will re-check my bookshelf when I’m home.

Seven people I would like to see take this quiz:
Bernie Goldbach. Be nice to get an insight into the man with the mysterious background.
Tom Raftery. A blog neighbour.
Dick O’Brien. Another blog neighbour.
Karlin Lillington.

Scoble. We get glimpses into his personal life via commentary about his Mrs and his kid. It’d be fun/interesting/unusual to see Robert Scoble put something like this on his blog.
Doc Searls. He’s one of the Uncles of blogging. Only natural to see what his answers are.
Jeff Jarvis. Respect the guys opinions on many but not all things. Perhaps this 7 things meme might give us a clue as to how the man thinks or comes to the conclusions he does.

Tags: irishblogs blogs meme

*Update 22-Oct-2005* This seems to be the most popular page on my site. Hello Sufjan fans!

By Sufjan Stevens comes this wonderful and musically simple song with beautiful lyrics. Buy all of this stuff. Hope to see him in Whelan’s in Dublin on Oct 14th.

Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window

Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes

Dick and Dave are both pointing to Sarah Carey’s blog where she fact-checks Eddie. I do so love Dick’s title “Hobbs nobbed on Trim”. Made me smile.

Hobbs is widly popular at the moment and Fianna Fail and the PDs are making an issue of his program which seems to come from the Michael Moore school of presenting facts. There is a good deal of chatter about him on the Consumer Issues forum on boards.ie too.

So, we have IndymediaWatch, how soon before we have an Eddie Hobbs Watch?

To get people started here are two rss feeds which search PubSub and IceRocket for the phrase Eddie Hobbs.

Sarah’s blog entry like Tom’s Googleshaming one is a good example of the power of the blog. Everything you write online gets crawled by a whole host of different search engine bots which cache and archive your page possibly forever.

An army or even a country of people reading papers, listening to the radio, watching TV reports and then going online to point out inconsistencies is a mighty powerful thing. Perhaps we can see more of this fact-checking as a collective effort when the election comes around next year? How hward would it be for a politician to lie and spin AND get away with it when not only is the research machine of the opposition watching what you say but a huge proportion of bloggers too.

EDIT: Ah hah! It is already happening with a bad Irish Times piece about Google Talk. Planet Potato fact-checks the Irish Times and so does Dick.

Another Edit: Why not tag any fact-checking posts with irishfactcheck

We all know about Google talk now. IM and VOIP and hoping to integrate SIP soon. 900k installer for the app. Nice and lightweight.

The use of XMPP as the protocol will at last make Jabber mainstream. Russ Beatie tells us succinctly why this is good:

I don’t know if you know how it works, but it’s pretty wild. You don’t send individual XML documents per message, instead you open up a socket and start writing one XML document keeping the socket open the entire time, as you need to send more messages, you keep adding XML stanzas to the document. You do this both on the up and down stream … if you’re really just sending a never-ending XML document as the way to make a conversation, then extending this protocol is drop-dead simple. … *Poof* – extensible instant messaging and presence. They’ve got a ton of extension proposals already in the works, including sending forms, multi-user chat, and geolocation.

This is why open protocols rock.

Ed Byrne was on to me about setting up Tech Camp Ireland and at that uri is now a Wiki for others to sign up to it. What is it? Who is it for? *Shrug* Go look.

Tags: Ireland techcamp IrishBlogs