Damien Mulley

Wouldn’t it be quite handy that if someone on another site linked to your blog post, and had some of it quoted and anyone that follows the link, lands on your site and sees the quote highlighted? Maybe the plugin is out there already? I know WordPress has the Google search keyword referral plugin, but that only looks for keywords in the URI the visitor came from.

I suppose what is needed is a plugin that does a text comparison of the URI the visitor came from and the one on the current webpage. After the first visitor it can tell what was quoted and adjust itself for every new visitor from the linking URI.

As I’ve said before the new Video iPod will change it all. Like it did for Podcasting Apple and iTunes will be a massive provider of homemade content. TV as we know it wil cease to be. It’s already started with episodes of Lost available from iTunes at $2 a pop.

With broadband being so pervasive in all but the most backward of countries people will find it easier and easier to put up content on their website and have their friends (from around the world or even friends from just around the corner) download the podcasts or videocasts or whatever they created. If they are a popular blogger or the favourite child in a 1000 strong clan, the 50mb homemade rockgod video they created will soon start to eat up bandwidth on their server and their hosting company could get pissed.

Taking the service Prodigem have where they scan your RSS feed for enclosures and if they find anything create a torrent for it and applying it to the Irish Blog aggregation services, you could have a distributed media library for Irish culture. Homemade videos, live (legal) recordings of concerts, interviews with Irish emigrants, hell you could even have clips from RTE News if given permission.

I wonder could this get an Arts Council grant? To prevent abuse or copyrighted material going on to it, perhaps the content would also need to have a tag accompanying it, otherwise all the fun videos TCaL put on their site would also be distributed.

It would be good though to have a central distribution point of Irish podcasts and videocasts and whatever else is in store for citizen made and distributed media and use Bittorrent to save on server load.

Kevin Burton needs cash for his Tailrank idea. Instead of getting in a VC he is selling “Golden Tickets” to access the Tailrank beta in order to buy servers.

So screw the VCs, let the community fund this start-up and let him keep his focus.

Tailrank in Kevin’s words is: “A tool for social discovery of cool news” or “A personalized recommendation engine for the Long Tail where you and your contacts control the ranking!”

I’ve added my 20 bucks to paypal. I’m not really concerned about getting a Beta account but more interested in whether this idea works or not and whether people send in the 20 bucks to get a Beta account or as a way of helping a developer get his idea working without having to get VCs involved.

It might be a worthy idea for the Irish Bloggersphere if all the various bloggers contributed either financially or resource-wise to some project that made our Irish Blogging Community better. As I mentioned before, one of the reasons that there will be an Irish Blog Awards is to further the community spirit we currently have and to keep it strong when the ‘sphere rapidly expands.

So, good luck with this idea Kevin!