Damien Mulley

Despite helping out with the birth of Digital Rights Ireland, work chairing IrelandOffline which prompted a Govt Minister to say we were damaging the economy, running a blog awards, getting promoted in work and other work I can’t mention on this blog, I also took on the evening law degree in UCC. Obviously the degree study suffered and I had to repeat some summer exams because I only started studying a few days before the exams. I got my repeat results today and I scraped a pass. So off to second year Law I go. To say I’m happy is quite an understatement. As usual with being so very very happy I become reduced to grunts and expletives.

  So really a lesson should have been learned and I need to calm down. Less IrelandOffline, less blog awards, less organising conferences (another to be announced very soon) and less other stuff. Yeah right. Not going to happen. There won’t be just one awards gig next year, there’ll be two. The other has nothing to do with blogs. No other clues, sorry. Maybe a few more conferences, there’s also an election coming up and I hope to take some time off to blog part of it. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go off and find €3k for college.

The new BarCamp Ireland blog. The press release about BarCamp is there now too. Please send on to details to anyone you’d think would be interested in this. We really really would like to see more people talking on the day or even facilitating discussions. Remember this is BarCamp so the rules are quite loose and informal.

We’re still looking for sponsors and judging by numbers we may have to rent more seating for the day and get in more food. Bubble Brothers are providing a good bit of wine and we also hope to have a post-event drinks event in a pub. Just waiting to hear back on that now. We’re also looking for the use of some Av equipment/projectors etc for the talk. If anyone wants to loan us the equipment it’d be great. We’re looking to get some T-shirts made too. So far our sponsors are:

1. Webworks
2. Qumas
3. Roam4Free.ie
4. Heineken
5. Bubble Brothers

We’re hoping to make this as fun as possible so do come along and even suggest things to talk about on the BarCamp Wiki.

  Virtual desktop and VPN is surely on the way now. This is what I suggested back in December. Firefox and Mozilla took more of us away from the desktop and to the browser with multiple tabs replacing multiple application windows. Now Meebo is going to start replacing multiple tabs with one browser tab giving us a new desktop. Is that the plan Meebo folks?

It’s called Spicylinks:

SpicyLinks is an automated link-blog summariser. It reads other people’s link-blogs, so you don’t have to, and reports the stuff that prove popular in your personal collection of sources.

A little bit of hacking has come up with an interesting twist: take a del.icio.us social network, a CGI script called deliciousnetwork2opml.cgi, and 15 minutes hacking on SpicyLinks to support inclusion of OPML via a remote URI, and hey presto — it’s now a social-network summarising aggregator. 😉

So it’s like your del.icio.us social network but with noise reducers and you can choose your level of ear fluffiness for the noise.

More info here.

Inspired by BoingBoing: Google Ireland search for confidential data.

Via Julian is the East Cork Early Music Festival..

Beowulf performed by Benjamin Bagby. The world’s foremost expert in Medieval music performance sings a major section of the Beowulf epic in the original Anglo-Saxon, to lyre accompaniment.

Good post by John Carroll on Nicholas Sarkozy’s approach to the youth of his country.

Another Industry funded Regulator. You’d think they’d learn that sometimes that doesn’t work.

TCAL talks about Rick O’Shea’s Brainstock. Great idea. Go support.

Liberman finally gets a blog. Bit late no?

and finally. D’Lefties are back interviewing.

A cunning plan as Julian calls it. I quite like this idea. Having your suppliers talk about their product on your blog. You facilitate the conversation. Perhaps with good feedback these suppliers might be encouraged to blog themselves.

Read more at the Bubble blog.

Scott Adams pulls plug on post about Steve Irwin. Tut tut.

Calcanis kept his up. The post that is.

Where are the video bloggers in this country? We have Technolotics and we have Balcony TV, anyone else? Blogs pushed the idea of homemade content and subscribing to it and then podcasting came along and is going quite well in fairness, but what about video content? When will Ireland have a Ze Frank and can we help it along? I’ve been chatting to a few tech companies to see would they sponsor some gear for such a thing. Two tech companies seemed interested but then they always say that instead of saying “get lost smelly blogger”. Too polite they are.

What I’d like to see are the current creative types who make quick podcasts, flash games and go crazy with photoshop, to start considering video too. Since most of the stuff created for YouTube and Bebo seems to be done in bedrooms using webcams then the first step to help along this new generation of content producers might be to give them web cams. This is where the tech companies come in to donate their gear and naturally they’d get some good coverage as a result.

What I’d like to see is a few people (maybe 10) given videocameras or even just cheapish webcams after they agreed to create something like a 5 minute show once a week for a month or once a week for two months. These shows would then be uploaded to a website with the sponsor’s name on it. There the public can rate these videos.

An audition or competition would be held to give the webcams and software to those who send in the best proposals. Then each week the shows are watched and after a month prizes of tech gear could be given out to those deemed the best shows. It’d be a first in Ireland for a competition to encourage digital creativity. It would be guaranteed to get the tech company or even non-tech company some good press as well as goodwill. We could even find the elusive Ze O’Frank.

and the sodomobile!

  eConsultation.ie is officially launched at noon today. Just don’t go to WWW.econsultation.ie because that doesn’t seem to be working right now.

According to the press release this is what it does:

For the first time in the history of Parliament, Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) will provide the opportunity for the Houses to engage directly with the public through the Internet. The Joint Committee on Communications, Marine and Natural Resources will use this innovative approach to assist it in considering proposals from the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources in relation to broadcasting. Simply by logging on to eConsultation.ie, the general public can read and give its views on the proposals and, at a later stage, see the Joint Committee considering the views expressed and actively participate in discussion — all on-line.

The site as of this morning doesn’t appear to be finished with a few broken links and “Put something meaningful in here” type space fillers. It might be done by noon though.

These are the current areas of discussion. It’ll be great to see more initiatives like this. Don’t forget to send them in your feedback.