Damien Mulley

I’ve become a massive Phantom FM fanboy in the past few weeks. It’s a seriously good station, for my eclectic tastes anyway and they certainly do an amazing job of promoting local talent too. I’ve not found loads of new Irish bands because of them and I’m very grateful for that. The DJs and the management also seem to *get* the idea of social networking sites and blogs and web forums with strong presences on Bebo, Facebook, Boards.ie and their various DJ blogs. All good but, the influence on my musical tastes from the station means I am listening to more new music than ever before after I had given up on other radio stations. Up to my Phantom epiphany, it was Sinead, Nialler, Una, Torture Garden, HiFi Popcorn and American music blogs that influenced me and one colleague in work who has great taste. I’m finding I’m listening less to my mp3 collection and instead I’m just tuning into Phantom, except the mid-morning and lunchtime slots. Sorry guys 🙂

But my gushing about Phantom is leading somewhere. I’d love to have a device, not necessarily a phone, with a 3g connection which allow me to bring Phantom with me as I travel about, with an additional “Want” button which will allow me to find out more info about the song playing and add it to a wishlist on my blog and which can plug into iTunes and every other music store too. I think I wouldn’t be too pushed about local storage anymore on a device, once it has a net connection and I can stream my own music and radio stations. Fits in a pocket with ease too. Last week Universal Music at the Nokia Go Play event said subscription services are on their way very soon and if so, where the hell is the capabilities in music devices for them? The latest iPod line missed out on that and Jobs seems to make bitchy statements about 3G:

WiFi, as you may know, is faster than any 3G cellular network, so it’s really fast.

It will take more than WiFi to have a proper streaming device if you want to walk around the streets listening to a radio stations 100s or 1000s of miles away.

Beaut.ie is celebrating their first birthday and have released a few stats:

Beaut.ie is read by up to 6,000 people a day (unique visitors to the site per day) and boasts over 150k hits on an average day. The sisters have clocked up almost 2000 posts (articles) on topics covering every aspect of the beauty industry – from facials to lipgloss, waxing, and latest beauty trends

The blog has received well over 50,000 comments so far from site visitors.

1 year and 50,000 comments. Holy fucking crapola! So will it be the Irish Times or the Indo or someone else?

Congrats Aisling and Kirstie, you both rock!

Still day 3 and since Karlin Lillington continues to selectively quote me on her blog but refuses to let my comments through, I’d like to point out that she cannot even recall what she said on her Newstalk slot the other day. Now she is backing away from the 90% broadband coverage statement on her blog saying she never said that:

In addition, let me make this very clear: I did NOT state the there was 90% coverage in Ireland, and I did NOT accept this statement either. However I was NOT the interviewer for the piece, and I do not ever control the direction of interviews or shows

If you listen to the mp3 of the tech slot, she says the following around 4 minutes 15 seconds.

A question that goes a long way with this whole issue of coverage and the takeup and our low takeup is whether there isn’t a larger question of why we don’t have the penetration despite a 90% coverage

It’s that quarter of the year again where I will be updating the blogroll/links on the right of this blog. If you are not on the list and want to be included, please let me know in the comments. Then when I will forget about a few of you (oh trust me, my mind blanks at times) do remind me via email or via another comment. 🙂

For those that subscribe to this site it seems you are only getting summaries of the posts not the full posts. I’ve only been told this this morning and I’m trying to fix it but for some reason WordPress is saying the feed is a full feed. I’ve also the number of subscribers Feedburner reports has halved so something is deffo up. I’m looking into it now and hope to remedy all of this asap. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Matt of Life Without Toast F A M E is auctioning off his guitar for charity, have a look and have a look that it is listed on eBay with a video.

This is the video and it’s fucking great. El kabong! My god, that unearthed great memories:

What a really creative way to auction something off. I’m very impressed and with more and more people auctioning stuff, this is deffo a way of getting more attention to your auction. Nice too that others can embed it. Still, it seemed I had to go to the listing on the VZaar site before I could get the embed code. Maybe this could be changed?

This is a London? based company, be nice if crowds like Intruders TV and Blognation covered this. *cough* *nudge*

Free ticket to Techcrunch 20. Apply to Pat now.

Win tickets to see Feist, courtesy of Nialler.

The new iPods are great and all (apart from the fugly iPod Nano) but Michele points out the serious price differential between here and the states now.

As Ken notes, I joined Jaiku yesterday after Twitter was down once again. It’s a fantastic microblogging/presence system, the only downside being it’s pretty empty when it comes to Irish users. I might stick around on it now actually as many of those I interacted with on a daily basis are on it now.

Want to review some wine?

Day 3 of the Karlin Challenge, where she blocks comments from me on her blog but happily slags me off without still taking up my challenge.

Kottke is a massive fan of the TV series “The Wire” and points to this marvellous quote about the creators attitude to the average viewer:

I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

It is not as such the erosion of privacy but the erosion of obscurity that is the issue these days. Search engines et al are now tieing all those small pieces loosely joined toogether and displaying them all in one go.

And more cleverness: Doc Searls points out the idiot girl from South Carolina has been viewed more than 13 Million times on youTube now. A few million more views that the number who viewed the actual pagent.

Via Una, the visuals at the Chemical Brothers gig at Electric Picnic. That screen is the size of the main stage. It blew me away. Absolutely fantastic.

This is Amy Winehouse at the Mercury Music Prize the other night. (Una also linked this but I swear I had an original thought of doing the same before reading Una) It’s a shame the Beeb seemed to be so obsessed about panning up and down her body, like they were looking for evidence of her recent battles with self-mutiliation. Her voice and this song shows what an amazing and quite beautiful girl she is. Shame the tabloids are helping her to be more fucked up. A rumour went around Electric Picnic that she had thrown herself off a building and I felt genuinely sad about that, even though I don’t follow her exploits and have yet to play her album but her voice seems to suggest to me she’s a lovely person. Could be way off of course!

Donncha has a photo on display at a Photography Exhibit in Mallow today that goes on for the next few weeks. If you around Cork, why not head along. It’s for a worthy cause.

I’m pleased to announce that Sublime Wines would like to offer readers of this blog the opportunity to review the wines from their collection. The idea is that they’ll send out bottles to people every two weeks and in return those people will write a review of the wine. Now, this is not like those sinister pay per post blog things where people are paid to write positive reviews. Mark and the others in Sublime Wine want your genuine opinions of their product. Naturally there are terms and conditions, the most important one being you have to be over 18 to take part in this. You must do a review and allow the review to be displayed on this blog and also have it on your own blog. (More conditions at end of post) In fact, I’d suggest using LouderVoice.com to do your review, which will also post it on your blog. For now, bloggers will take precedent but over time we’ll be asking non-bloggers too and they can definitely use LouderVoice to publish their review.

Here’s the intro from Mark:
Sublime Wines is the online equivalent of the best wine shop you know. We have a selection of wines from all over the world – hand picked by Mary Gaynor, one of Irelands’ foremost wine experts – and a woman who knows that wine is meant to be simple and fun. There are great value wines available – and the delight of exciting discoveries from small, specialist artisan winemakers.

As Ireland’s premier online wine site Sublime Wines are delighted to sponsor this new wine tasting section on Damien’s excellent blog. We are looking for wine lovers to review our wines – and will be needing two new volunteers per fortnight – no experience necessary – in fact we would prefer that you didn’t have any!

In return we would like you to write a review within 10 days that is honest but also entertaining – where would you drink it? with who? what might that lead to?? Be imaginative but not too filthy!! We will be offering wines for review from 8.50 to 50 euro so you will have to bear cost in mind too.

And finally please visit the site, have a tour around and buy if you like what you see – our wines are genuinely great value. And please, please also tell your friends about us – we need the word to spread!!

The first wine Sublime Wines would like you to review is:

Dehesa de Rubiales – Alaia 2004

Many wine experts see Spain as the ‘next big thing’. This gem, made from the classic Tempranillo grape along with the little known Spanish varietal Prieto Picudo punches way above it’s price.

Terms of this Review Offer:
You must be over 18 as already stressed.
Email damien < at > mulley.net with the subject “Wine Review” if you want to take part and include your blog address.
When you do the review, please link to the wine on the Sublime Wine website.
Please be honest in your review and have fun doing the review.
Send the review to me and I’ll post it here along with the other review, then post it on your blog too, once published here.
If you are not picked initially, your name will still be on the list and we’ll hopefully get around to you and everyone else, this is a long-term project so be patient.
*Update* Just to clarify, this is not saying everyone who applies will get a bottle, but Sublime Wines will try their best to give wine to as many people as they can but two people will get a bottle of the same wine, meaning at some stage all their catalog will have been sent out.