Via Mick. Wispas still not available where you are? Try here.
And if you like them that much, why not get the earrings too?
Black bastard energy drink. Oh ze Germans.
A flying spycam the size of a dragonfly?
Via Harry, see all the episodes of the TG4 political drama “Running Mate”. Go here and click on “Drama cartlann”.
So, name a company, win a router.
Via Twenty, the Star Wars Trumpet lady:
(Nothing to do with the For Nine Pounds blog)
(Nothing to do with Ireland’s most famous blogger and author)
I love the idea of 50 pieces for 50 euros that happens every year with Habitat in Dublin and I love the idea of poundshops or Euro2 stores, as they’re now called, where everything under one roof is a simple set price. So I was wondering about the idea of a website that aggregated offers from Irish companies. Services for a flat fee of 20 euros.
Examples:
For twenty quid we’ll give you a domain and hosting for a year.
For twenty quid I’ll give you a twenty minute skype consultancy on what you need to change on your website frontpage to rank higher for certain keywords.
For twenty quid I’ll upgrade WordPress for you.
For twenty quid I’ll design a simple logo for you.
For twenty quid I’ll write a press release for you.
This wouldn’t be like the fantastic Bargain Alerts forum on boards.ie that highlights special offers, but which time out after a while. The forum too concentrates mostly on products of all types. The For Twenty Quid site would offer services as these are social things, in a way since they connect people together. Also too the offer would ideally be there for 6 months or at minimum 3 months.
I’d see it as a way for people with a limited budget to get something quality for a “must be stolen if it’s that low” price and as a foot in the door for those people that want to sell on additional and more in-depth services. Unlike some kind of Buy and Sell listings, there would be quality control so not any auld crap can be offered or useless stuff that isn’t of any use unless you pay for another product or service.
Every offer too would have a feedback option so you can read the reviews of the services that have been offered. Reviews are good.
I’m wondering what people think about such an idea and would they offer their own services on the site and what would they offer for twenty euros?
Is 20 Euros too cheap? Would dealing with 20 euro payments mean too many resources used to cash them? Should it be set at 50 euros to get rid of messers?
The other option is to just do this over a set few weeks every year where all money goes to charity and people are in effect donating their services in exchange for money going to a charity. It would be nice to see a blogger born charity initiative doing the rounds.
I’ve started updating the Irish Tech Company blog again. Emails going out in the next while asking for updates and clarifications. Go to the blog if you want your tech company to be listed.
*Channels the dead Blogorrah* Wayne is back and what an evening was had in Cork!
Am thinking of going to the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Who else is going?
Liking the sound of this cheap officespace in Belfast.
Irish Broadband are just asking to be hacked.
Stupid filter. I love it. Use the same spam fighting algorithms to find and kill stupidity online.
Devendra Banhart – Sight to Behold (Jools Holland)
I’m subscribed via RSS to the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Mailing list and there was a recent kerfuffle about ad campaigns and what to do and who to use. Seems some people took exception when people said let the experts run a campaign and don’t DIY.
Many people who know their stuff recommended Dave Davis and RedFly Marketing if you want to spend some lolly and run ads for whatever your campaign is. Now I’m on record as thinking ads, especially the Google ones are goddamned ugly and people who run them on personal blogs disrespect their readers but at the same time I do recognise there is a need for a company to run ad campaigns to get business. Nowadays it will be rather tough to rank highly for every area your business operates in, unless you are highly niche. Google will allow you to run DIY ads but just like you can build a staircase yourself it doesn’t mean you should. It seems the almost Dave Davis Fanboyism (I hope he reads this and blushes muhaha) irked some people who think what they do themselves can be just as good. Wake the fuck up. Unless you work in the Search Engine Marketing business on a daily basis, you will save money by outsourcing the work to crowds like Redfly for mid and large campaigns. Same goes for SEO. I know a little but I’d spend to earn if I had a commercial site and would bring in the Hearnster. (Aside: I was hearing ads on the radio all week for a bloke called Richard Hearns who lives some of the year in Dublin and some in thailand and who’s an artist and I was thinking, a secret life of an artist, the sly dog. But no. Diff Hearnster.)
Check out some of the comments here.
loving this:
It is an insult to someone’s intelligence if people think that you need to be an expert to get the best from an AdSense campaign.
and this:
This discussion smacks of elitism and a fair amount of back slapping between different parties who seem to share vested interests.
Adsense and Adwords are not incredibly difficult once you take time to read the instructions.
Handbags at dawn, while brain checked into the cloakroom.
Now I have no affiliation with Dave though we have chatted now and then about search engine marketing but I have heard high praise from various quarters about his work. Google being Google and their lack of transparency and shit customer care and feedback means that it really does take a lot of dedication to know all the tricks and methods to maximise both search engine ranking and search engine marketing. I’d leave it to a pro.
This video has nothing to do with nothing.
News came out in the past few days that the Google Phone/GPhone was not afterall going to be a hardware device and that Google was working on something like a competitor to Windows Mobile. Told you so. 🙂 Anyways, with the Jaiku deal announced yesterday, I thought I’d re-examine the Google Mobile software suite that I think they’re developing and add in thoughts on recent acquisitions.
First GrandCentral. With the purchase of this company, it means Google can now offer a single number for your phone or even a different number per country so people can phone local numbers but connect to you no matter where you are on the planet. You are free to create rules for that number so at certain times of the day, only family can call and everyone else is diverted to your desk phone or to voicemail. Certain numbers you can just block forever. Blocked number rings in? Send them to the spammer voicemail. Client number ringing in? Send them to the business answering service. Will this be one of the features on the Google Mobile Operating System? It should be.
Now to Jaiku. Dave Winer said that Scoble rang him and said the Jaiku deal was not about Twitter but about Facebook. Bollox to both reasonings. The Jaiku purchase was not about Twitter or Facebook or the threat from either, Google is working on something else to combat Facebook. Jaiku, in my view will be integrated into this Google Mobile Operating System/Suite that I believe will be able to work on a whole slew of phones.
Jyri himself from Jaiku pointed out how Tim O’Reilly thinks that the mobile phone addressbook could itself be the killer app for Web 2.0. Jaiku already has software for Nokia phones that does this. You can see who on your addressbook is on Jaiku and you can see their status. This is what it looks like:
Now, imagine having a phone where all your contacts will also show a status (blank if they not using Google Mobile Services/GMail). Scenario: Ok, Jim is in a meeting right now, so I won’t bother calling. Fiona is also in the meeting but her status says she will reply to IMs, so you IM her from your phone. Change your own status to say you are in Denmark now, only important calls can be taken. Paul is on holidays so he says ring Jim. Julie is driving home, contact her after 5 instead. Gah. Notice how simple status messages are proving to be more and more important? This so reminds me of the inch speech in Any Given Sunday.
Jaiku is also perfect for saying where you are which can tie itself into the geotag information on Google maps. Tell Jaiku (or whatever it will be called with Google) where you are and it can tell you what are good places to eat nearby and it might even tell you if any business contacts are nearby.
Now for the Cubic phones. The key thing about them is that they have a sim card so sit on a normal mobile network but they also sit on a wifi network. Imagine the Google Mobile Operating system running on Cubic phones? Google is giving it away, so flash the Cubic phone to run it. You see your address book on your phone and a special icon next to those people who you can call totally for free and likewise they can see you are in a wifi zone so can call your from their PC or wireless device. Why do you need a €700 phone just for WiFi? The Cubic phone is cheap as chips, gives you WiFi and cheap roaming too and when on WiFi free calls to anyone on GTalk/GMail or on the Cubic service. Cubic already have deals with WiFi networks but imagine if Google, an investor in FON also said, “any phone with the Google Mobile OS can use FON for free calls and data”? And all without any lock-in with operators. I’m sure Google is hoping and praying that there’ll be lots more Cubic Telecoms in the not so distant future as they mess with the existing mobile cartels. I do too.
Ron Mueck is a legend of an artist.
Yeah, more facebook jokes. Cheers Matt.
We need a mobile web camp too. Do we have enough Irish companies working in the mobile space?
Politics and Web 2.0, How not to do it.
Korn – A.D.I.D.A.S. (Final Destination 2 mashup, one of best opening scenes in a movie ever)
Original:
Congrats to Jyri and the gang in Jaiku, the better microblogging service out there. Announced on his Jaiku, Jyri told the world that Google now owns Jaiku. Let’s hope they won’t fuck it up as much as they fucked up Dodgeball and all the rest. I don’t want a valuable service like that ruined but it will be interesting to see what they will do now when they have Google resources behind them. Another part of the Google social networking service? More details on their blog.
Using GMail to spam filter and virus clean your non Gmail email accounts (iol.ie, esatclear.ie, eircom.net etc) without changing email application.
As well as being a very good online email application, GMail is fantastic for filtering spam and warning you about viruses in your email. You can avail of this service even if you have an eircom.net or iol.ie or esatclear.ie account and still use Outlook or Eudora or whatever to check the mails. And all for free.
Google has allowed you to download GMail mails from your GMail account for years now and you can also forward emails from your own domain to your GMail address and use it to filter emails for spam as well as viruses. Handy out. Recently they’ve allowed Gmail users to access other email accounts and load them into your Gmail account and again filter the emails for all the crap they get these days. This is what I do for an esatclear.ie account that I’ve used for years and which gets 100s of spams and viruses a day.
I’ve been telling people recently about how this is possible and after looking around for a guide online, I can’t find anything apart from the old ones that say “forward your address and then download to Outlook”. I told a good few people I’d write them instructions on how to do this, so here’s a quick guide:
I. Sign up for a GMail account.
II. Set up your eircom.net or IOL.ie account so GMail downloads email from it.
III. Set up GMail to allow you to download mails from it.
IV. Set up Outlook or Thunderbird or Eudora to download mail from GMail
Go to www.GMail.com and sign up. Remember the email address and the password.
Now that GMail is checking your email and filtering it for spam and viruses, you will need to download that email from GMail.
This bit is easy enough.
Next up is changing the settings in your existing mail client to download mail from GMail and not from the existing account as that would be futile, now wouldn’t it?
The gist of this is that you should change your username and password in your mail account to be the new one you created with GMail and change the server details in your client to the settings for GMail. Google has a very comprehensive guide for most mail clients and you should check the settings against that.
Basically under POP3 settings in your mail program you need to change the server to: pop.gmail.com and change the port number to 995 and specify that your server requires a secure connection (SSL).
For SMTP or outgoing mail you need to change your server to smtp.gmail.com, change the port number to 465 and again specify that your server requires a secure connection (SSL).
Don’t forget to still use the existing email address for your reply to and from etc.
It seems I have spare tickets to Arcade Fire on the 23rd. I don’t like to sell on tickets so I’m open to suggestions on how I should give them away. Suggestions in the comments please… 🙂
Update: And this is where I realise yesterday’s fluffy links only went out this morning. So today we have two scoops of fluffy, not one. Ooops.
Fustar has a new home. Redo your blogroll folks.
The Newswire is back. Yay.
No lady, your car was not stolen.
Wow. Photos of teeny tiny things.
A coach carrying the jury for the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, has crashed outside The Ritz Hotel in Paris.
The Data Protection Commissioner now pretends to be concerned about Bluetooth. Headline grabbing again but never will they do anything productive since that takes effort. Sham.
Selling links on your blog? Google might just wipe your blog off the net.
New blogs on the block from yesterday.
Bat For Lashes – Whats a Girl To Do
Mercury Rev – Goddess on a Hiway
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