Off to Dublin til Sunday for the Young Scientist Exhibition. Some good stuff there. Give me a call if you’re about.
Meanwhile, chew on this via XKCD:
Archive for January, 2008
Dublin again – Young Scientist Exhibition
Friday, January 11th, 2008How I’d do advertising on blogs
Friday, January 11th, 2008I wrote a blog post recently on advertising/Internet marketing and my thoughts on how vulgar and useless some ads can be. Cheap, intrusive and sneaky ads that bring short term gain while screwing over people who visit your blog are not good for anyone.
I’d like to think that one future of blog advertising is where ads actually make the blog better so that the reader and the owner/writer gets something back. Your readers get new valuable information while you get some money.
I’m still playing around with Gastronom.ie and have a few UI changes and backend additions before I seek out sponsors/advertisers. For that site, the main section is the aggregator that aggregates Irish Food Blogs and on the right is a section where a sponsor will write a blog post giving away valuable information that will make the site even more valuable to the readers but I also make money. I was thinking it would be a good space for Wine companies to talk about what wine goes best with what meal and then listing some wine that fits that from their range or maybe a restaurant talking about how to prepare one of the items on their menu or a food company talking about putting together a festive meal and including some of their products. That’s how I’d like to see advertising on blogs. Professional ones. I still won’t have ads on this blog.
If you were a company though and wanted to get word around on loads of blogs I’d go along the same lines and follow one of the online reviews/carnival thingies. There’s this thing called the Blawg review where each week a law blogger will give a summary of what the law blogs are talking about. Other law bloggers point to this blog or find you via the main blog, so it means a massive traffic surge when you are the the chosen blogger that week. I’m not sure would it scale in Ireland but having a rotating blog post each week with valuable advice from a sponsoring company would be great for the company and the blogger in question. Having your own blog would make it easier to coordinate all this too.
Beats a banner ad.
The Wire , first four seasons
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Fluffy Links – Thursday January 10th 2008
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Stephen on Irish Rail, again. He should start a group blog.
Greens in not thinking things through shocker.
Next Fine Gael might learn to count.
Via Richard, get 30 days free trial of Wordze.
Choice Music Price details. Well done Jim et al.
iPhone listens to music, guesses the tune?
A fictional kiddies book about Microsoft Home Server. Uhr.
David Allen explains Getting Things Done at Google:
Idiot Irish Driver of the year 2008 (yes already!) goes to…
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
iPhone iPhone iPhone Lynch Lynch Lynch
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008So David Lynch bitches about movies being played on phones.
So I videoed the clip being played on my iPhone.
And then someone videoed my clip being played on their iPhone:
Update: And then I played the above on my iPhone and filmed it again:
Fluffy Links – Wednesday January 9th 2008
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Want to be a Blog Awards judge?
Check out the Irish Family History blog.
Want to try some of my Dirty Chai?
Via Value Ireland, the chair of the quango-loving and mostly clueless Consumer Association of Ireland has a personal blog. (Not associated with CAI). The CAI are the yesmen of ComReg when the EU comes calling. The CAI get paid a lot of money to be on ComReg’s consumer panel so never really rock the boat. They get €1500 per half day meeting to be exact and happily listen to lies and perverted pricing stats which are reguritated to the EU when they come to town.
So Labour are starting to box clever?
Check this video and explanation via DaithÃ. Journos with backbones.
Belle and Sebastian cover Dinosaur Jr.
OfCom got it pretty much right when it came to being a telcoms/broadcast regulator. Their old boss just got a massive job in Downing Street.
Mike thinks Data Portability is a problem in the EU. Legal scholars, can you give some constructive feedback? Oh and check out this comment from Scoble.
Google Kills Jaiku?
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008Another dodgeball it seems.
When Google snapped up Jaiku, the first thing they did was to stop sign-ups to the service. Over time the service with Jaiku has gotten worse and worse with no new iterations at all. You can see from various messages that the Jaiku boys are working hard and learning loads but it has been ruminated that Jaiku was purchased for the brains and not the service. A recent comment from one of their people in the Jaiku Dev channels seems to suggest that it’s true and Google is just letting them tank:
we’re pretty much at the end of our rope as far as scaling goes, i’ve been in discussions internally as to where to proceed but things go slowly, and it seems like any path forward requires radical architecture/database restructuring
it’s a lot of work and there are some major pieces of the process that i am unable to do on my own but i’m trudging along, just feels like it isn’t going quickly enough 🙁
Jaiku has a strong community and a nice feel to it and while people can still sign up via invites most of the public still won’t avail that way. Anyway, I left this week as the service is really awful and there is no fresh blood and am sure many more feel the same. Their blog has been dead too since they were purchased. It’s understandable in a way that Google would get these guys sooner rather an expensive later but jeez, why let it die? Just so Yahoo! or Microsoft could not build it out?
Some quick bits
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008Business Blogging course: Still spaces, waiting to hear back about a venue and then it should be on the last Sat of January. (Jan 26th)
I’ll be at the Young Scientist Exhibition on Saturday. Let me know if you will.
I hope to find out later today if the hotel can give me February 23rd for the Blog Awards.
Nominations close at 9pm on Friday January the 18th for the Blog Awards
TD and Senator Expenses for 2006-2007
Monday, January 7th, 2008In a zipped archive these are the expenses and wages of the various TDs and Senators from 2006 until the end of 2007. The main word doc is 300+ pages. Have fun going through that…