Archive for September, 2008

Fluffy Links – Tuesday September 16th 2008

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Judging for the Web Awards has begun blogging will be light as that’s being coordinated and bugs are being squished. The long lists for them are out by the way.

Check out the Post the Roast for this week.

John McGuinness for Taoiseach. When he sorts out those lazy civil service folks, he’ll target his political peers too, right?

EI ICT showcase on October 6th. You going?

Meanwhile why not get involved in Global Entrepreneurship week in Ireland?

Bruce Schneier has a new book out. Buy it direct from him and he’ll autograph it.

Via James. Lehman’s invested in quite a lot of startups. Shares might be going cheap in em now.

MTV cuts down some rainforest for a reality show?

Something is rotten in the State of Winemaking.

The guy that did these opening credits for Rocknrolla:

Has a show reel:

Fluffy links – Monday September 15th 2008

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Josie Josie Josie!

New blog from Bryan Corden.

MRIs will be able to tell if you’re gay or stylishly challenged. Given they can’t detect cancer in women in Ireland, can you imagine the future where Mary Harney makes a public apology to a man and his family after a mixup in MRIs says the man was heterosexual when clearly his brain formations said otherwise? Daddy go Oscar Wilde.

Brands set up fact-checking websites. Brandrepublic blame bloggers. Bollox. Meanwhile Valleywag looks at the companies who bought the sucks version of their website.

Salim Ismail’s new startup Ã…ngströ looks great. Well done to all involved.

High res royalty free images. Daily picks.

HP are considering doing their own OS? Why would they? That’s a huge amount of work and pain.

I like the giant guitar, oh and the 50,000 marching North Koreans.

Disturbing but good.

They live-twittered a child’s funeral. Christ.

Lib Dem councillor fecks off to college in Arizona. Still claims his monthly expenses.

Via Andruuuu – Antony & the Johnsons “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”

Hard Working Class Heroes

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Hard Working Class Heroes is this weekend in Dublin. Muzu put together a nice playlist of the bands that are playing. Here yiz go. No more blog posts til Sunday evening so enjoy the music:

Fluffy Links – Friday September 12th 2008

Friday, September 12th, 2008

The Equality and Rights Alliance. The group to stop Fianna Fáil and the Greens bunging loads of different agencies that are doing good work together with useless fuckers and by doing so will pretty much make some equality and disability groups die a civil servicey death.

Musical Rooms covers Immanu El and they play Cork tonight. Have a gawk at em.

Please do the IIA Blogger Survey, if you blog.

Check out the blog of Ronan Lyons.

Cory Doctorow and his cape have released a book of his essays. As usual, free to download.

Handy list of FOI officers in Ireland.

Frank Fahey announces the Claregalway bypass. Again.

Science Fiction moment. Altering stars to send interstellar messages. Nice idea.

Build something simple well. Matt talks about Umbrella Today. One function, do you need your umbrella today?

Know anyone called Kate?

Coke Zero have redesigned their packaging for the James Bond movie. Now, how many weeks before there’s an outcry because there’s a gun on a Coke bottle? Ok, maybe days?

From the Diet Coke and Mentos guys: (this should be the new Sony Bravia ad, wow)

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Blogging and Social Media Conference, Dublin, Oct 4th

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Organise, Activate and Influence: Social Activism Online in Ireland

EU conference

Blurb:

In October 2008, the European Commission Representation and the European Parliament Office in Ireland are acting as facilitators for a conference in Ireland. A number of independent bloggers have provided guidance on what they would like to discuss and who they would like to hear speak.

The theme of this event is: Organise, Activate and Influence: Social Activism Online in Ireland. On the day we will discuss ways in which civil society can harness the power of the blog and increase debate on a topic as well as enhance activism. What role does it really have in Ireland and where does the future lie.

Check out the schedule. Zack Exley will be there. European Commission Vice President Margot Wallström will do a video introduction. Simon McGarr will do a talk on Defamation and the Internet. Damian O Broin will talk about opinion mobilisation. I’m on a panel with Harry McGee in the afternoon.

Even were I not speaking, I’d be attending. Why not register to go? Limited places.

Fluffy Links – Thursday 11th September 2008

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

Congrats to Fiona and her new On the Fringe blog on the Irish Times website.

So I watched the US election convention speeches and the best one was from Hillary, followed by Obama’s. McCain’s own one seems to have bombed. Garr Reynolds takes it to pieces here.

Twitter goes even more mainstream with a CNN show using the power of it.

Via Brian, Kim Jong…

This is marketing!

Google invests in a satellite “broadband” company.

Via Kerry (again) Ranking in Google’s top ten might not be enough these days. People expect just the top few results to give them what they want.

Nice idea from the Wikipedia founder. Use the Wikipedia ideals for information on green issues.

Every photographer needs a cup like this.

Steven Berlin Johnson is working on a new book.

In a real sense, Priestley was a kind of lost Founding Father: a hugely important figure to Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson who is barely mentioned today in most accounts of the revolutionary generation. To give you some sense of his role: in the final correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, starting in 1813, Priestley is mentioned 52 times, while Franklin is mentioned five times, and Washington only three. And when you see the Founders through the lens of Priestley’s life, it changes the way we think about the values of the revolutionary generation. (For one, it makes it clear how thoroughly integrated science was with their political worldviews.)

Via Analogue Mag:
cLOUDDEAD ‘Dead Dogs Two’ (BOC mix) Music Video (Unofficial)

You mean mobile dialup, right?

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Just because you scored a girl once, doesn’t make you’re a stud, just because it’s theoretically possible to get broadband speeds on a modem from 3, O2 or Vodafone doesn’t mean you have a broadband connection. But why let the truth get in the way of a report from the telecoms poodle, right?

ComReg today said there are 222,330 mobile broadband connections in Ireland as of last quarter. Here’s something to try: Publish monthly results of speeds tests on their networks from various locations. See what happens.

Minister Eamon Ryan congratulates ComReg on a telecoms market in Ireland which collectively lies about what a broadband connection is. Heckuva job there Comregy. The Dept of Comms, ComReg and the telcos are never going to question each other when they’re all benefiting from not opening their books to see the real speeds of their services. I chatted to Minister Ryan before the Summer and put this to him and suggested he instruct ComReg to run monthly speeds tests on all the networks and publish the results. Until this happens I’m certainly not going to have any respect for these figures and the offices that tout them.

Dave sent this on and is just doing a Pavlov’s Dog test on me I think. 🙂

This isn’t Pavlov’s dog. It’s ComReg:
Apricot Miniature Poodle
Photo owned by charkesw (cc)

LinkedIn DirectAds launches – USA Only, some figures

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Edit: Well that’s a screw up! This was launched in July! Slow news Summer for Mulley.net!

LinkedIn DirectAds

Chris alerted us all on Twitter than the new LinkedIn DirectAds have launched.

Some thoughts and figures from playing around with LinkedIn DirectAds:

You can go er direct to the Directads creation page to run your own ads. It runs a bit like the Facebook SocialAds idea. Target ads to people. You can target them based on: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, Geography

LinkedIn DirectAds

Targeting

There are 12,449,658 members in the United States who you can now target a LinkedIn DirectAd to. United States only right now, hopefully the rest of the world to follow. Also LinkedIn charge per impression, not click. The basic charge is $10.00 per 1,000 impressions. As you make your ad more targeted, they charge more. For example to target women or men only it’s $13.00 per 1,000 impressions. To target women aged 25-34 it’s $16.00 per 1,000 impressions.

I actually like that idea of charging more for targeting. Facebook doesn’t mind how targeted you get but there is more value in targeted ads really.Trouble is that LinkedIn will only allow you target based on two or less of the seven target types. This is odd.

LinkedIn DirectAds

Some additional figures :

Company profiles:

211,137 are self employed
513,697 in a company with 1-10 employees
640,016 in a company with 11 to 50 employees
802,168 in a company with 51-200 employees
562,431 in a company with201-500
479,299 in a company with501-1000
1,129,009 in a company with1001-5000
560,801 in a company with 5001-10,000
2,404,600 in a company with 10000+

Added up you get 7,303,158 who have filled this in.

Oddly, when you check the Seniority box you are told 1,296,023 are the owners of their business, yet 211,137 are self employed. Hmmmz.

Age Profiles

18,841 are aged 18-24
623,310 are aged 25-34
1,428,227 are aged 35-54
102,392 are aged 55+
When you tick all the boxes you get 2,172,770

So that means you are missing 10 Million people if you send an ad based on age

Misc:

On gender there are 4,752,304 women from the U.S. on LinkedIn and 5,625,916 men. Which gives 10,378,220 that have filled in their gender. So 2 Million in the U.S. have not.

There are 1,423,490 people on LinkedIn who say they’re from New York

Thoughts

All in all, this is good. I’m sure mySpace and maybe even Bebo will come along now too and offer something like this. I hear it’ll be 2009 before mySpace can offer these type of targeted ads.

IIA Blogger Survey

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

I’m suffering from blogger survey fatigue here so maybe other bloggers can answer these questions for the IIA’s Social Media Working Group that Joy from the group sent on:

Why do people engage with it? (Both readers and bloggers)
What motivates them? (Both readers and bloggers)
Why do you think it is a success?

D stands for Doodle
Photo owned by KaiChanVong (cc)

Last call for Web Awards judges

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Irish Web Awards

We still need a few more judges for the Web Awards. Why not sign up? Email contact awards.ie, if your site/work has been nominated then you can’t judge any category at all. Sorry!