Damien Mulley

Hearty congratulations to Rick O’Shea for his new 6pm to 9pm radio show on 2fm. Dave Fanning on Radio1 on weeknights now! Jebus. Mystery Train and John Kenny have left the station! Christ bike etc. Wow, Rick is going head to head with Tom Dunne AND Dave Fanning. No pressure fella!

If you ever want to work for a company that spends time deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others, look no further than an American company based in Cork. Today it emerged that O’Reilly sent a cease and desist to the IT@Cork conference for daring to use the term Web 2.0 in the title. Instead of saying “we’re behind you” the company’s blog is delighting with the news. They’ve been snapping at the heels of Tom Raftery and the rest of the IT@Cork folks for weeks now for running the conference and even trying to encourage speakers to give out about the use of the web 2.0 term. What a bunch of fucking assholes.

You’d think a company would try and be part of the local IT community but they’re like a bunch of juveniles with chips on their shoulders. Any time I think of that company I’ll just think of them as that. I certainly won’t recommend them to anyone if I ever had the opportunity to do so. Business blogging can show that you work in a great company and equally it can show that a company can be populated by assholes. I’d link to these gobshites but being the attention economy a link only builds their pagerank and they don’t deserve my link. They’d probably threaten legal action too despite their glee with IT@Cork getting a legal letter. In fact they still could.

The media diversity training initiative is doing a 2 day course on how to make documentaries. Space is limited to 5 people it seems. Applications via the above link. Cost is €50. Pity there isn’t more of this around the country.

The pre-conference dinner with those interested in Technology on June 7th has been booked. I’ve provisionally booked for all of those that put their names down on the other post and we kick events off at 1930 hours. There’s a set menu and it weighs in at €40 including service. There may be some Stormhoek wine at the event too.

If you have not put your name down for this then I advise to do so. It should be fun. Britt Blaser and his wife are now attending this too. Don’t know Britt? Read is Bio. Afterwards we can adjourn to a city centre pub although maybe all the presenters want an early night for their gig the following day?

Via John Battelle, Gilad Mishne at the Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam has released a paper on blogs. From the abstract:

This paper discusses the blogging phenomenon from an information access point of view. We examine blogs as a source of knowledge, analyzing the properties which make them unique as a data collection. We outline information analysis tasks aimed at blogs, and discuss how the properties of blogs are used in this context; finally, we point out some of the main aims of current computational blog research.

Download the PDF of the paper. Check out Gilad’s other projects.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain plays “Smells like teen spirit”.

I’ve been interviewed quite a lot recently about blogging in Ireland and generally I’m asked what blogs in Ireland I like or I’d recommend. Two I’m mentioning a lot in interviews are United Irelander and the Limerick Blogger.

United Irelander is a fantastic blog built like a daily print publication and carrying special sections depending on the day of the week. Words on Wednesday, Fun Irelander, Top 10 Tuesday, Monday Madness, Thursday Thoughts and now interviews on the weekend. It really is chock full of interesting sections and UI is really starting to get the heavy hitters coming on to be interviewed. UI deserves a medal alone for the HUGE amount of work put into this blog. The blog truely sums up the passions of blogging. I certainly don’t agree with the politics or general sentiments but look no further if you want an example of a blog with mass appeal. He just needs to drop his Enda Kenny fetish.

And speaking of passions. A blog from the home of Irish Rugby. The Limerick blogger since creation is a very strong blog putting Limerick on the blogging map and filling the void left by Alive in Limerick. It’s the blog of 2006 so far in my view. Who knew so much could be written about Limerick? The coverage of the European Rugby matches was superb and the daily insights into local Limerick news is a template that other cities and towns should consider using. Great to see the Mayor of Limerick recently writing something for the blog and hopefully we’ll see more guest contributions.

Big round of applause for these two blogs.

Google searchers make me a more responsible blogger?

The most accessed image and corresponding blog post on this site is the one about my nape piercing. The pic of my infected piercing is horrible, so be warned. I now feel strangely responsible for providing better content and information for those that come to my site for the search “nape piercing” or “nape bar” two phrases which has the nape blog post in the first few results in Google and Google Image Search.

I’ve found the same for a few other posts in the past that I did. The main example is my broadband choices post which I keep updating when new information on broadband is released. 79 comments on that post so far and I feel it is only right that if Google brings searchers this way then I have to make sure what they come here for is good quality. It’s not like I feel loyalty to prove Google’s algorithms right but my god imagine a search engine that had that kind of influence? I’m sure many other bloggers do the same because of pride in their blog and a respect for links. The more links, the more respect people are giving you or are at least stating you are worth visiting.

Imagine if every business operated that way, the more business they got the harder they worked to make sure that the existing and newer customers were happy. It seems to me that as a product becomes more famous/used many manufacturers rest on their laurels instead of addressing new issues that crop with more “gamma” testers. Instead of saying “No, you don’t use it like that” they could say “Wow, never saw it being used like that, if we tweak it like that it makes doing this unforseen action a bit easier.” Of course it could be death by 1000 cuts and there could be too much feature creep. But imagine a customer services dept. which actually ran like a research Dept. Do businesses have that with blogs? At least partially?

And the blog title is taken from “Yes, Minister”, a great show on the civil service and how life really works. They attribute the quote to a Nixon staffer. I’m not sure does it have any relevance to this blog post but I wanted to use it in on the blog.

Yeah yeah, before I get to the main meal, some appetisers.

Viva Voce play Cork on June 20th. Might trot along.

10,000 sheeps, the Mechanical Turk in action.

Funny story from the Google canteen.

Think of the Prodigy song “Their Law”. My first ever time linking to Bebo.

Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer and Marge join a country club or something and Marge can only afford to buy one blue suit and wears it daily and chops and changes it for each event? Joan must have hired the photographer for a few hours only. It’s the same suit she has on in every photo. She should have hired Piaras. He knows about this kind of photocall stuff.