Damien Mulley

I said:

why would I need to make resolutions? That would mean I wasn’t doing things right in 2005. I did everything right. Wouldn’t change a thing in 2005.

Oh the arrogance/delusions…

From the Director and Producer of Homosexual Agenda comes a new bigger and more explosive sequel – Gay Agenda.

There are now 42 LGBT bloggers on Homosexual Agenda which caters for Irish people or those living in Ireland but for those non-irish or not resident here we have launched Gay Agenda. Unlike Queer Filter which is pretty massive, I think for GA we’ll have to keep the numbers down and choose blogs that are less personal diary and more cultural, political or somethingelse-ical natured. I was thinking that if we kept the number to something like 500 or so blogs and ran an automated script that when the technorati ranking of a blog reached a certain level then the blog would be removed from the aggregator.

The idea being that GA would help promote some of the good but lesser known blogs and try to help with making them more popular and as they reach a certain threshold they’d get kicked out of the nest to fend for themselves. There are another few ideas for GA using structured blogging and the like which I have to convince Rob to create when he has some free time. 🙂

At the recent IT@Cork Conference a school principal/teacher asked Robert Scoble about blogs and school kids blogging. I think the principal/teacher was worried about kids blogging and revealing too much information about themselves. I wonder how much the fear of predators contributes to schools and parents preventing kids from going online.

Trouble is, trying to discourage kids from blogging will be counter-productive. They’re curious, they’ll want to be independent, they have a lot to say. So perhaps kids should be taught how to blog when they are taught how to use computers. Blogging could be a serious tool for the likes of debating, english assignments and learning how to frame arguments. Seeing how your peers blog and how they think would be an excellent means of furthering ones education surely?

I think I mentioned this in another post, but I’ll say it again: Scoble made a great point that he wished that his son’s teachers blogged so he’d know what they were covering in school. I like this idea a lot. A single daily post from each teacher would be good. For primary schools anyway, doubt this would work with secondary schools though, so perhaps a weekly post from each subject teacher.

In an email chat with Ina O’Murchu she mentioned how DERI have given classes on the semantic web to refugees in the area and that Brendan Smith the DERI outreach officer is in the process of setting up blogs for 40 schools in Galway. Definitely something to watch and see how it goes.

A while back I posted about Google Print/Books and them wanting to scan in every book without first consulting the Authors or Publishers and how I agreed with Dave Winer and thought it was wrong of Google to use the model of the web in relation to the publishing world. Tom Raftery disagreed with me and supported Larry Lessig’s arguments. I still stand by what I said and suggest people Download the torrent of the Battle Over Books debate.

It must be said that Google didn’t come out well in this and had nothing significant to say or to justify their position. Allan Adler from the AAP played a blinder and came across as way stronger. I would have thought that Google with their sheer arrogance and self-praise for hiring intellectual heavyweights would have fielded a better representative or better arguments. In the end nothing was added to the debate as Google and Larry LEssig chose what seems to me to be a twisted version of fair use. It seems fair use is anything Google wants it to be. When they said all they wanted to do was index books and the publishers now want to stop them making indexes, the APP retorted “Well why not scan in all the index cards in the libraries then?” to which Google replied “Oh we want to make a better index card”. Yeah right, with their vision there would not be a difference between and index card and a book.

One thing I hadn’t thought of is that Google making the programme opt-out means that 100s or 1000s of other web companies could do the same thing, so the publishers would have to be on constant vigil for new companies doing a Google on them. No mean feat.

But after saying all that, I’m for fair use and would like to see it in Ireland but not a definition that Google decides on.

Via Justin Mason comes this Anil Dash post about Blog Awards which also links to this Business Blog Wire post on Awards. Food for thinking!

They’re making a TV show of the best videos found online. Weird. I was only thinking about that after watching some videos on google yesterday. Cheap TV. Just what we need.

See here for post title. Other signs of cheap blogs are lists of things. Top 10 lists etc. Another sign of cheap blogs are trolling posts to get in a lot of people.