Damien Mulley

Michael Arrington points out a podcast transcription service which priced at $10 for a half hour of audio is really really cheap, too cheap I think if someone wanted to make money from doing this. 30mins audio to me would mean around an hours work. $10 an hour is minimum wage in Ireland. How can someone hire a person to do this and make any money?

In the comments of the TechCrunch post people suggest that voice to text software be used and then someone goes over it to check for errors. That doesn’t make the work any faster as you still need a human to check the words and listen to the podcast.

I left the following in the comments of the TechCrunch post:

Perhaps if the transcriber had the right to sell on the transcriptions then she/he could recoup costs that way. Or another way of recouping costs and maybe using a free model would be to offer free transcriptions in return for a share of ad revenue on the page that hosts the transcription.

If I were a transcription company I’d be contacting the main podcasters and offering my services for free to them for 6 months in return for a link back to my service.

Tom, as a podcaster who is getting serious heavweights in the tech world to do interviews with you, would you be open to such an idea?

I wanted United Irelander to email me for a chat but he wouldn’t for whatever reason and wanted me to state on his comments why I was looking for a chat. But the fact that I didn’t want the judges of the Irish Blog Awards to be disclosed for another while meant I had to ask a person to be a judge in private. Oh well UI. I’m sure your replacement will do just as well.

Yup. I’m on it now. James Corbett convinced me. If you want to add me please do. I’m damien AT this domain.

You’ll need ID to use Net cafes now in Italy. Add Data Retention into this and everything you do online is going to be watched.

Internet cafes also must make and keep a photocopy of the ID and be registered with their local police station, dictates the law, part of an anti-terror package approved after the July terrorist bombings in London.

Ireland and it’s 3 year data retention is cited for a reason to bring in longer and harser data retention laws in Europe. To harmonize things they say. Next they’ll harmonize with Italy for Netcafes and with another country for prepayed mobiles. Like the way the EU and the US “harmonized” their copyright laws but instead of matching the lenghts they increased them more, back and forth like a tennis match. Why do the governments have so much disdain for their electorate?

WordPress Structured Blogging plugin with added microformat attributes. The new wave starts here. This is Content 2.o

Pic of the fuel depot explosion in the UK. More here and here.

Tara Hunt blogged a bit about backchannels at conferences and it got me thinking to a degree about conferences such as IT@Cork and TechCamp and the idea of an unconference. But for a moment we’ll go back to what Tara mentioned about conferences and IRC/backchannels:

#1. We come to conferences to learn stuff, sure, but first and foremost for many of us, we come to connect. Speakers and panels kill networking time. Kill it. And really, since the advent of the internet, many of us would sit in our seats with our laptops pointing towards our email or Skype or the like, where we would be socializing with people back home rather than the very people we came here to connect with.

#2. Okay, so we do want to learn, but hell, the material isn’t always groundbreaking or earth shattering, is it? Well, the same goes here. But who cares? We have the back channel being projected behind the speakers, giving us an extra layer of knowledge to ingest. We often laugh, but there is a great deal of truth in those irreverent statements.

Dave Winer pushed the idea of an unconference and I think it is a fantastic idea. The best conversations happen in the hallways at standard conferences, the best conversations happened at the Digital Rights Ireland press conference at the tea and coffee table. How many people enjoyed school? The teacher up the front, you at your desk, bored to death. Conferences. Unless the speaker and presentation is as high a calibre as Dick Hardt’s OSCon2005 presentation people are bored with being lectured.

So Winer’s ideas make things a lot more fun and turn everyone into a presenter with just a facilitator to get things going. Or as Dave said:

At BloggerCon, there is no audience, there are no speakers.

There is a discussion leader, a person responsible for the flow of the discussion.

To get things started the DL talks for a few minutes, listing some ideas from the pre-conference discussion.

David Gammel posted a fantastic Conference v Unconference comparison list which is a good guide on how to run an unconference.

So what I’d like for say something for a discussion at somewhere like TechCamp.ie is the following:

A room without a podium, just a guy who starts off a conversation and then gets the crowd talking. The second room in TechCamp was perfect for this kind of talk. The table layout was O shaped so we could all pretty much see each other and comment while looking at each other which is good for interacting and expressing ourselves fully. Each talk should either have a discussion thread on a webforum or else a wiki page where everyone can add in links and comments or perhaps both.

I don’t think a backchannel would be needed for an unconference. The whole discussion would be the backchannel. Isn’t having a backchannel admitting that the lecture is boring and allows people to escape from it?

Of course unconferences aren’t for everyone. An unconference about blogging would be wasted on the businessman who wants to find out why blogs could be useful to him. You’d have people then talking about stuff way over his head. There are uses for the standard type of conference and the unconference where everyone is on the same wavelenght and there is no filling in of backgrounds.