Damien Mulley

Gavin’s Irish Corruption Site is already number one in google for the phrase “Irish Corruption”. Bernie suggested the irishcorruption tag with technorati too. So, this appears to be the first to use this tag.

I would hope that as Gavin’s site gets more traffic and eyeballs that it will eventually draw in some people that could get Gavin new information not available in the press so that he becomes a prime newssource in time. Drudge, though maybe with less of the Jerry Springer tendencies. Ireland needs something like this. There’s certainly a gap in the market.

On Dec. 4, 1982, a deeply suntanned man, about 40 years old, walked into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boise, Idaho, and readied himself for confession…. the man swallowed a cyanide capsule. A few minutes later, he was dead.

Sounds like the opening of a thriller. This is a true story however and asks Who killed Fr. Paddy Ryan?

Elvis Mosiac made from stickies. Perfect for our “Statement Wall” in work.

How to deal with burnout.

I, Reporter. New citizen journalism project.

Via Ebby

Comes a a link to photos like the below:

Yum.

Jarvis on Public Broadcasting. Every day he posts something valuable. I think his blog is the most important one I read at this stage.

Tasc the Irish social policy think-tank released a survey today on activism.

Most said they were happy to leave the job of holding the Government to account to the media and opposition parties.

More on this in the Irish Independent.

I have a deep bias since I’m involved with IrelandOffline but I do find that people want activist groups and are happy to let them do their thing and not get involved themselves. I wonder if we were doing a poor job would more people feel they’d need to get involved?

There’s been some reaction in the past 24 hours to the eircom pay as you go product that they are releasing. The Irish Liberal quoted consumer laws as well as saying

The whole point of broadband is that is is always on! Is this the only country where we are expected to pay absolute laughable amounts of money for such a completly rubbish service?

Planet Potato also dislike the idea and are saying what we’ve all been saying and that is that always-on was the biggest selling point of broadband and is one of the best properties of it.

It’s quite ludicrous that if you use this product for an hour and a half or more per day you are going to end up paying €50 a month on top of the €25 highest line rental in Europe. Meanwhile the same company is offering an always-on product for €29.99. So 672 hours for €29.99 or 20 hours for €20. Mad mad. Penalties and fines for using Broadband is quite scary. Low usage users can be captured using a cheap product with a low download limit. When they are given all the time in the world to use broadband their usage will go up until they eventually move to a more expensive package. Even Google wants people to stay online more and have said broadband is what does it.

IrelandOffline Press Release on timed broadband.

VOIP company bought by Yahoo!. Let the consolidations and fun games begin. I remember using dialpad years ago to ring my father’s mobile in Boston. It was quite handy back then even before VOIP was refined and improved and before VOIP became over-skHyped.

Update: Now Yahoo! has purchased Blo.gs. Interesting one that.

Via MetaFilter
Amazing pictures of a wooden train bridge on fire and collapsing with a train on it.

The BAD NEWS to this is that the train just happened to stop with its hot weeels on top of a wooden trestle bridge built with creosoted ties, bents and trusses.

This is the power of the Internet. From a persons camera in Sharon Springs, Kansas to my blog in Cork, Ireland. Citizen Journalism all the way.

I actually woke from sleep thinking about this. Funny old world in my funny old brain.

Via Bookslut is the Independent Online’s piece on Richard Chalmers giving away his book as a way of driving word of mouth and the possibility of actual sales due to this word of mouth.

Someone give this man a Creative Commons license and have Cory talk to him how he got word out on his brilliant book.

My own thoughts on this are go the route of releasing it under a CC license like Cory did, but if your publisher refuses that, then offer a free book to all the bloggers and ask them to review the book on their blog and ping back your own blog when a review is done. Accept all reviews not just positive ones. Make sure there’s a “buy this” link somewhere so you can sell the thing online. Your audience is global online, not country specific.

This could actually work very well for the book market in Ireland. Have local Irish Publishers like Cork University Press offer anyone in the irishblogs world a book with the sole condition that when they’ve finished reading it they review it and put it on their blog. Planet of the Blogs now has about 500 bloggers listed in the Boggersphere. 500 independent reviews of your book, all online would certainly generate traffic and trade.

“Hello, you are through to NTL customer services,” they were told. “We don’t give a fuck about you, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just fuck off and leave us alone. Get a life.”

Guy gets pissed off at NTL service, hacks their voicemail system, is arrested and found not-guilty. Heh. Wonder were the jury sympathetic? Watch out Irish ISPs and TV rebroadcasters.