Damien Mulley

How to make a really geeky Doctor Who style WiFi network name.

Really nice sentiment. Stop making more productivity tools and focus more on developing methods and systems for productivity. Then maybe write a blog post, a manual, a book?

a hammer, a lever, a text editor—assume little and ask less. The tool doesn’t force the hand. But digital tools for information work are spookier. The tools can force the mind, since they have an ideological perspective baked into them. To best use the tool, you must think like the people who made it. This situation, at its best, is called learning. But more often than not, with my tools, it feels like the tail wagging the dog.

Saying “I don’t” is much more empowering than saying “I can’t”. I don’t eat chocolate, I can’t have chocolate. One implies decisiveness, the other implies weakness. I don’t check work email after 9pm, I can’t check work email after 9pm. For me, my voicemail says “I don’t check my voicemail”.

Instagram blog post on The Long Room in Trinity.

The Twisted Celluloid film festival is on in the Triskel in two weeks time. Two Doctor Who movies! And Rubber is also showing. It’s about a killer tyre that makes people’s heads explode. Kinda.

NPR interview with one of the Godfathers of the iPhone.

Instagram gets all the boys to the yeard, I mean, gets the best engagement around.

But on Instagram, content that brand posted delivered 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.

Squarespace’s CEO hires people based on trusting the right people. These people:

• Understand your definition of “good enough.”
• Are committed to the same outcome as you.
• Have the right cultural mindset.

The further growth of Snapchat.

Devil in the Details

The Oreo dunk in the dark tweet? Yeah it’s been done. Flash mobs, yeah they’ve been done, “CompanyX Staff is Happy”, oh do fuck off. I like the sentiment of this post. Plan to be reactive to an undefined moment. If you plan for a known moment, everyone else will be doing that too. Being original is quite an original thing to be, in any form of marketing. Move on from a win, let the other weaker crowds copy that idea then and enwrap themselves in mediocrity.

RHCP lyrics, Kedis talking about a City being a friend, a confidant. Some cities are a deep part of the identity of people.

Friend-washing. Like the term. Via Mat, Terence Eden on brands getting chummy with you on social media. Do your fucking job and then stop, less of the “bants”.

The only reason companies engage in friend-washing is to make you feel guilty when you want to leave them for another supplier.

One day Social Media intro course in Charleville on May 7th.

Interesting list of acquisitions by Apple. They mostly fly under the radar as they’re never really big ones.

Want to do this. Kayaking from day into night in West Cork.

This is doing the rounds. Eat some yeast by-product to prevent yourself from getting too hammered. So where can I get alcohol dehydrogenases?

Nice Slideshare. The emerging global web.

Economies where close to 3 billion people have yet to use the web, but thanks to mobile–won’t have to wait much longer to discover it. This presentation will introduce you to fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the web to serve the consumers of tomorrow. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities and challenges we will face, when growing a truly global web.

Got a .training domain. DigitalMarketing.training – Let’s see how the single page site it’s on does in Google searches in the next while.

Stripe and subtle animations on a shopping cart page. Love it.

“86% of UK smartphone owners accessed social media last year, for roughly 26 minutes a day.” via Facebook Business.

via @elgrom “Ten things we learnt building the Android app Metro10.”

She was so good they bought her company. Maria Giudice, head of Product Design for Facebook, interview. Book.

Full Length Event – Building Paper

If you can get past the silly name the “Unfail unconference” on Saturday might be of interest.

Everyone gets a chance to talk about failures they have experienced in work and business with fellow entrepreneurs, tech developers, and digital marketers.

Fred Wilson talks about how Turntable.fm died. They had the data showing users stayed for about 3 weeks and then got bored. Do you have data like this with your startup?

17 unique places to find content for sharing. From Buffer.

Nice book report/summary of Ricardo Semler’s book “Maverick”.

Uh oh. Via Justin. Ryanair overhauled their website and forgot about links and redirects and more, causing them to plunge in search results.

“The polar opposite of traditional Fleet Street”

Must get to watch “The Writers’ Room” sometime. Sounds good. Via MediaRedef

France makes Nespresso play nice with other capsule makers.

Building Paper. 1 hour talk on how Facebook Paper was made:

The future with Elon Musk behind the wheel

Cool and Co, Cork based stationery company.

A book just on how to cook eggs? Yes, it’s such a core ingredient for so many things. It’s the letter E of food.

Data journalists and journalists in general. Get this e-book: Finding Stories in Spreadsheets

Startups: This is how design works.

Would you like profit with that? A masterclass in restaurant income growth.

Information overload screws with out ability to be aware/observe.

Newsdiffs for Irish news sources. (See what and when stories are changed)

The hard way, the not so hard way or Norway. One country looks after writers.

The Mac Pro. P O W E R.

What kind of careerist are you?

So here is this now, got a good reaction but now?

Go watch Muscle Shoals

Cork City, Once a Month. Nice sentiment from Bradley’s to get more people to visit the city centre. Cheaper multi-story parking will help too. 12 fucking quid for a few hours in town in some car parks. #CorkCityOnceAMonth

The Radio Station Formerly Known as Phantom, TXFM for short, relaunches, James points out some things that could have been done better. (Via JC)

Check out Katie Sweetman’s art on Etsy. I love a good art I do.

This change in Facebook’s reach might be a good thing if you you’re not a boring brand doing updates that aren’t very engaging though the equivalent of fart jokes on Facebook aka Paddy Power photoshops still seem to do very well.

More on that.

But really, do you have a customer strategy?

Restaurants should be able to offer apple wine as well as grape wine with the same licence? Emma Tyrrell suggests that proper cider could be seen as the Irish version of wine. Different ciders to go with different dishes perhaps? Cider makers get screwed though when it comes to excise. Emma would like change to happen.

NYT Now, nice app from New York Times. iOS 7 and above only.

Interesting backstory/history of the founding of GMail. I remember at the time thinking a gig of space would blow everyone out of the water and deeply mistrusting it for scanning all my email.

Another nice events web app. GetInvited.

Olbermann on Letterman

Courses:
Damn Fine Print studio is doing a 4 week (3hrs per week) Beginners – Introduction to Screen Printing course in Smithfield. Might be fun to do?

8 week course on crime writing (fiction) with Declan Burke. One night per week, starting in May.

I didn’t know Sufjan did this. “a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop”. Now I do.

The next thing was mobile. Mobile is now the last thing.

– The future is bright and uncertain. There is money in turning uncertainty into certainty.

Attending.io. Beautiful and very mobile friendly service for taking bookings for free events.

The Colleen/Jac Test. A way of testing a blog to see is it legit and worth working with. Handy points we could use at the Web Awards and Social Media Awards.

Are there at least two opinion pieces in the last ten posts and do they discuss something other than goods and services.

Another giving it away about a company purchase. Zuckerberg visits Oculus pre purchasing them. One would think this would be more common or those wooing would be more careful. Whatsapp sending legal letters/takedowns to third parties and now this,

Do you dare? Get someone to live critique your website.

iPhone app that allows you to read WAY faster than normal and still take it in.

The legendary Ideo have a new campaign/movement? Called Made in the Future. Might help you figure out what’s coming next from the people that are fiddling and trying to make things for what comes next.

“I think negative stuff is interesting the first time; you’ll never reread a negative article. You’ll reread a positive one.” says Malcolm Gladwell. Writers talk about their writing.

Valentino’s Major Domo is Irish. Of course.

It was the clients. They were awful. Why I left advertising. Big fan of the writing of Bud Caddell. His next venture sounds highly interesting.

Irish B&Bs, get your pages translated properly into German. Germans are big into visiting Ireland. Take advantage. I know Holger well, he’s dead on.

How to build your personal network from scratch. From the guy that built Circa. Small town, big town, doesn’t matter. Conferences are a handy way to do this.

The golden rule at all times is that you never try to get to a final conclusion in the very first interaction.
Take that awkwardness off the table and suggest an easy action to get the email out of their inbox

Mat has too many LinkedIn contacts and so do you.

Whoda thunk it Government unit spins out to become a commercial vehicle. Course it would be the “nudge Unit” of the UK Govt.

John Adams

Philip Glass – 06 – Pruit Igoe

The Back Page “festival” is a mighty impressive few days of events around sport.

Seamus Heaney, Billy Connolly, the Beeb. Five Fables. “Five medieval Scots fables, translated by Seamus Heaney, have been brought into the 21st century as enchanting animated tales for BBC Two Northern Ireland.”

Some post that all media orgs ought to look at. 10 growth hacks that helped Metro.Co.Uk go from 10 Million to 27 Million monthly visitors.

This could easily be used for adults too. A kids’ guide to how ads on the Web work.

Nice idea. Newspaper Blackout Poems.

Nice. You can now embed Medium posts and collections on your own website.

For the fella that pretends he doesn’t read my blog but does to steal stuff. When you don’t have the natural charisma, some tips on being an interesting person at a party.

Interviewly. Or they could make Reddit look nice by default.

Why dabbling can be a good thing.

Gerard Baker described many publishers’ moves in the arena as a “Faustian pact.” For those unfamiliar with German folklore, that’s a deal with the devil.

AdAge writing on the web and not realising their readers can use Google if they don’t know what something means. Fuck exposition, fuck treating your readers like morons.