Damien Mulley

• Mashup Camp Dublin. November 10th. Seriously, get to it. Also, if you have a blog and readers of the nerdy/tech variety can you let them know about it too? It’s not everyday we get people of this calibre mixing together and it would be great to see Mashup camp come back on a regular basis.
• On November 1st Digiweb are holding a free seminar called ‘Making Websites Work’ which is part of their Online Edge Seminar Programme. At the Digital Hub, Dublin. All you have to do is go to www.digiweb.ie/onlineedge and register your attendance. Registration closes at 6PM Tuesday 30th October. Laurence Veale, Eoghan McCabe and Richard Hearne will be the speakers this time round. They’ve a lot to live up to since I was fantastic at the last talk. I’m sure they might get near that high bar. You can do it guys!
• On Tuesday, October 30th 2007 The “possibilities for a post Web 2.0 world” will be explored iby Mike Culver, Web Services Evangelist with Amazon.
  

  The presentation will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, the company’s distinct technology arm, which allows developers to build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that supports Amazon’s retail business; there will also be a code demonstration showing how .NET developers can easily build managed clients for these services.

  This takes place in the swanky Westin Hotel, Westmoreland Street, Dublin 2 with registration from 7.00 pm. If you wish to book a place, please contact Cormac Moore, Verkom, on (01) 432 1501 or email cmoore [ at ] verkom.ie

• IDMA’s Digital Marketing Seminar on 15th November – Raising the Bar in Digital Marketing
  8:30am – 12:00pm
  Thursday 15th November
  Mont Clare Hotel, Merrion Square

  Tom Bazeley (CEO, Lean Mean Fighting Machine)
  Jay Stevens (VP Operations, MySpace.com)
  Jonathan Forrest (Managing Director, Cybercom)
  Shenda Loghnane (Managing Director, ICAN)

  Tickets are only €75 for IDMA members / €100 for non-members – available from info [ at ] idma.ie

Last week I had a Fluffy Link which talked about all the Microsoft Hyper/Microsoft Hyper V domains that Microsoft were buying up. Since then I’ve had, shall we say “interesting” IP addresses visit that post.

Lots of Microsoft Hyper V domains as well as vboxlab.com and vboxlab.net
Some folks in MS in the States seem coy about whatever this is.

However, a project called Viridian, also known as Hypervisor which had to do with Virtualisation might be something to do with it. Just seems to be part of Visrtual Server really. If it ever gets out the door. Seems there were a few delays. More here and here. Maybe that’s it? Shame really after buying all those domains.

I’d love to see MS do their own version of an NGage like platform that will work on all OSes and all platforms so people can interact with XBox Live from anywhere. Course I also think XBox live should be waaaaay more than just an online games platform. That’s their social network right there. Perhaps if Silverlight shows the way for “any OS and platform” they might do the same for other products too.

Update: More.

I’m a bit obesssed with receipts. I hold on to every one I have for about six months or much longer. It comes from having a mother that threw receipts in the bin the minute she got home and so it became a lot more fun to try and exchange things or get refunds or complain about shoddy merchandise. One of the many novelty and tacky cups I have (Aside: I demand of friends that when they come back from holidays, they bring me back the tackiest thing they can.) is filled with receipts for all types of purchases. Every now and then when I do a spring clean I go through the cup and sort out the receipts and throw many of them out.

I’ve also been thinking about email for a while as I use GMail to sort out more and more of my other email accounts. I now seem to have an email account that I just use for notifications of all sorts. Booking details from Aer Lingus, Ryanair, notifications from Bebo and Facebook and offers now and then from Hotels and Threadless. Newsletters and the like. That account used to be my main account for a while and now it’s pretty useless and to be honest I think a lot of the stuff that comes in could easily be replaced with feeds, either public or private ones. So one account is now becoming my receipt cup in a way but GMail is also like a container of all these receipt cups. I currently have three accounts inside GMail. At any time I can just remove any one of these and still have my container.

I seem to find I’m using email now as a jumping point to other places, blogs to reply to comments, Facebook to read messages on that or Bebo or LinkedIn. Isn’t that what feed readers are too? My GMail notification container and my feed reader are becoming blurred. I really wonder/despair why there isn’t any innovation in this whole area and why feeds are still used by a tiny subculture of people for notifications. I thought the latest version of Microsoft Office with this feed support would have kicked off something where people started using feeds more and saw Outlook as a communications application not just an email application but this hasn’t happened. GMail too, while having support for feeds is not pushing it at all and there isn’t a push by the overall tech industry to replace email notifications with feeds. Why is that?

It seems now that email is like the underpinnings of other platforms, like the stilts holding up a house, dealing with the slime and grime that builds up under homes during damp seasons and termites during dry seasons.

Is email dead?