Damien Mulley

IBM announced earlier this week on a conference call that they’re going all Web 2.0 and social with their Enterprise offerings. Blogs, wikis, collaboration spaces for staff and customers, social bookmarking (called dogears) and a few more bits and pieces. They’ll also be releasing mash-up software for Enterprises. Are they doing what Microsoft should have been doing since Ray Ozzie came on-board?

• IBM Lotus Connections — the industry’s first integrated social software for business features a suite of five Web 2.0-based components. They include the most popular social networking uses such as: social bookmarking and tagging, rich directories including skills and projects, activity dashboards, collaboration among like-minded communities, and web logs or blogging. By making it faster and easier to find experts across the organisation, bring together diverse teams around a common point of interest and access information previously qualified by others, Lotus Connections helps people save time and avoid duplication in their daily work.
• IBM Lotus Quickr — an open standards-based team collaboration tool that helps teams inside and outside a company firewall easily and effectively work together across geographies, work styles and operating systems. It offers a rich set of team collaboration capabilities, including blogs, wikis and team space templates supporting a variety of business processes to get a collaboration project up and running quickly.
• IBM WebSphere Commerce — the industry-leading commerce software incorporates new Web 2.0 capabilities to more closely align with consumers’ natural shopping experiences and help decrease the incidence of abandoned shopping carts through rich and contextual shopping features. The new features in WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 Store Solution include rich Internet applications such as an interactive catalog to enable shoppers to narrow down choices by filtering products or services with attributes most important to them.

  Additionally, this store solution includes a single-page checkout to let shoppers view the real-time impact of intended purchases and then recalculate the cost of alternate products and shipping choices to help speed up the buying-decision process. These Web 2.0 capabilities are changing the on-line shopping metaphor from static, catalogue-driven experiences to dynamic, customer-driven ones.

And now for the mashups:

IBM is previewing an Info 2.0 suite of integrated products that enables organisations to easily catalogue, combine, transform and remix any type of data and content by drawing on the industry’s widest variety of enterprise data sources and a vast array of Web data and content.

If this continues Scrapblog is deffo going to be acquired by another company.

Casiotone for the painfully alone – Live outside in Paris

Cold War Kids – We used to vacation (live and acoustic and out of synch!)

Meat Beat Manifesto – Edge of no control

I just got emailed a pdf scan of a letter that has been posted to me via a legal firm on behalf of Sky Handling Partners. They have requested I take down the two posts about Sky Handling Partners.

Note: They have not threatened litigation and have not asked for an apology.

It seems Sky Handling Partners have called the Gardai too. They also chastised me on my use of bad language. Yes, really! How many people have ever seen a solicitor’s letter than contains the word cunt at least three times? ME! I’m sorry but I can’t post the letter on my blog, thus why I’m giving you all the highlights.

I will not be taking the blog posts down.

This is my first takedown notice. I’m framing it and replacing my framed copy of Joan Burton in her pink suit with that on the shrine. Sorry Joan, the fickle tastes of bloggers. It was nice though. Really.

Pranksters put a mushroom cloud into a weather report.

Vote for John.

Nice Charity Links meme going about. Add some charity links to your blog posts.

Check out cork band Hooray for Humans.

Over a million people are on fibre in the States and they are still beating themselves up for poor broadband penetration. Heh.

Via Una Los Campesinos – ‘You! Me! Dancing!’. It’s very Dinosaur Jr. in my music mind.

If you’ve not seen the last episode of the Sopranos, do not watch this spoof with Hilary and Bill Clinton. Now if only Bertie had this sense of fun:

My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes (Cut to Lost in Translation)

Two young brothers do a cover of “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight ” by Postal Service. Fantastic

UPDATE: Legal letters sent to me demanding I take this post down.

This morning I noticed someone snooping around my website after coming to the site with the search “sky handling partners”. It has happened before. Now for some background, I have had issues with this crowd losing my baggage. See my Sky Handling Partners are… post.

Just before lunch I started getting email confirmations from dating sites, including gay ones saying my account for their site has now been created. Seems someone was creating profiles saying I was looking to meet men and had rather interesting profile descriptions. One of the emails disclosed the IP address where the person submitted the details from:

62.77.175.251

A quick reverse DNS shows that the IP allocation of this eircom customer is:

inetnum: 62.77.175.248 – 62.77.175.255
netname: CITYJETHLING
descr: City Jet Handling Dublin.

City Jet Handling is the former name of Sky Handling Partners. Dun dun dun. Now to be clear, it is not concrete yet that Sky Handling Partners rent this IP but according to the DNS details, it is them. I will check from another source if this lot do not get back to me.

I contacted them before lunch and said I wanted to report abuse coming from that IP. They took my phone number when I asked to speak to a manager. They would not put me through to a manager as requested.

I heard nothing back by 15.55 so I called them back, spoke to a girl who didn’t know anything about this and wanted to take my details. I strongly said I was not going to be called back, let me talk to a manager. After much talking in the background I got put through to another woman who was aware of my complaint and said their IT person was investigating. I asked how, since no details apart from my mobile number were ever taken. They grudingly took details. I really didn’t like the attitude.

I pointed out that signing up to dating websites using my details was fraud and I could happily call the Gardai and let them sort it out. Quoting from Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act,. 2001 to the lady seemed to make her take the matter seriously. I also pointed out I felt that posting untrue details about me on at least 3 websites was not on, especially what was written and I said I felt I was libeled. They took my phone number and said they’d get back to me and again I did not like their noticeablely angry tone. I said they had an hour.

It has now been an hour and they have not contacted me.

What do you think I should do next? (A link to this would be appreciated)

Update: Go here to DIGG this.

Further Update: Big thanks to my Irish Web hosting company – Blacknight who moved me to a new dual quad core server with lots of ram since the post hit the front page of DIGG.

“Cois Fharraige 2007”, Ireland’s first surf and music festival.

Sony Ericsson in association with MCD announces this three-day festival, which will take place in Co. Clare on the 7th, 8th, 9th September 2007

Timetable:

Friday 7th September

Fun Lovin’ Criminals, The Blizzards, Roisin Murphy, Majella Murphy

Saturday 8th September

Ocean Colour Scene, Republic of Loose, The Enemy, 28 Costumes, The Kinetiks

Sunday 9th September

Kila, Tom Baxter, Buffalo Souljah, Delorentos, The Wombats, Amy MacDonald

Update: Padd Casey added to Saturday line-up. Badly Drawn Boy added to Sunday line-up.

Additionally, a carnival of water sport activities will take place across Kilkee Bay over the three day weekend. These activities will include an official Surfing Event on the breathtaking Doughmore beach in Doonbeg on Saturday the 8th (in association with the West Coast Surf Club).

Further details for entry to the surfing event can be found on www.Coisfharraige.com, which goes live on Friday 22nd June 2007.

Tickets for Cois Fharraige Surf Festival go on sale on Friday 29th June at 9am.

· Tickets for each individual day 29.50 euro

· Early Bird Three day Festival Ticket 69.50 euro

(Available to purchase until August 18th 2007 only)

· Three day Festival Ticket 84.50 euro

(Available to purchase from August 19th 2007)

Update:
For those unable to find where to get tickets:
Three day ticket from Ticketmaster.
One day tickets from Ticketmaster.

Thanks to a little hack with Hypemachine, I’ve got a handy flash player playing all the recent mp3s that Nialler9 has stuck on his blog:

Also, if you want to hear all the tracks from I guess I’m Floating, just click on the image:

or Hi-Fi Popcorn:

Blogs have to be registered on Hypemachine for you to listen to them. so I’ve submitted UnaRocks and On the Record

ZX Spectrum games hidden in vinyls. Damn. Nostalgia.

There’s big pimping and there’s superstellar pimping. Drugs are still bad though.

No bike lanes? Paint your own. Not that Irish drivers obey them anyway.

Fun advertising.

Rejected Wii games:

Rejected Wii Games – Watch more free videos

James – Laid

James – Destiny Calling