Damien Mulley

Via Tom Coates comes details about Moo Flickr Cards. Choose your favourite Flickr pics. Make 100 different cards for $19.99. Add your personal details on the back. Now I wish I had a Flickr account. I wonder would Treasa and Ryan be interested in making business cards for me?

Guido Fawkes is coming to the “Blogging the Election” conference on October 7th.

Guido and his peers have changed UK Politics. They stuck with stories the press gave up on and forced them back into the spotlight, they uncovered new scandals and they fact-checked the hell out of the media and politicians. They’re that annoying guy in work that says “Actually that’s not the case”. They may annoy a load of people but everyone knows they’re correct. I wonder how many spin doctors now fret about this new breed? Their influence seems to be growing too.

A quote from Guido in reply to one of the begrudgers:

Go to the Oxford Union and ask our future political class who they read more often – the Times’ Peter Riddell or Guido Fawkes’ blog? Next ask them who they trust more? It is no contest. With 200,000 hits a month and rising, my politics blog is more trusted than the Times’ pompous political columnist.

Having Guido at the blogging conference should be educational and fun. Now if we could get some sponsors … 🙂

Hugh Macleod is on the money.

Bruce Schneier says renew those passports now. Someone from the UK in his comments says it’s too late for those in the UK though. Is it too late for here?

Anyone else been approached by Blogburst? MTV won’t allow you to say “Pimp my” anything anymore. Just ask Ogra Fianna Fail.

We still need people to give talks at BarCamp Ireland. If you want to give one then add it to the wiki. I’d really like to see a talk on something like “Business Opportunities in Second Life.” Maybe Sabrina can partake? (If she finds a dog minder)

We’re also going to have a Pecha Kucha talk. What’s that says you? A speaker has 20 slides and has 20 seconds to talk about each slide. Rapid fire and fun. Everyone should have a go.

Also if you are going and even if not presenting, add your profile to this Profile Wiki page so we all know a little about each other before the day.

We’ re still looking for AV equipment. Anyone want to donate some for the day? Bernie will bring a projector along too.

Twas the night before BarCamp. Pre-event food and drinks in Wagamama’s. Do come along.

New blogs on the block for September 18th.

Bye bye Potato. You’ll be missed.

We’ve always done it like that. Very management.

Some useful APIs.

Euan Semple talk at the LIFT conference:

Jeff Jarvis has some nice video stats:

nearly 40 percent of internet users download and watch videos on the web and — get this — 54 percent of young people want to create or share their own content on the web

In the the future everyone will have their own TV channel.

Scoble on videoblogging.

The Viral Video Chart. Can we get an Irish version?

Via boing boing: The Girl with the error-message eyes. Very William Gibson.

The Omniplex cinemas have a special offer at the moment for cinema tickets. It applies to the Omniplexes in Cork (Mahon Point), Santry, Limerick. Oranmore, Galway. Just go to http://www.omniplex.ie/ to book them.

ComReg lied lied lied to the Oireachtas when they testified in front of them a few months ago. They told them the failure rate in the Republic was the same as the North. It’s 0.0015% there and 12% here. 8000 times higher. I’m glad something is going to be done about the continuous lies our telecoms regulator is telling.

According to the Sunday Times:

A DAIL committee is to examine whether ComReg, the telecom regulator, provided it with misleading information during an inquiry into Eircom’s broadband infrastructure, writes Mark Tighe.

Last June ComReg told the joint Oireachtas committee on communications, marine and natural resources that broadband failure rates in Northern Ireland “are broadly in line with our experience�. But Eircom’s own statistics show its broadband failure rate of 12% is much higher than the 1% claimed by BT in Northern Ireland.

From the Oireachtas minutes:

Bernard Durkan asked Isolde Goggin:

I draw her attention to line failure in broadband. We were not able to get information on the extent of that line failure because it is supposed to be commercially sensitive. Is ComReg aware of the extent of line failure resulting in an inability to provide broadband services?

Isolde Goggin answered:

We get information from Eircom about the rate of line failure and the time to repair, and issues regarding repeat faults and so on. Our experience of the number of lines connected to a broadband-enabled exchange that will fail the test appears to be in line with that in other countries. The experience in Northern Ireland, for example, bears that out.

In their written submission to the Oireachtas they were asked and answered, under the heading of:
Line failure in broadband enabled exchanges

Q8. Does ComReg collect data on line failure in broadband enabled exchanges?
Yes.

Q9. Is ComReg satisfied or surprised with the amount and/or frequency of failures?

ComReg considers, from international experience, that some level of line failure is inevitable due, for instance, to long lines or the use of carriers. There are also a variety of ways of defining what represents a line failure and we are aware that different companies have differing approaches to the testing of lines. For instance, the current approach adopted by eircom may be overconservative, based on experience in the UK. While comparative data is difficult to obtain, it would appear that faults per 1,000 lines in NI are broadly in line with our experience.

Again I ask and I do so often, why is our regulator misleading the public and the Government?