Damien Mulley

I see that the Irish Times turned the pimping for work press release from Karyn Harty into an opinion piece

The long awaited Defamation Bill, which was presented to Cabinet on Wednesday, may not immediately excite the interest of those who are not in the publishing business. But in reality, the increasing use of the internet and, in particular, blog sites (personal weblogs) means that it is now much more likely that any one of us could be defamed or be responsible for defaming someone.

*Yawn*

Hadly any variation on the press release. As Gavin also points out. This is pure pimping and still adds nothing to the debate. TJ McIntyre and the good folks at Digital Rights Ireland are probably better qualified to write this piece.

This is as poor as “Spam is dangerous, writes anti-spam company shill” or “Man who sells vitamin tablets tries to insinuate his competition are dodgy in shitty press release” type pieces.

*Snore*

The Machiavelli personality test has a range of 0-100
Your Machiavelli score is: 69
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli’s opinions.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but there’s a significant minority at either extreme.

Toture Garden interviews Owen Pallett.

Ok, I thought Tom’s post was tongue-in-cheek but I guess it isn’t. Hugh says hire Tom. Shel says hire Tom. I say Hire Tom or the puppy gets it. If the ISPCA had a blog I bet they’d link here right now pouring scorn on me. Not tested on animals type scorn obviously.

Aine should be a regular on the show. She was a natural and Tony Fenton on the show as the voice for Blind Date was a nice added bonus. I’m waiting to see what the hits from Google will be now.

EDIT: 30 visits already this evening.

EDIT No. 2: The 2nd half of the show – The Blind date

Two new pairs.

Ahhh vanity

This is the 1.2kg rib-eye steak a co-worker had the other day. Notice his phone next to the plate. Yes, big plate, bigger steak.

This is the small 850gram rib-eye steak I had. Yeah it was a bit fatty.

And this is the trout I had a few weeks ago. Yes of course I ate it all, including the eyes. Mmmm, jelly.

EDIT: Forgot to add that I had a sing-a-long with the fish and had it opening and closing its’ mouth as it sang with me.

The loud-mouthed, write about everything and anything, highly opinionated bloggers should be the ones promoters look after.

I just got another one of those Hotpress free passes for a movie emails today. Because I’m not in Dublin I never get to see the movies. I’m not up on this whole deal but I guess Hotpress gets money for promoting these movies and additionally they get goodwill from their readers for giving them free passes. The payoff for the movie promoters is to create buzz about the movie and get people talking about it as well as having an advertisment for it in Hot Press. Could they get a bigger bang for their buck with bloggers?

Why not allocate a percentage of these tickets to bloggers? People who by their nature talk and share their thoughts with others. People who are opinionated, people who might just write really good reviews if they see a movie. Reviews that will quickly be indexed by Google. The same goes for new up and coming bands who tour the world. All these early tours are there to generate hype, to create interested, to grow fanbases and to get the word out. Shouldn’t bloggers who are into music be given free tickets to gigs, bloggers such as the In Fact, Ah massif? I’d welcome opinions on music, drama and movies from a lot of the bloggers out there who I’d give more trust to than some of the folks that write “fantastic” reviews of the latest disney shite that gets released.

But what happens if someone says the movie is shit? Well that’s quality control in a manner of speaking isn’t it? Doesn’t it encourage the movie studios to make better movies? If people are genuinely into making great movies then they should be genuinely soliciting unbiased feedback. Let the bloggers be part of the Quality Assurance programme. Not that you have a choice as they’ll still give their opinions whether you bring them to a movie or a film or not. The first entity to spot this market and link up bloggers to promoters could make a nice living out of it. The big issue too should be that there is a no obligation agreement. Nobody should have to blog a review, it is up to them if they want to write one.