Category: irishblogs

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Fluffy Links – Wednesday July 8th 2009

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

In aid of Brainwave, the Irish Epilepsy society is The Horsehow Hustle on August 7th. That’d be a Friday. Tickets on sale now.

Tonight the iQ Prize is announced. Good luck to everyone who will be pitching from early morning and those working behind the scenes! Such a wonderful idea.

Via Concubhar – Caint Campaign based in South Korea no less have started a campaign to save Irish. The site is aimed primarily at English speakers favourably disposed towards Irish. Love the t-shirts.

Niall Devitt and his experiences with Twitter so far, as a business person new to it.

Spolitchild are doing a free email marketing course, by email of course.

The Abbey have a new website. Love the design. Actually on that, they brought a few bloggers along to see Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant ages ago. I need to do a proper review. It’s worth the entry alone for the set. The set and the lighting of it have to win awards surely. The lead character is one badass woman too. Superbly acted. Some skincrawlingly sppoky other characters too.

mySpace is still numero uno place to be for bands says Jim. I agree. No more demo tapes, mySpace it.

Wine tasting in the AGA shop in Cork on Thursday. Nice combo.

The inaugural Dingle Marathon is taking place this September 12th at 9am and registration is currently open. Will it go past the most famous ice cream shop in Ireland?

Been following Mike living the dream of writing a scifi show and it being taken up, worked on and filming is starting. Fascinating.

via Thrillpier The Tallest Man on Earth – The Gardner
[youtube eYVnRyZWs70]

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | 3 Comments »

Feynman – I know what it means to know something

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Do know what it means to know something? About your business? Those that know something, really know it, about their business or life or themselves are the ones who can see what happens next, will have a good guess about future outcomes and can easily adapt to changes. Feynman goes off on a fine rip here about fakesters:

[youtube _EZcpTTjjXY]

“Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically; they follow the forms — you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything…. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiment, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know, that this stuff is [wrong], and they’re intimidating people.”

You’d swear he was talking about the new breed of Twitter ninja coaches popping up around the place guaranteeing that you can make money from twitter by adding 5,000 to your reading list, hiring people to fake your messages, target influencers while ignoring the peasants and link to affiliate crap in every message. Pseudo happens. In every situation and industry.

Posted in business, irishblogs | 3 Comments »

Fluffy Links – Tuesday July 7th 2009

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Politics in Ireland. Know about The Healy-Rae Criterion?

Very thought-provoking post from Red Mum about the role of photographers. Do you get involved or record the event?

New blog to help expose French Music to Irish Audiences. Written by Flohix who organised the Let’s French festival.

Few about already but this is a handy site to get access to the streaming feeds of Irish radio stations.

Cheeseburger cupcake?

Bruce Sterling’s closing talk at Reboot.

Ronald Reagan speeches. Impressive archive.

Be Polite.

Google couldn’t do a Google in another industry due to regulation and chokepoints, this from their CEO.

The Brilliant Things are playing at Oxegen, they’re opening this year’s show on Friday on the main stage at 2pm. This is one of their songs: Pointless
[youtube kOhh5r7lgkE]

Via Jim Major Lazer
[youtube qz3lK5SUdc8]

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | 1 Comment »

We need more Helens and Conors

Monday, July 6th, 2009

I know the woman who wrote this letter to Dermot Ahern about her sons. She’s brilliant. It won’t be self-serving, cliquey, rainbow waving gay groups or “pride” parades that’ll bring about equality, it’ll be people like Helen Doody talking about her gay sons, it’ll be Conor Pendergrast talking about his two mums and it’ll be friends of gay people who are sharing their experience about their gay friends with greater society. If gay people are hiding themselves away at work and skulking in gay bars on weekends and only coming out in daylight for a single annual pride parade, exactly how can society understand and identify why we want to be treated as equals? It’s easy for a society to be ignorant and even hateful of a vacuum. Who’s creating that now though?

Posted in irishblogs, personal | 12 Comments »

Future of manufacturing in Ireland – All digital

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Knowledge Economy. One of the most abused terms by the Government in the past few years, spouted out in press releases and speeches in a form of buzzword bingo. From the cribsheet of a jaded civil servant to the mouth of a politician without any brain work.

Traditional physical manufacturing in Ireland is a dying if not a dead industry. Grunt work done in Ireland is expensive. When trees are cut down, shipped to another country and then sent back here as building supplies, you know something is amiss. Physical labour alone to make something can be done anywhere and mostly now it’s done in India, China and some African countries. That this was going to happen was obvious for at least a decade yet people are surprised and shocked.

Yet, it’s all going to happen again with tech jobs in this country because so much of it is grunt work. High-tech according to the Government and their spindoctors is localisation, sales and tech support. That’s far from knowledge work there. And when the grants dry up, those jobs too are off elsewhere. It’s just another Shannon stopover. Yet we’ll all be shocked when this happens, why? Many of the software manufacturers in this country now outsource work to India and China that once was done here. We should actually welcome that. Any vacuum created should be filled with real knowledge economy jobs. We’re not drones yet all these jobs are drone work. We’re relying on borrowed time.

Suzzallo Library, one of the great libraries of the world - studying here embues you with a feeling of scholarly history, Seattle, Washington, USA
Photo owned by Wonderlane (cc)

I think Ireland, despite the shit broadband and the lies about it being good, can overcome that and be a core part of all things digital. Ireland should take in digital raw materials, work them, add value by reworking the digital bits and produce something that can be used elsewhere. A new form of manufacturing and processing that merges various bits but very importantly uses the greymatter in our heads to improve these things. We could make a lot from Government data too. Some are suggesting that Ireland becomes the project manager for outsourcing. With our GMT foothold and our culture of being good diplomats, we can be a bridge between the Western world and the world where outsourcing takes place.

Certainly this is one future but with our talented kids we pump out from colleges and a history of creativity, Ireland could own the space in digital where value is added. Britain is getting it. I wonder will we see it or will we just pump out more and more java developers who invariably end up training up some lad in China on how to replace them?

Posted in business, irishblogs, technology | 14 Comments »

Fluffy Links – Monday July 6th 2009

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Stunningly beautiful photos from Treasa.

From Seán. 100 amazing design blogs to subscribe to.

Few days to go for the it@Cork iPhone event. Places almost gone.

Via Richie Egan. Mariah – Shinzo No Tobira.

Neuromancer, one of my favourite books ever is 25 years old. PC World looks at the tech in this book.

Typography soap. Reminds me of Fightclub.

Amazing stage setup from Kanye West.

Via We make money not art: Photos of improvised prison tools.

Happy 25th Anniversary Miami Vice, where else would you get Kate Bush music in a scene:
[youtube 9oyepfeT67Q]

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | Comments Closed

Dear Customers: You suck

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

In the gents in the Farm Restaurant in Dublin, a place I won’t go back to anyway, not just for this but the atrocious service too. Nothing seems to have changed in two years:

IMG_0057

Posted in fuckingmorons, irishblogs | 7 Comments »

Not in top 3 in Google? Using Google Ads? Ruh roh

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Mulley Communications had a survey carried out on how people react to Google search results and Google ads.

The survey results are here.

In summary:
If you’re not in the top 3 results, hardly anybody is going to pay attention to you.
Google Ads? What are they? Seems they get little attention.
People are not using the address bar to type in website addresses, they just ask Google.
Women are a little bit better than men at considering the data presented to them.

I can see a future where Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” will be the default. Type in your query, get a single result.

There are videos of the heat maps generated based on the movement of eyes around a webpage:
[youtube 8iPLkfJK-Tg]

Irish Times article on this (not shown on Times website oddly)
Silicon Republic Article on this.

Big thanks to National College of Ireland for doing the research and Enterprise Ireland for their Innovation Voucher scheme.

Posted in business, irishblogs, online marketing, technology | 15 Comments »

Fluffy Links – Thursday July 2nd 2009

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Thomas writes about the death and life of his father.

The Irish national debt clock. Shesus.

Blog of Dave Power.

RTE Radio 1 launches one their radio documentary archives ever. 180 documentaries there, 400 by month’s end. Some gems in there. Like this one of Eddie Lenihan. They’re also on Twitter and Facebook. You can direct download the documentaries or get them as podcasts.

And on RTE. Someone hacked RTE player to work on Boxee. Vid:
[youtube 7_W4Tc2MCn0]

Labour should have taught the Greens something? Book review on an old Fergus Finallay biog.

Via Elana, Twitter gets all haute courture.

Do any public presenting? Fantastic blog post from Nancy Duarte on how she improved her skills and she’s already damned good.

DJ Shadow – Blood on the Motorway (Please Teacher anime added in)
[youtube wTwxvrSTrvY]

Posted in Fluffy, irishblogs | 3 Comments »

Attn Biz people: Mark Zawacki talk in Dublin on July 3rd, 10am

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of the Milestone Group will be in Dublin on Friday. He’s doing a talk at 10am in the Pearse Suite, (upstairs) Radisson SAS Golden lane (the one in town behind Dublin Castle)

RSVP to stephanie < AT > milestone-group.com

I met Mark when we did the tour of Silicon Valley. A dead-on guy with a huge amount of experience. Well worth meeting him and getting his perspective.

About the talk:

Milestone Group has worked with more than 50 companies crossing the Atlantic (both directions). Mark is going to share his experience and successes. Mark has developed a unique framework called The 20 Stress Points of International Expansion, which looks at all the stakeholders (investors, executive management, partners, employees) over a period of time and what the traditional challenges are as startups expand and grow out of their home base. This is a very informal and interactive session with lots of Q&A.

If you want to go then RSVP to Stephanie Graybeal.

Posted in business, irishblogs | Comments Closed

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