Money goes to charidee. Part of their Global Classroom week.
Winner gets an OLPC and the money goes to a third world charity. Current bid is around €60€150.
Surely a company will get into the bidding? G’wan.
RTE Auction for an OLPC
July 31st, 200810 years of Irish conversations
July 31st, 2008Boards.ie are giving away all their collected data. That’s 10 years of posts and threads from massively massive discussion site Boards.ie and all now available for download. It’s a bold and open move. And very exciting.
And if that’s not enough, there’s a bloody big competition for people to do interesting things with the data. The most interesting apps or thingymabobs win prizes:
* The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
* The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
* The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)
See more here on John Breslin’s blog.
I’ve love a Google News/Boards.ie mashup and a timeline kind of thing. Pick a date from a timeline, see the main news from Google and then see how people on Boards.ie reacted.
Or pick a few brands that became over the past few years and plot the rise of them. Sociology and Anthropology researchers will have a field day with these things.
When was the first mention of x on boards.ie and the first use of “celtic tiger” etc. etc.
Screw Google’s zeitgeist, what was the most linked to site in 1998, 1999, 2003?
Well done the Boards.ie owners for doing such a thing.
Fluffy Links – Thursday July 31st 2008
July 31st, 2008New Blogs:
Trust Tommy.
Ant Galvin’s blog.
Well finally, Sligo Today launched and they’re getting thousands of hits a day. Yeah, take that.
Heard Gerry O’Beirne on Pearl’s show on Phantom. No way will I pay $17.50 for a cd these days. or $15.50 for a digital download. Sorry.
Ben on his Mobile Me package.
XP on the OLPC seems to be shit.
Meanwhile some people think Vista rocks when told it’s not Vista. Hmm.
I’m a cynic but Obama would have known this would happen.
Dexter season 3. Yawn.
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All Change – The great blog switcheroo
July 30th, 2008English Mum was on to me about a nice idear she had with others. They all hijacked swapped their blogs about.
From here to here and to here.
No blogs were harmed. etc.
Photo owned by mysticchildz (cc)
Upcoming training bits and bobs
July 30th, 2008The actual business blog for my new company will be set up in the next while on a different domain so these self-promotional things will go away then and it’s back to slagging politicians and the town of Muff. Promise.
Next week is the Media Training course in Dublin. August 6th in the afternoon. Takes place in the lovely Radisson Hotel. Also home of the Web Awards, dontchaknow.
The Cork Media Training event will happen mid-August. Dates will follow.
On Wednesday, 15th October, at the ICS Headquarters in Crescent Hall and in association with said Irish Computer Society I’ll be doing a day-long course on Business Blogging. Contact them if you want to sign up.
On Wednesday, 29th October, again with the ICS in Dublin I’ll be doing a day-long course on New Communications and Online Marketing.
There’s also versions of these (in assoc. with another org) going to happen in Cork. Possibly Limerick too.
I think I’m doing some free talk with it@cork in October as well. Stay tuned.
Photo owned by thebittenword.com (cc)
Yeah I dunno why I have beans in the pic. Colour.
Fluffy Links – Wednesday July 30th 2008
July 30th, 2008Last day to give feedback about IrishBlogs.ie
Swear I’m not Paul. Another music blog but pretty damned good all the same.
Joomla to wordpress importer from Cathal.
A Bebo page for Roches Stores. RIP.
I began Life as a simple furniture store and expanded to Cork’s largest dept. store hiring many a mouldy college student to stack shelves and hook up.
The Beeb have at Stephen Fry about Apple.
Steve Jobs, arrogant fuck. Love it.
Via Joel, it seems Second Life is fueled by the sale of women’s dresses in the virtual world. Just like we have a recession in Ireland due to the housing issues, will we see the same if the market is flooded with dresses and too many people overspend on them?
This was in April but is still good. How to prevent your daughter from becoming a vegetarian.
Helicopters going upside down, just rock:
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Now that’s a gig
July 29th, 2008People should play gigs in houses more. Or backgardens.
Una covers it too.
Kind of goes back to the Stations blog post I write way back when.
Using Blogs and Twitter to give blood?
July 29th, 2008Via Kerry is a story how via Twitter, a blood drive was organised in Austin, Texas. At the same time Will McInnes has a great blog post on how we the diggerati split our time between talking, thinking and doing and maybe we should do more of the doing.
As well as generating a huge amount of buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere far more importantly it led to 100 donations that day, may from first time donors.
A great idea. The Irish Blood Transfusion Service are always looking for people to donate blood and there are loads that probably would donate if their peers around them are also doing so. Shouldn’t social media (still dislike the term) also be about empowering people and getting them to be social and helping society?
I don’t like many charities. I have a particular dislike for African charities and those gimps on the street that harass you on their behalf. I don’t think giving money to an org is the best thing to do most of the time so actually giving blood without harassment, that’s good.
So what’s a geeky way of organising a blood drive and who’ll help organise it? Online sign-up form? Limited number? The Austin drive billed it as “exclusive” as only 100 people could sign up. The buzz generated on Twitter and Facebook got the momentum going and people turned up in droves. It seems afte ryou give blood the IBTS do clever things like text updates etc. to let you know when they’re next about or phone you up when they’re at crunch time so that bit is sorted. Should there be an aim to get 40 new people to donate blood and be brought there by experienced people?
Should local businesses sponsor the refreshments afterwards? Pillows to faint on have been sponsored by Swan beds? Booze by diageo.
Oh and who’ll organise such a thing? Not gonna be me. Your turn.
Tuesday Push 30th July 2008 – Pix.ie
July 29th, 2008Pronounce it Pixie. Yeah? Good.
The blurb:
Pixie is a popular photo sharing site based in Ireland. Launched in August 2007, Pixie has registered users from over 120 countries and is currently storing millions of images on their behalf. Pixie’s free service which includes an upload quota of 500MB/month, is used by both professional and amateur photographers, families, friends, students, charities and photo bloggers, i.e. everyone!
So yes, an Irish Flickr some will say but it’s a tad easier to get your stuff out of Pix.ie. Tried that with Flickr recently? It also looks prettier.
But what I personally like more (Jesus when did I become a capitalist?) is the fact that they allow co-branding and commercial profiles. Promoters also get access to the Pix.ie commercial API which can feed live photo streams of their event or competition back to their official site. Throw in blogs and discussion forums too and you have a really nice hosted social platform for events and promotions. Why build something and self-host for a limited-time event? Makes sense. I also hear that groups are on the way.
Also, the way the images are displayed are much nicer than Flickr too and as has been spotted by those rascally Irish bloggers, they’ve got a nice deal going with Guinness Storehouse where people upload the photos they took at the Guiness Storehouse to Pix.ie.
That 3D gallery looks great, so spread the word about Pix.ie
Want to be part of the Tuesday Push, find out how.
Coming up in the next few weeks are Toddle, Crewger, eWrite and more!
Fluffy Links – Tuesday July 29th 2008
July 29th, 2008One more day to give feedback about IrishBlogs.ie
Julian wants to get Gary Vaynerchukto come to Ireland. How do we do that?
Rapture Ponies talks Max Streicher. Nice clouds!
This is a great idea. Caffe Noto in Dublin have their own social network, thanks to Simon.
Justin points out yet another security hole on the O2 website.
Josie has a list of open source social software. Nice one.
New blog Resident Vagabond.
FriendFeed is a monster. Look how many times is smashes at the Flickr servers.
Check our Conn Corrigan’s website.
Lenovo is the tech partner for the Olympics. They have athletes blogging on their site about the Olympics.
For companies, they’ll start needing community managers to look after their blogs and social interactions online. Here’s a list of essential skills to be one.
Via Helge Tennø – 23 Rules for brands wishing to attract the youth. I like no. 20:
If you don’t know by now, I shall tell you now. Intentional virals that are made to be sent around DO NOT WORK! So please, stop trying.
Via Connán – Stop
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