Damien Mulley

(I have serious business people reading this blog so I’m turning my back on saying “fuck off” in blog posts.) *

First they tried to do it with 3G phones as part of the DCMNR. Fell through. Then they were worried about terrorists I think. Now it is scumbags in prisons who are using these phones. Nevermind the wardens who helped them sneak the phones in. As well as budgies and flatscreen TVs. Ever get the feeling there is a company out there that is just waiting to run this “registry” that is a friend of someone? Noooo, that could never happen. The Civil Service always want to put as little trust in the people as they can, just in case one day they rise up and demand a reduced place in Government for them. Now they want to issue licences to use mobiles? If you’re against the idea then you are against freedom or for terrorism, drug dealing, fearinducingissueofthedayforDailyStartReaders etc. That’s what the new Minister for not dealing with drug issues in any real way says. What would the Minister do to deal with FF councillors snorting coke and it being on YouTube? I’d ban YouTube for glorifying drugs/politcs.

TJ has some good things to say about the latest act of stupidity and even quotes an official Govt email which says the idea is too difficult to police. Daithí makes sense too. Fergus too. Update: Adam too. Antoin freisin.

Reminds me of Yes, Minister or maybe the latest clone of it: The Thick of It:

This is definitely a : Minister says “I need a new iniative. I need a spectacular like Micheál’s smoking ban or Noel’s plastic bag tax, what have you got on file lads?” “Er, cracking down on dole scammers?” “No, nobody is unemployed any more” “Oh I know, a registry …”

Here’s an old gem:

* Actually Twenty already used the blog post title I wanted.

Jeff Jarvis points out that the Guardian are going to stream the TV series “The Wire”. More here on the Media Guardian site (use BugMeNot.com for a pass). Jarvis points out it was the Guardian who did the Ricky Gervais podcasts too which generated a nice few quid for everyone when they went a pay-to-listen model. I think the Guardian more than most are getting the idea that they are a media org not just a newspaper and as people want podcasts and videos, they should cater to that. The New York times does that a little with their YouTube channel with original content such as David Pogue and the iPhone musical number.

Over here, the Irish Times are apparently doing video though it’s shite. I’d expect over time that they might actually get their own little mini studio for things like this besides outsourcing. The Independent and the Examiner will also have to get into more media forms. I have a feeling the Indo will do this soon but again, not using in-house people. The Examiner will come along to the party eventually. The Irish Times has recently invested in Entertainment.ie which is a good enough site but very yesterday in what it does. They also sought to look into buying the Irish interests of EMap which include TodayFM and Dublin 104FM. It’d be a shame if they didn’t leverage the fantastic talent they have in there to do podcasts and videos, though I suppose that might actually mean paying them money for all their extra work. I’ve heard from some sources that the current Irish Times bloggers are doing it out of a love for writing and receive sfa from their employer to do it.

It’d be very interesting to see whether a media company that owns both print and radio assets would cross-link them and whether that’d be allowed. Everything is going from dead trees to electrons and it makes sense for an organisation to feed the new appetites of those that exclusively read online. I’m almost one of them.

I haven’t mentioned RTE yet. Best til last? If RTE don’t change their gameplan soon they could be a runner-up to lots more websites. They need to stop streaming their video using the godawful and much hated Realplayer and allow people to embed clips on blogs and websites. Just stick it all up on Youtube for goodness sake. Perhaps they’ll use the online medium to launch their mooted 24hr news channel? Would make sense I suppose. Like the Irish Times there’s some fantastic talent in that organisation and a lot of waste too. It would be nice actually to see their current affairs sections expand massively online. I’d listen to Morning Ireland, all morning and evening. They’ve butchered 5-7 live so much now that I rarely tune in. Morning Ireland especially is jam packed and a lot of the reports could probably be left in their original expanded form online. It’d be great to hear more interviews online.

Or perhaps with the Denis O’Brien acquisition of the Irish Emap stations, shows like the Last Word on TodayFM might expand their coverage too and do a little video segment which will have longer interviews of guests?

So will we see IrishTimes.tv and IrishIndependent.tv? I think we will but I wonder will Setanta have beaten them to the punch? They seem quite progressive. Meanwhile here’s some nice stats on online video advertising, the past, present and future of it. Gold in them dar hills.

Check out Dick O’Brien’s cycling blog.

Ultraviolet, the brit vampire series (nothing to do with shitty movie) is only €10.49 online. Recommend getting it. Brilliant show.

Harass Brian into making his HTTP bargain search idea into a Firefox Extension.

BP have had more eco-friendly petrol stations designed. Gnatt on the arse of an elephant really.

Staying on that theme. Paris buys 22,000 bikes for its citizens to use for as little as a euro a day.

Via some random visitor to my blog is this: Harry Potter is thinly-veiled homosexual propaganda. Between that and Star Wars, I’m shocked.

Iron and Wine cover “No Surprises”:

We’ve seen the 1500 Phillipino prisoners doing Thriller right?

I think I like the Bollywood version more:

Don’t break anything while I’m gone to this. Posting is on auto-pilot.

Via Elderly Gamer:

Rebuild of Evangelion is an announced Tetralogy of animated films in the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The first three movies will be an alternate retelling of the TV series (including new scenes, settings, backgrounds, characters), and the fourth movie will be a completely new conclusion to the story.

Rebuild schedule thus far:
EVA:1.0 (2007)
EVA:2.0 (2008)
EVA:3.0&FINAL (no release date)

Hmmm. Not at all sure of this.

No winner cos I forgot to do it. Won’t happen again.

Via Walter Higgin’s Twitter is the story of how Gordon Murray from eWrite brought along his Nokia 770 Internet Tablet to Open Coffee Cork. A quick showing around and with a pricetag of €100 ex VAT and Walter decided to buy two, Rory bought one and Diarmuid bought four apparently. Walter’s Twitter evangelising of it then got Conor, myself, Niall and Elly to buy one. So 24 hours later and 11 have been purchased, all as a result of one person at an event yesterday.

Interesting to see the chain-reaction to something like this. I think were it not for Walter’s evangelising, I probably would not have purchased one. I’ve seen this bargain being discussed on boards.ie for weeks now and was not tempted but the minute it got closer to home, the level of trust went up for me and I was easily persuaded to part with my money. It might also to do with the fact that I saw Walter’s delicious feed and saw him bookmarking all these resources for the device, showing me the abilities of the device as shown by people and not corporate tech specs. Also, I’m sure the fact that Walter for me can be a local point man (in a way) for the Nokia 770 helped. (Yes Walter, you’re my tech support for it.)

I wonder can sites like LouderVoice tap into that? A way of adding other reviewers as friends and having a filter so that reviews from this closer network gives them a higher ranking than any of the uber-reviewers that are out there? And stagger it down so friends of friends come up next etc.

I think if a company can figure out how to make your friend a salesperson then their sales rates would go through the roof. Of course your friend can’t see themselves as a salesperson or get monetary reward as then monetary motivation can skew their recommendations. If a company can provide free evangelising tools for their products, perhaps this is one way of increasing sales. Of course the first step in all of this is to make a great product.

For the second time today I heard €500k a year salary Vincent Sheridan from the VHI on the radio suggest that without yet another hike in VHI fees, people would die. Apparently charging 1.5M members an extra 8% means they won’t kill that puppy. This guy is obviously getting communication lessons from one of the ones that teaches the politicians to lie professionally. Prick. How dare you guilt trip people and try and say that without more money coming in, people will be denied treatment. Do we live in a country where people are denied the best cancer drugs because they are not on VHI? Because that’s what this guy is saying.

This was in the Irish Times today:

BT has just upgraded its equipment in six Eircom exchanges to ADSL2+ which will provide speeds of up to 8MBit/sec, which Mr Maloney says is more than adequate to provide new TV-over-broadband services.

The service is available to new BT customers connecting to the Tallaght, Dún Laoghaire, Dolphins Barn, Terenure, Merrion and North Main (Upper O’Connell St) exchanges in Dublin.

Costing €42.50 per month, existing customers will be able to move to it from September.

September is when eircom allow hassle-free movement to LLU which will allow you to keep your number. Makes sense. Nice to see BT start doing something with LLU again. Should mean more competition for Magnet and Smart.

This is the most fantastically nerdy and clever thing I’ve seen in many a year when it comes to bargain hunting. Use http headers to check how long a car ad has online and with that info leverage your bargaining skills. Brilliant. DIGG it if you want.

Indo talk about eircom splitting up. Something I discussed on Monday. Yay for validation.

Una did some live blogging yesterday. Twenty did it before too. Perhaps Una should take it one step further and sign up to UStream.tv and do live TV from wherever she is. One mobile broadband card, one video camera or Nokia N95 and live UnaRocks.tv 🙂

Just cos: