Damien Mulley

Due to very low uptake , the training event from ShareIT on April 28th ShareIT has been postponed. I’ll be looking into how to work with local organisations in future to boost numbers but with just 9 people registered, there was no way I could run the event on Saturday. Apologies to those that did register, the trainers who were doing all of the work for free and to Microsoft for offering the venue. I think for future events I’ll run a register so that an event will take place if 30 or more people register to attend in a given city.

New Irish crime fiction / movies blog from Declan Burke.

USB Boss Pedal.

Judges not reading depositions?

Check out Conor’s blog.

Value for money? Via NYTimes

Skype, which earns money largely from fees to connect users to the telephone system, posted revenue of $79 million, up 123 percent. EBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion. “This is a very young business growing very fast,� Ms. Whitman said

Via Mr. Exley, looks like a really good intiative from Labour UK.

Via Metafilter – Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

As an EHM, John’s job was to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, international corporations and the aid agencies allied with them were able to control these economies and to ensure that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building the global corporate empire.

Via You Ain’t No Picasso. Nice to hear some of her new songs. Quality is shit though.

Wanderlust:

Earth Intruders:

(To the tune of “The heat is on”)

No, it is not anything sexual but could be classed as dirty as in mud-slinging. Via Coolhunting is news that the Rasterbator now works in colour.

What is the rasterbator? Well to quote myself:

The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge rasterized pictures out of relatively small image files. The pictures can be assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 5 meters in size. You upload an image it spits out a pdf which you print off and put together.

Yeah, so, remember these photoshops? Well, you can now make giant poster from a4 sheets with the Rasterbator. Handy way of hacking the real election posters. Look forward to the giant version of Green Ink‘s work. Or Hugh‘s for that matter.

A giant version of this anyone?

And just cos:

The three new blogs from the Irish Times – On the Record by Jim Carroll, Pricewatch by Conor Pope and Present Tense by Shane Hegarty are all quite excellent and all meet the criteria of blogs with comments and proper feeds. (I encourage you to subscribe.)

Not to be outdone the Irish Independent are almost almost there in putting blogs and podcasts on their website too and I even hear videos will be put up. Hooray for content. A few Sunday papers are also messing around with the idea of blogs.

Some people at the Blog Awards this year complained that the “professional” writers were at some kind of advantage because of who they write for. I don’t believe they are and that was reflected in who won. I’m against the idea but do people think people who write for papers or the blogs on the likes of Ireland.com should have their own category?

Inside Google asks whether Google should allow media companies and others to buy Google Ads for searches relating to the Mass Murder in Virginia. Are the news orgs that desperate for the eyeballs of onliners?

Dave Winer has two posts on the mass murder (One titled Vlogging Comes to Mass Murder” and the other entitled “ChoTV Day2”) and thinks that the videos sent to NBC should be uploaded and left for everyone to see and do with them what they will. Some have argued about copycats but I’d more worry that this is just another form of trolling. The guy wanted attention and spreading the videos will do that for him. Attention whore has already got enough publicity. Doc Searls also says release the videos. Would he link to blog posts that had mockup pics of Kathy Sierra being murdered? Would he tell Kathy to upload the abusive pics and messages if they were posted to her?

Jeff Jarvis also supports their release and has some very good reasoning but I don’t think releasing the videos will encourage people to report potential rampage murderers, I think that lesson will be learned without them. We’ve seen the degrees of stupidity and insanity some people go to for attention, will this not just reinforce that fact that trolls with guns will be rewarded with the attention they want?

Meanwhile, isn’t someone in RTE being awfully clever with their “Sororicide jury breaks for weekend“. I’m not sure are murder cases the best place to show off your word of the day skills, though they seem to be fantastic sources for pullitzers and for best-selling non-fiction books.

Following on from my post about looking for mobile phones, I was asked to mention a few charities in the almost daily fluffy links. If you want more mentioned, add them to the comments.

Markham (you have a blog anymore?) recommends Camara.
Blurb:

Camara has three main activities:
1. We take in second-hand computers that have been discarded by Irish organizations, refurbish them and send them to schools and colleges in Africa.
2. We send out groups of volunteers to train African teachers in basic computer literacy and more specialised technology areas.
3. We produce computer training materials, and educational multimedia content in areas such as HIV/AIDS.

Primal Sneeze points to the Jack and Jill foundation who help sick children and collect mobile phones and ship them to Africa.

Support the Irish at the NextWeb Awards. Vote for LouderVoice and for Pixenate. (They’re in different categories so you can vote for both.)

BarCamp Dublin is on this Saturday, you going?

Speaking of which, don’t forget to register for ShareIT Dublin which is on Saturday April 28th. Free business training for startups!

Via Niall: An entire wedding party does the Thriller dance at their reception:

Nooo, they want to destroy Bloggorah by getting rid of lovely girls. Best Blogorrah headline in a while, cos there’s been some great ones: Lovely Girls Lubricate Dick. Why on earth are the PR company defending themselves, why are people not questioning the expense wasted on this?

Mobile phones wanted. Apply within.

Rufus Wainwright – Going To A Town

Why the shootings mean you must support my politics. a new version of the “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics“. Totally interchangeable with “Why the Kathy Sierra threats mean that you must support my code of conduct.”

Neil Gaiman – How to talk to girls at parties.

Primal Sneeze is looking for some feedback on Web 2.0 Usability.

I’ve been lumped with doing a paper on the usability of Web 2.0 applications. In this context, Web 2.0 means Blogger, WordPress, Flikr, Feedburner etc.

Send your feedback!