Damien Mulley

Clever. Oxfam got the students of the FÃ?S Television and Video Course in Tralee to make a video and have now stuck it on YouTube. Here it is:

This is in order to promote their Christmas offerings. Oxfam emailed Irish bloggers and asked us to spread the news as part of a viral push. I wouldn’t however class this as viral and even getting bloggers to put it on their blogs (like I’m doing) isn’t viral. The Viral tips I linked to yesterday would give a better idea on how to make this viral. I’m sure there is a little reward to the person in spreading the video but is it enough? Does it cause enough of a reaction from the viewer to get them to send it on to more people?

I do like the page which allows you to pick a banner to support them, which gives a nice choice and makes it easy by including the HTML for the banners.

James has also blogged about Oxfam and included the video. Like him, and as I said, I don’t think it is viral. So, an example of viral? Viral is the Threshers Offer that Hugh Macleod pushed out. Now that has some great viral elements.

• Easy to spread: Just email, IM, blog the link to the voucher or the voucher itself.
• Snowball effect: The more Threshers is selling out of stuff, the more attention the offer is getting, the more it spreads…
• Reward/Ego/Power:
  You have that little bit of power over your friends by being the one to get them the discount by forwarding the link to them.
  In turn, your friends then too want to feel this power and send it on to their friends.
  You get that little kick of “getting one over on the man” since it looks like a “big business didn’t want you to have it but now they can’t stop it” type feel to it.
  You are in a special group since not everyone knows about the offer, for a little while you a more important that the general populace.

The Oxfam video has the easy to spread bit but the reward/ego/power part is quite weak. Still, I’m sure a charity viral is hard to do and you can’t be spreading something that helps getting one over on the starving kids. I guess what you’d need for a charity viral is build up some story and have a twist at the end that upsets/shocks/causes emotion, so much so that the viewer sends it on so their targets in order for them to experience what they just experienced.

Just in case you ever wanted to have blue pee and to poison yourself in the process.

Save Pandora music as mp3s. Needs java though.
Richard Feynman saw letters in colour.

This is bling. Fo schnizzle. Yo.

World’s longest cross-sea bridge. You can imagine how much it would cost in Ireland.

Use your wii-mote as mouse in Windows.

Videos of people being interrupted while recording themselves in their bedrooms.

The Annoying Devil Part 1

The Annoying Devil Part 2

The Annoying Devil Part 3

Anyone in and around Cork interested in having a few social drinks on either December 9th or December 15th? Perhaps we could even get some food? Who’s about?

As well as the Elmo, I want a Wii, possibly. Damn these look fun.

You can’t beat these free ads for the Nintendo Wii. A search on YouTube for Wii Sports brings back over 1400 videos.

Hicks try it out:

Wardrobe malfuntion!

Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear) and Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) interview each other.

Riding a traffic wave.

7 Viral Marketing tips. Seems more about making viral videos. Good video examples included.

High number of downloads. But poor stickiness. Podcasts still not a killer app?

Faithless – Bombs. Banned by MTV. Wimps.

Richard Dawkins (who I consider an arrogant git) takes apart students from a Jerry Falwell “college”.

I’m chairing a talk in the Rochestown Park Hotel on Wednesday called Staying Competitive in the International Arena which is part of the Wireless Wednesday

We’ve bitched and moaned that these wireless events are always in Dublin, well finally they’re coming to Cork. Hurrah.

Full details below, please do come along and don’t forget to register.

Date: Wednesday December 6th 6pm-8pm
Venue: The Maple Suite, Rochestown Park Hotel, Rochestown Road, Douglas, Cork.
Registration: 6pm – 6.30pm
Admission: Wireless Skillnet members are free
Non members Euro30

To register contact: admin [at] investnet.ie (David Neville)

6.00-6.30 – Registration
6.30-6.50 – Presentation
6.50-8.00 – Panel Discussion
8.00 Networking Reception sponsored by Selatra

Chair for evening: Damien Mulley

Speaker: John Dennehy, Director – Upstart Games Topic – Operating a Successful Mobile Games Company in Cork – Lessons Learned

Panellists:
Sean Cronin, CEO – Selatra
Ian Deakin, CEO – Pervenio
John Dennehy, Director – Upstart games
Chris Lynch, Co-founder – GMedia
Pat Phelan, Director – Roam4Free

Presentation will be followed by a Q&A session with the Speakers

Karlin lines up a list of net visonaries and Gerry McGovern of “Nua fame” is put in the same mix as Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Tim O’Reilly and Nicholas Negroponte. One invented the web, another designed the protocols for connecting computers , one is running the One Laptop per child initiative and set up the MIT Media Lab and then we have Gerry, now modeling himself as a Jakob Nielsen-like character.

Ireland’s best known thinker on matters digital, Gerry McGovern, set up one of Ireland’s first web development companies, NUA, back in 1994

After that point, and with the setting up of his own consulting company, he has focused more on web content, in particular how organisations can best use the web. Though less of a presence in Ireland, his early writing and columns – before the Celtic Tiger took off – were some of the first to get people thinking here about the arrival of these new communications technologies and the role they might play.

Is Gerry McGovern the greatest in the history of the Irish Internet? If not, who is? Mary O’Rourke?

Meanwhile, look at the rest of the articles in that series on the Irish Times website. Lots of blogger have written pieces and lots more get mentioned. It is also in the Times as a supplement today.

I may have mentioned it before but the greatest concert I’ve experienced so far was the Odin’s Raven Magic concert that Sigur Ros, and a whole heap of other people performed on September 28th 2004 in Charlie Parker Hall in La Villette in Paris.

Pictures of the event are here. I particularly like this one.

It was an opera type male singer who performs the Icelandic 14th century poem “Odin’s Raven Magic” and accompanying him was a choir, an orchestra and Sigur Ros. They played some very traditional instruments including what looked like stones and made amazing sounds. There was a big screen behind them showing very arty visuals. Overall, everything on stage complimented everything else. It was absolutely amazing to experience and I’d travel the world to see this show again. The audience I think were blown away. People including me were almost emotional enough to shed a tear at the beauty of it all. Almost.

Here’s a clip from another performance of it in London:

Ooops he did it again. The Late Late drunk invader ramraids RTE.

Alf Stuart’s mySpace profile.

Racist rant boosts Seinfeld DVD sales. Of course…

See-though fridge.

Via Piaras, is news that the EU Dublin office is podcasting.

Owwww. I mean, it is used for more than just sex.

Top 40 bands in America.

Gay man spends half a million to try and defeat a republican who voted to ban gay marriage. I don’t find this an uplifting story to be honest. Surely that money and energy could have been spent on making a better difference.

Booom. Fun with alkalis:

Dumbass:

PSNI on mySpace. Thanks to Phil for pointing it out.

It contains the tag line “Making Northern Ireland Safer For Everyone” and has this in-your-face drink driving ad:

Who’da thought it? I expect to see a Garda and Crimeline Bebo account by the end of the day, knowing how these things go. Veh-hick-kill.bebo.com is free still.

Meanwhile, new blogs on the block for this week are here.