Damien Mulley

I did a talk today in Cork on Podcasting and the majority of my powerpoint presentation was words-free , I just used pictures and spoke on whatever area the pic was covering. I started off with the below picture because everyone loves cute baby photos and it also showed an audience for a podcast can be of any age and making a podcast is easy for everyone.

Displayed thanks to a Creative Commons licence from: Teds Blog.

Piaras suggests on his blog:

It isn’t hard to think why some people hold blogs in such disdain given the fact that there’s all this chatter about the phrase ‘Web 2.0′, but in terms of some of the biggest stories which have been in the news recently such as the Afghan hunger strikers in St. Patricks Cathedral, Irish bloggers have been relatively silent.

My view on why Irish bloggers got in to this is because Tom is family. He’s part of the community. If Suzy was threatened, or Piaras, or Richard or EWI we’d do the same. Don’t mess with family. I should think that most of the Irish bloggers couldn’t give a toss about web 2.0 but they would give a toss if one of us was sued for some stupid reason. There’s a reason we get together at blog awards and other events and have a laugh and a natter. It is the same way many of us gave out shit when El Paso acted the bollox.

If we are constricted to talking about what newspapers and the radio covers then we’d be a very very boring community and dictated by business interests and the interests of demographics. The “big” stories are what “they” tell us they are. This sounds all hippie and conspiratorial about “the man” but hopefully you get me. The conference Suzy was at today got some coverage but mostly about McDowell getting harassed. It was Suzy that covered the more important aspects of the event. It was Auds that spoke up for those against gay marriage who think the protestors today were just troublemakers. If she was threatened over what she said I’d create as much as a fuss as I did over Tom’s issue.

It was the Irish Blogging Community giving out that Mystery Train was canceled and sharing memories and fondness for it. The “mainstream” told us it was ‘gone, nothing more to see here, move on please’. I’m sure it could be them that start a campaign to find it a new home.

It was Digital Rights Ireland who covered the fact that Gardai might be leaking mobile phone data of the Afghanis in the Cathedral. Where’s that in the “mainstream” media?

The blogosphere is what we want to talk about and not what is dictated by editors under influence from their owners and the bottom line. We are all our editors and we choose what we want to read and what we want to discuss. If people have disdain for bloggers because we are free then I feel sorry for them. We won’t be homogenized. Screw the disdain.

Going back to Tom, it’s not about Web 2.0, it’s about a guy we know organising a conference and some over-zealous lawyers trying to suck the fun out of it and us saying. “Oi, lawyery types Noooooo.”

Hearty congratulations to Rick O’Shea for his new 6pm to 9pm radio show on 2fm. Dave Fanning on Radio1 on weeknights now! Jebus. Mystery Train and John Kenny have left the station! Christ bike etc. Wow, Rick is going head to head with Tom Dunne AND Dave Fanning. No pressure fella!

If you ever want to work for a company that spends time deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others, look no further than an American company based in Cork. Today it emerged that O’Reilly sent a cease and desist to the IT@Cork conference for daring to use the term Web 2.0 in the title. Instead of saying “we’re behind you” the company’s blog is delighting with the news. They’ve been snapping at the heels of Tom Raftery and the rest of the IT@Cork folks for weeks now for running the conference and even trying to encourage speakers to give out about the use of the web 2.0 term. What a bunch of fucking assholes.

You’d think a company would try and be part of the local IT community but they’re like a bunch of juveniles with chips on their shoulders. Any time I think of that company I’ll just think of them as that. I certainly won’t recommend them to anyone if I ever had the opportunity to do so. Business blogging can show that you work in a great company and equally it can show that a company can be populated by assholes. I’d link to these gobshites but being the attention economy a link only builds their pagerank and they don’t deserve my link. They’d probably threaten legal action too despite their glee with IT@Cork getting a legal letter. In fact they still could.

The media diversity training initiative is doing a 2 day course on how to make documentaries. Space is limited to 5 people it seems. Applications via the above link. Cost is €50. Pity there isn’t more of this around the country.

The pre-conference dinner with those interested in Technology on June 7th has been booked. I’ve provisionally booked for all of those that put their names down on the other post and we kick events off at 1930 hours. There’s a set menu and it weighs in at €40 including service. There may be some Stormhoek wine at the event too.

If you have not put your name down for this then I advise to do so. It should be fun. Britt Blaser and his wife are now attending this too. Don’t know Britt? Read is Bio. Afterwards we can adjourn to a city centre pub although maybe all the presenters want an early night for their gig the following day?

Via John Battelle, Gilad Mishne at the Intelligent Systems Lab, University of Amsterdam has released a paper on blogs. From the abstract:

This paper discusses the blogging phenomenon from an information access point of view. We examine blogs as a source of knowledge, analyzing the properties which make them unique as a data collection. We outline information analysis tasks aimed at blogs, and discuss how the properties of blogs are used in this context; finally, we point out some of the main aims of current computational blog research.

Download the PDF of the paper. Check out Gilad’s other projects.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain plays “Smells like teen spirit”.