Damien Mulley

IEEE USA has an Entrepeneurs resource website.

Slate unveils textcasting. Newspapers for your iPod which you can get via iTunes. How long before Irish publications start textcasting? Never is a credible answer I bet.

Speaking of iTunes – share your iTunes over the Internet.

Guide on how to start blogging.

Answering Richard’s quiz. I don’t know what my score is.

1. Are taxes too high?

Yes.

2. Should we worry about absolute poverty rather than relative poverty?

Both. I don’t think this is a black or white issue and couldn’t be broken down into one or the other.

3. Do we need to scrap the state-run TV station?

I think we need a way of preserving our culture and I don’t think a commericial entity will be into that. I like the BBC model to a degree. RTE TV is mostly an abomination. RTE Radio 1 is good though. Merge the cultural bits of RTE1 and TG4 and dump the rest. I’m not seeing a valid reason for my taxmoney being used to buy Lost and Prison Break.

4. Was it a mistake to rule out nuclear power?

Saving the environment by burning turf is just as bad as pissing about with radioactive isotopes. I’m not for nuclear though.

5. Is the Irish military underfunded?

It’s shit. I don’t think it being better funded will make it better. Wait til people read about the Army’s own version of PPARS. That’s going to be fun. The Army is a Civil service built and designed to “think stupid” and waste money. Unless it becomes efficient I don’t see a reason to throw more money at it.

6. Is gay marriage a bridge too far?

Eh no.

7. Has the partnership model become a problem?

Following from Dave’s lead I take it as the public/private partnership? See my comments below about unions. To answer the Q though, yes.

8. Are fees the solution to underfunding in universities?

No, blowing too much money on utter bollox is a problem. Address it. I would like to see colleges be run like businesses but allowing money to be spent on loss-making sections such as research divisions. At the same time I think that some universities are going all commercial and creating too many “buy a degree” options.

9. Does neutrality prevent Ireland from acting responsibly internationally?

No.

10. Has the peace process failed to hold Sinn Fein to full democratic standards?

Pot calling the kettle black really. They’re all guilty, on all sides. I’ll delight in Sinn Féin romping home in a lot of the poorer areas of Ireland where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael wouldn’t dirty their Italian leather shoes in. I can see how much interactivity SF has with the communities in Mahon where they only see FG and FF people 3 weeks before a general election.

11. Is religion and the Catholic Church in particular a force for good?

Religion and Christianity is good to a degree. Christianity is a good way of teaching a good way to live life. The Catholic church has been a malevolent force in Ireland and has done a great deal of harm and no matter what good they’ve done before and will do after, the group that models itself on purity has a black mark over it and instead of repenting for things like raping kids it instead became more corrupt by covering it up. Catholicism needs to seriously reexamine itself.

12. Do we critise America too much?

Yes.

13. Are private health accounts with support for low earners the solution to the health system?

As someone who worked in the health system I’d say no. Fire them all and get in new people. Consultants, Nurses, “Managers” all need replacing at this stage. There are now “managers” on stupid money who’s job it is to assign people beds. A software program can sort this besides three women on 55k a year to tell A+E that they can send a patient to ward 3B because a bed is free there. An A+E with 10 beds and 20 nurses tripping over each other and then one porter to move all those patients to and from x-ray and up to the wards and also to deliver bloods to the labs is the typical way the system is run. Total cronyism, total corruption. I don’t see why tax money should be spent on this wastage but I’m fine if there was no waste. Funding low earners to get private care in such a corrupt system isn’t going to fix much.

14. Would we be better off if the unions were less powerful?

This is an odd one for me. The unions that exist now are a corrupt force full of self-serving backstabbing nasty lazy pricks. Unions are needed as I see companies still trying to screw people over and sometimes unions are the only way to solve this but whenever I’ve had dealings with unions they’ve been Uncle Toms. Someone to watch over someones labour rights is what is needed and most unions don’t do that these days. I saw it myself in an old job where the union signed up the new lads in the company and then screwed them over by getting the new guys to do all the work that management dumped on them.

15. Is Michael O’Leary an example of a good businessman?

About the only businessman that stands up to the Irish Government. He’s an egomaniac and a fantastic PR machine.

16. Should we be wary of supporting a more powerful EU?

The EU is needed and is very beneficial but holy christ is it bureaucratic and slow. The EU has dragged Ireland screaming into the modern world in some areas but as time goes by it is slowing down and choking on it’s own fatty jowls.

17. Should we trust the actions only, and not the words, of the IRA and Sinn Fein?

And should we do the same for every other poltical party and President?

18. Was the Aer Lingus partial privitization insufficient and overdue?

Yes.

19. Do we need the death penalty for the worst crimes?

Certainly not.

20. Should the overall tax take fall by a third or more?

It’d be nice wouldn’t it?

As dictated by the In Factahnistas. See post title.

Map:

Dermod has an interesting post on search engines and Irish Blog aggregators. It seems his posts are found in Google under the IrishBlogs copy/cache of his post and not via his own website. Dermod asks whether blog aggregators should block search engine spiders from looking at blog caches? Leave a comment on his blog.

Edit: Amended title.

Google Trends. You can check the search trends for countries and regions. For Ireland it breaks it down by City!

Google Trend search for broadband.

Google Trend search for Podge and Rodge.

Google Trend comparing Bebo to mySpace. Look at the bloody massive rise for Bebo!

But as Dave says in the comments, worldwide Bebo is mauled by mySpace.

Compare UCC to TCD to UCD

Oh I could be here for hours!

Richard mentions a BBC and Reuters survey on blogs and whether people trust them compared to traditional news sources. Details of media trust survey.

The results:

National TV was the most trusted news source overall (trusted by 82%, with 16% not trusting it) – followed by national/regional newspapers (75% vs 19%), local newspapers (69% vs 23%), public radio (67% vs 18%), and international satellite TV (56% vs 19%). Internet blogs were the least trusted source (25% vs 23%) – with one in two unable to say whether they trusted them.

TV was also seen as the most ‘important’ news source (56%) followed by Newspapers (21%), internet (9%) and radio (9%).

Richard said:

I think this is more reason still to see blogs as supplementing, rather than supplanting, established media.

I’d agree with Richard on this. I think some get too excited that us bloggers will take down O’Reilly Corp and Thomas Crosbie Media. Not a chance. However I’m quite upbeat about these figures and I said as much in the comments on Richard’s post. Blogging is just a baby at the moment especially when you compare it to the age of the printing press. 50% of people couldn’t give an opinion on blogs with 25% saying they’d trust them and 23% saying they’d mistrust them. The same level of mistrust they have with local papers. They mistrust public radio and satellite TV more! That’s fairly interesting.

More importantly though to me, I think everyone should have a healthy level of mistrust of all news sources so that they’d check more than one source and on perspective on the news. This to me would make the news more fair and balanced. Also if blogging has a long way to catch up to be as trusted as TV news then good because if blogs ever reach that level I think the blog quality will be much better than TV news. You won’t get much credibility or trust from other bloggers unless you back everything you say with a few links to other sources. Bloggers in a way provide you with their raw newsfeeds whereas TV and radio do not.

I’d be disappointed if everyone that read this blog took what I said as gospel. DO NOT (fully) TRUST THIS MAN