Damien Mulley

Web 2.0 A-listers for Dublin event. The Web 2.0 is a load of bollox. It’s like calling a Power point presentation Presentation 2.0 just because you found new swishes and fadings and woosh sounds and segways. Christmas Tree 2.0 because we have new sparkly tinsel. Been through the same hype for WAP, java, shockwave, activewords and all the rest. A-listers? Jesus. There are no A-listers. We barely have enough “listers” in the first place. Fight Club time: “You are not your fucking A-Listers, you are not your fucking paradigm shifts, you are not your fucking AJAX.” Less time on making new labels and inventing new half-speak and more time on making products that are useful and do something, thanks.

Well done to Tom Raftery too by the way who just happens to mention in the comments in the post above, a very understated “mini-conference” in June that IT@Cork are running. He made the same announcement in a matter-of-fact comment at IT@Cork RSS event on Monday night. Mini? Look at the lineup. Fantastic.

Tom also has news about a nice deal with Electric News who’ll have a Podleaders channel on their site. Way to go Tom. Good to get greater recognition.

Another Corkman was in the Irish Times today too. Well done Walter Higgins of PXN8. Love the Tom Coates quote too.

suggested someone should give it a “bajillion dollars”

Brilliant post from TwentyMajor on how blogging can once again keep families in touch. Love the linkroll on the new site too.

Via BoingBoing are these dead cute Love/Hate mittens for a baby. Perhaps we should have a line for all the soon to be or recent Dads in the Blog O’Sphere? “Baby Blogger” maybe?

iPod Nanos are not pregnancy tests, you stupid girl. Meanwhile, how about doing webhosting/colocation on an iPod Nano?

Dole.ie, search all the Irish job sites at once. Bernard mentioned RSS feeds for job listings. If Dole.ie did this for their sites using both the catergory sections and the search ability then every other job site would be redundant. Dionsaurs will always become extinct if they don’t evolve.

Amazon builds a service allowing anyone to make their own search engine. Woah. First they bring in dirt cheap file storage with Bittorrent support and now this. Amazon is turning into an infrastructure provider. Clever.

The Irish Daily Mail knocking off Mark Tighe’s Sunday Times piece about Bebo isn’t the first time a mainstream news outlet has knocked off a story though it was quite blatant this time round. Mostly though they’ve been lifting whole paragraphs from blogs or web forums without attributing their sources. Lazy reporting and to some it would be classed as basic thievery. So, since Awards.ie isn’t going to be used for another while, why don’t we set up the The Irish Press Plagiarist of the Year awards? 🙂 And to keep with the theme, this isn’t an original idea. I nicked it from Guido Fawke’s blog.

There’s an RSS button on the front page of SiliconRepublic at the moment but when you click on it you are brought to the Syndication page where it is suggested you email SR so you can syndicate their feed. Uhm, RSS doesn’t work like that. Kind of defeats the automation of it all.

Via this consultation.: European Telecom’s Lost Investment: An analysis of the ECTA Regualtory Scorecard

Europe is missing up to €14 billion of telecoms investment each year due to ineffective regulatory environments in some countries. In this report we calculate the regualtory elasticity of investment and show how much investment is left on the table.

This new report from Strategy and Policy Consultants Network (SPC Network) entitled “European Telecom’s Lost Investment: An analysis of the ECTA Regulatory Scorecard� examines how ineffective regulation of the telecommunications sector is costing Europe vital investment. The key findings of this analysis are:
1. Effective, pro-competitive regulation is strongly correlated with increased investment: the better the regulation the higher the levels of investment;

2. Improved regulation could increase annual investment in European telecommunications by up to €14 billion;

3. The ECTA Regulatory Scorecard found that Germany and Greece achieved the lowest scores while the UK and Denmark received the highest scores for regulatory effectiveness;

4. Over 60% of the variation in telecommunications investment can be explained by unequal implementation of the European telecoms regulatory framework;

5. For each 10% increase in broadband competition there would be a 5% increase in investment

The World Economic Forum relased their Networked Readiness Index Rankings for 2005 and Ireland is 20th. Last year we were 22nd. We’ve moved ahead of New Zealand. France has fallen back though France has a fantastic broadband infrastructure which we of course don’t have. Here is report for 2005-2006. (PDF file)

Here’s the report from last year.

DamienDamienDamienDamienDamienDamien.com is available or maybe DamienDamienDamienDamienDamienDamienDamien.com

What choices!

*Highest mobile prices in EU*
*Highest line rental in EU*
*2nd highest domestic phone bills in EU*
*Broadband uptake significantly lower than EU average*
*LLU complete failure *
*ISDN usage increasing again*

Well done ComReg. Funny how you hid the most important facts. Tranparency comes in opaque flavours now I guess.

Full details from IrelandOffline.

Bright Eyes – “First Day of My Life”

This is the first day of my life
Swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain, suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach
Yours is the first face that I saw
I think I was blind before I met you
Now I don’t know where I am, don’t know where I’ve been
But I know where I want to go

And so I thought I’d let you know
That these things take forever, I especially am slow
But I realized that I need you
And I wondered if I could come home

Remember the time you drove all night
Just to meet me in the morning
And I thought it was strange, you said everything changed
You felt as if you’d just woke up

And you said, “This is the first day of my life.
I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you.
But, now I don’t care, I could go anywhere with you
And I’d probably be happy.”

So if you wanna be with me
With these things there’s no telling
We’ll just have to wait and see
But I’d rather be working for a paycheck
Than waiting to win the lottery

Besides, maybe this time it’s different
I mean I really think you like me

EU sets up online discussion forum where the EU public can give their views. Hugely underused at the moment. Go in and give your views. I’ve linked to the english language forum but there are a good few more forums for other languages.

Unsure what that filetype is? Use this site.

Sussurration – Meaning, “A soft, whispering or rustling sound; a murmur.â€?

Another Youtube et al video downloading service

Mashable – TechCrunch competitor. Competition is good. I have to say though that I’m getting quite bored of all these Web 2.0 launches. I might even unsub from TechCrunch soon.

How with proper regulation you can get broadband for all. France gives an example of how to do it. Ireland is the “how to do it badly” example.

The Guardian immerses fully in Podcasting. Woot. Their Guardian unlimited site made a million quid last year. That’s how to do it the right way. Be open enough and make money. I like the idea of the Guardian people doing a news roundup and trying to predict how things might unfold. Will they have an astrologer on the podcast too?

Newsdesk is our new, daily news podcast, where we round up the big stories of the day and analyse how things are likely to unfold. Presented by Jon Dennis, you’ll find a fresh edition daily at 12 midday

Does Paddy Power take unique bets? Noel Dempsey says his broadband targets are going to be met by end of year. He says 400,000 people will be on broadband by years end. I think not and I’m willing to bet on it. 🙂

Via scoble Boston Legals says what the Democrats and so many more didn’t. Years ago shows like Star Trek challenged and informed the world about important issues. Now a show about lawyers does it. Hooray.