Damien Mulley

Lots and lots of stories about the numbers of “non-nationals” living in Ireland of late especially that of the number of Polish people in Ireland. There does seem to be a lot of Polish people about. There’s now a Polish TV show on new Dublin TV station, a new Dublin to Warsaw Bus Route, there are posters for the Polish Presidential election around Dublin and Irish Eagle reported on a Newsweek Article about the Polish in Ireland which gave the impression they endure quite a shock when they get here. No streets paved with gold.

Even in Cork we have Polish taxi drivers, who refrshingly don’t talk about the bloody immigrants coming into our country stealing our dole or other nefarious crap and we have Polish bars in Cork – one on Albert Quay and one in the basement of a bar on MacCurtain Street.

So where are the Polish Bloggers in the Irish boggersphere? 🙂 Are they too busy doing the work that us nouveau riche Paddys refuse to do, now that we have an extra few shillings a week? Surely we should be seeing a Polish section on boards.ie or even Boards.pl being added to Mr. Breslin’s expanding empire? A .pl domain costs about 50 Euros

It would be good to see the views of these new future citizens, especially on their take on Ireland and the Irish. Irish people are biased and we cannot judge our culture or our attitudes to others fairly. We’re part of the system and it is hard to stand outside and be critical. So says Edward T. Hall anyway.

It irks me at times when Irish people demand that new citizens/migrant workers/refugees need to adhere to our laws and our culture. Culture changes and cultural change cannot be governed. Bringing new views and attitudes and new blood to this country is good. Just like the Irish strongly influenced the culture of the UK and the USA, these new visitors to our shores are going to change our culture. Cuchulainn couldn’t fight the sea, Irish people can’t keep their Irish culture from changing.

It’d be good to get an insight into the current views of those moving to Ireland and working for and with the Irish. Bring on the Polish, Nigerian, Estonian and Philipino bloggers!

Michele was talking about making AdSense work on web forums and how hard it is to get regulars to click on ads because they are so used to the site they are just about blind to AdSense. Michele talks about a method used by some of interfering with the river of information in a thread by juxtapositioning ads between posts in a thread.

To me that is just being rude and just a way to trip up and ignorantly disrupt viewing a thread. It would inspire me to just write a greasemonkey script to block the ads.

What I think may work instead is something like an AdSense Ad mixed in with Google Suggest, which brings you to a site search page.

So, on a forum where someone talks about their XP font size issue, they see an Ad from Google stating “Search Google for XP Font Size issues” which brings you to a nice results page with a few Ads. You get a cut of those ads. An example below for a DVD search:

Importantly enough I think they have to say they are Google links since Google is almost a guarantee of quality. As well as ads they are quite a handy tool for those looking for information. So why not make money from those people who can’t find what they’re looking for from your site?

In fact search results too for VBulletin forums and the like should have this as the default. Results from VBulletin lined up with results from Google or an option to “Try Google for the same search.” To me this would be far less intrusive and would be a genuine way of helping users of your site.

Further Edit 10-10-05: Add Podcasts to these awards too? Some people say yes.
(another edit: New boards.ie thread on it.

The Irish Bloggersphere in my opinion is now maturing a bit and becoming a real community. Certainly the addition of IrishBlogs.ie and Planet of The Blogs to the web has made an immense difference to the Irishbloggersphere. Hell even my boggerspere neoligism made it into the Tribune. Maybe it’s time for the Irish Blog Awards?

But this idea isn’t unique. Seems that bastion of balance – the Freedom Institute came up with their very own Irish Blogs Award 2005, way back in urm February. Not sure how the voting system worked. They officially called it the “Liberty Blog Awards for 2005” though, so maybe if another Irish Blogs Awards happened they wouldn’t mind too much? And if they did it would only generate more attention for these awards. Even better.

So, to me it’s obvious that Slugger O’Toole will wipe the boards when it comes to any awards involving Ireland and blogging. When it comes to humour, well then Twenty Major will kick ass. (BTW he comes in the top 10 in Google for just the word “twemty”.) He doesn’t even need a special “Best use of ‘Cunt’ ” in a post. Though (NSFW Link) Mr Bing’s Blog entry tonight might.

But even if Slugger and Twenty clean up, it would be good for the citizens of the blogger/boggersphere to nominate bloggerss and posts and have them line up shoulder to shoulder and be recognized as the cream of the crop. Not entirely sure what the categories should be though. How about?

• Best Blogger
• Best Blog Post
• Best New Blogger
• Best Contribution to the Boggersphere (Tech wise)
• Best Potential Blogger i.e. Someone we’d like to see blogging

Now since comments are fucked on this blog, if you want to comment you’re going to have to post about it on your own blog. Oh and if you do that it means more people will read about the idea. That can only be a good thing.

UPDATE 09 Oct 2005:

Richard from FI emailed me to let me know that there wouldn’t be an issue with using the name Irish Blogs Awards. So there we have it. And now he’s blogged about it too!

Kevin over on Disillusioned Lefty liked the idea and Mr. Free Stater likes it too. Progressive Ireland also endorses this.

Further Update: Should we also include Podcasts?

One has to wonder with some of the greatest minds in the world working in Google, whether they really are going to be working on secret applications for the US Govt or Military. Sure, they can still do no evil, “do not be evil” is just a philosophical viewpoint.

In John Battelle’s post about Google Reader he states that Google is looking into facial recogition. Man. That’s quite interesting. Wonder how long before you have “Search Google personals for guys that look like Matt Damon. ” That’s just one selfish application. Ssssh, I’m allowed to indulge! Here again is the quote:

Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos. This is a first step toward ID’ing faces, then searching by face

Tags: googlereader facialrecogniton irishblogs

Google Reader – simple bloody name. Not a bad interface. The best thing is you can import and export OPML files. Going to import my bloglines OPML now.

What else? TAGS! Well, labels, as per GMail. Handy handy!

More on John Battelle’s site AND a very very interesting snippet which I will post in another post, just to get more Google juice. Google also announced its work on determining sex of a person using pattern recognition in photos. This is a first step toward ID’ing faces, then searching by face.

Hmm. Anyone else think the Google site is very slowass? Slower than Technorati at the moment!

EDIT: 15 minutes later and it is still importing my 120 feeds. Jesus this is painful!

EDIT 2: What horseshit. Beta it may be, but Google are the ones that made Beta something so professional that it outclassed release candidate material. Not this time.

Tags: googlereader bloglines

Paging Dr. Scoble,Paging Dr. Scoble, can you bring your Slingbox to the IT @ Cork event? Go raibh maith agat.

Via Google Blogoscoped. This brings me back to 1st year college running crackerjack against a shadowed linux password file and using a massive list of dictionary words to check passwords. Full txt list of resolving Google Subdomains. Tony Ruscoe found some interesting unpublished Google subdomains by using a bruteforce check on Google subdomains.

Via InsideGoogle: GreaseMap “Greasemap uses Greasemonkey to add a small layer to Firefox webpages. When you visit a geotagged page, it allows you to view an overlay map (powered by Google Maps) showing the coordinates of the geotag.”

Via BoingBoing: Bedroom slippers with LEDs in the toes.

Are EU ready? .EU domains are almost good to go.

Me in need of a haircut. Nice colour to my eyes, if I do say so myself.

More on Larry Lessig’s Powerpoint presentation style. Where can I get a PPT copy of his presentation? Larry’s presentations were the inspiration for the best powerpoint presentation I ever saw.

Sesame street lyrics in Klingon. Sing along! ” Describe to me immediately how to go to Sesame Street.”

Digg Spy. Automatically refreshing flash interface. Quick AJAX/Web2.0 fanboys. Love it! Love it now!

Handy Getting Things Done Email hack from Ross. It’s a tick box you can add to your sig stating you don’t want the email conversation blogged or quoted or that you permit it.

EU Information Society open Consultations. Handy bookmark.

Handy VoIP Flashdrive phone. Plug it into the USB, launch the software on the drive and you’re away. Now that’s mobile!

Rick is sick of this Web 2.0 bollox:

Having said that, enough already with this Web 2.0 nonsense. We are doing the same thing we always do when “new” has “newer” come along. We hype the snot out of it and crap all over the ‘old stuff’.

Blogs are the new new which is the new brown which is the new black. I remember the good ole days of WAP and how that would set the world on fire. I wish someone would have set a WAP PR bunny on fire. WiMax, there’s another sinner. Petrol, sugar, frozen orangejuice – Napalm some marketer scum and his dumbass client. How to succeed in this new age: Just build apps with the tech you have and stop being a marketing whore. The best way to pimp your product is to turn it from vapourware into ShitThat’sImpressiveWare.

Do you really need some dumbfuck marketing guru who only has the ability to “buzzerize” your product? Did FireFox need someone to give them a sexy name? If it changed its name in the morning most people wouldn’t give a damn.

Meanwhile look at Ning.