Damien Mulley

Dick and Dave are both pointing to Sarah Carey’s blog where she fact-checks Eddie. I do so love Dick’s title “Hobbs nobbed on Trim”. Made me smile.

Hobbs is widly popular at the moment and Fianna Fail and the PDs are making an issue of his program which seems to come from the Michael Moore school of presenting facts. There is a good deal of chatter about him on the Consumer Issues forum on boards.ie too.

So, we have IndymediaWatch, how soon before we have an Eddie Hobbs Watch?

To get people started here are two rss feeds which search PubSub and IceRocket for the phrase Eddie Hobbs.

Sarah’s blog entry like Tom’s Googleshaming one is a good example of the power of the blog. Everything you write online gets crawled by a whole host of different search engine bots which cache and archive your page possibly forever.

An army or even a country of people reading papers, listening to the radio, watching TV reports and then going online to point out inconsistencies is a mighty powerful thing. Perhaps we can see more of this fact-checking as a collective effort when the election comes around next year? How hward would it be for a politician to lie and spin AND get away with it when not only is the research machine of the opposition watching what you say but a huge proportion of bloggers too.

EDIT: Ah hah! It is already happening with a bad Irish Times piece about Google Talk. Planet Potato fact-checks the Irish Times and so does Dick.

Another Edit: Why not tag any fact-checking posts with irishfactcheck

We all know about Google talk now. IM and VOIP and hoping to integrate SIP soon. 900k installer for the app. Nice and lightweight.

The use of XMPP as the protocol will at last make Jabber mainstream. Russ Beatie tells us succinctly why this is good:

I don’t know if you know how it works, but it’s pretty wild. You don’t send individual XML documents per message, instead you open up a socket and start writing one XML document keeping the socket open the entire time, as you need to send more messages, you keep adding XML stanzas to the document. You do this both on the up and down stream … if you’re really just sending a never-ending XML document as the way to make a conversation, then extending this protocol is drop-dead simple. … *Poof* – extensible instant messaging and presence. They’ve got a ton of extension proposals already in the works, including sending forms, multi-user chat, and geolocation.

This is why open protocols rock.

Ed Byrne was on to me about setting up Tech Camp Ireland and at that uri is now a Wiki for others to sign up to it. What is it? Who is it for? *Shrug* Go look.

Tags: Ireland techcamp IrishBlogs

In March 2004 I posted about the Four Principles of Interpersonal Communication and I completely forgot about them, so here they are again:

1) Interpersonal communication is inescapable
2) Interpersonal communication is irreversible
3) Interpersonal communication is complicated
4) Interpersonal communication is contextual

Esquivalience – Via MetaFilter is a link to the New Yorker about the Oxford English Dictionary adding a fake word to the dictionary in order to catch people ripping off their content.

But what is this fake word supposed to mean – Esquivalience-n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.

InsideGoogle mentions the talk.google.com domain which if you connect to using a Jabber client will talk back to you:

Inquisitive Neowin member Tom Servo, taking a que from member CarlNewton tried to connect to talk.google.com using his Trillian client.

What he got was a secure XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, alternatively known as Jabber) server waiting for connections.

The same site also points to comments in the New York Times: Google executives say they plan to unveil on Wednesday a “communications tool” that is potentially a clear step beyond the company’s search-related business focus.

The NY Times speculates about the possibility of a Smart Phone: A Google-branded smart phone has long been a pet project of Mr. Page, and earlier this year Google invested $2 million in a project by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, to develop a $100 wireless laptop. The smart-phone idea, which the company has not talked about publicly, would be a way to extend Google’s reach and give it a more extensive connection with its users by offering Google on a multipurpose mobile device.

What I’d like to know is whether it is going to connect with Google Desktop. It would make sense really for an IM Client or Smart Phone or VoIP communications device to use the Desktop client. Desktop is really taking the daily tasks performed on a pc and putting them together into one client and running the services off their servers. Poor Microsoft.

I really would like to see some innovation in the IM Sphere. Nothing has changed or taken a significant step forward in years. Emoticons are not progress! I’d really like it if it worked with MSN Messenger and other IM Clients. Redmond would be a tad more than just pissed then but I don’t know would Google have the balls to hijack the service and try and convert over MSN users.

Rowan Nairn has some good advice on his blog which I found via a comment on James Corbett’s post about an Irish Geek get-together. So yes, Rowan advised:

Put your ideas out there. They are worth more to you as advertisements or previews of what you can do than they promise hope of single-handed exploitation. You want a patron who recognises your brain’s capacity to generate new ideas as a more valuable commodity than any individual idea. It’s hard to get someone to pay you to start having ideas from nothing, but someone may pay you to stop telling everybody else your ideas.

Nicely said. That’s why I sent out the NewsRoom.ie idea. Get some feedback and if some hacker wanted to take the idea and run with it, then more power to her. I’d even be happy for the domain to be used. I’ve got loads of ideas and I cannot use for work or for pleasure or for any campaigning work I do. Maybe someone will end up here via a Google search, find the idea and use it.

Anyways, not seen Rowan’s blog before but I’ll keep tuned now. Hey Rowan!

Mozilla Mouse Tips. Some quite handy ones here.

Via Kottke, using Excel to search for jobs when in work. When will IrishJobs or RecruitIreland provide an API to their DB. In fact, when the hell will they bring out RSS feeds for my job preferences? Email is so bloody old.

Overshadowed – Fantastic photos from Japan. I wonder can Ryan or Donncha produce something like that?

Seth outlines how he wants to sell his next book. His marketing of ideavirus was fantastic.

Gmail Conversation Preview Bubbles

Death by Caffeine. How much of your favourite caffeinated drink would it take to kill you?

Jarvis on new news sites. Something for Newsroom.ie to model itself on?

The title says it all. Boards.ie is down and so with all this spare time available to people they have gone about their work in their jobs. Quarterky profits will be up everywhere!