Damien Mulley

This is Brian Greene’s idea really not mine. Brian mentions that TDs don’t seem to turn off their mobiles when in the Dáil.

the whack of electro magnetic radiation hits the audio cables of the mic and is recorded for Oireachtais Report or broadcast live on Dáil Beo (TG4)

So, a nice afternoon game can be played by all those lazy ass students who stay at home to watch useless TV. Watch this on TG4, when they see a TD speak, find their number and ring it. Finding a mobile is a piece of piss these days with Google et al. Or a bit of social engineering when ringing party HQ will easily get you the number. Mobile rings and that nasty obnoxious fuzzy noise will piss off the TG4 sound engineers. Fun!

Can bloggers become the old style journalists? Or will we see journalists fork into factual and factual with commentary type journos. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that we will see a few of the quality and probably not so quality irishblogs citizens join the ranks of journalists. Blogs allow and almost default to people adding in their own commentary to news stories. Just look at Planet of the Blogs for commentary on the latest world news.

As more and more bloggers graduate into journos will more and more news stories become opinion pieces?

More reading on this:
Jeff Jarvis – Editor of News Gatherer.
Jarvis on new business models for news.
Open letter to Journalism school grads. Not very positive.

We are the tinyMusic makers. Interesting report on the people and the thoughts behind the tiny pieces of music we hear day in and day out.

A lot of interesting thoughts online now at the moment in regards to the post code system which the DCMNR wants to roll out.

Antoin weighs in with his thoughts. Antoin has been monitoring and commenting on this for a long time now. Good analysis going on.

A chapie on boards.ie Gives his views and provides an insight into the An Post sorting system. Bureaucracy gone mad. I love his analogy.

Tesco deciding to implement a huge optical scanning system that can recognise products by reading their full lables rather than a cheap fast laser that reads the barcode on the bottom.

United Irelander thinks it’s a bad idea though doesn’t give any concrete reasons as to why apart from cost. But doing everything in Government costs money, and if they brought in a policy of remaining static we’d see this would too cost even more.

Gerry O’Sullivan thinks it’s a good idea too. For courier companies it will be a godsend. Right now An Post are at an advantage in that the knowledge about a lot of locations seems to be only contained in the heads of the local postmen. That’s not a good way of running a business. It’s the mindset of a monopolist.

Other applications for postcodes would be an Irish version of Fax your MP. It would also make things a hell of a lot easier for Wireless companies that want to do site surveys.

Geeky Stuff:
Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now). Matt Haughey makes some very good arguments for not putting ads into RSS feeds for now.

WinAmp Plugin for the iPod. About time this came about. If I do go for an iPod this will make life easier.

Greasemonkey and business models.

Productivity stuff:
12 ways to think differently

Ticking email in Outlook. Part of the Getting Things Done school of taught. A good way of filtering work and tackling issues using Outlook.

How to become an early riser. Deffo need to go through this and see will it work for me.

After a week of meetings in Dublin for IrelandOffline it’s time to start getting back into blog reading and blogging.

Podcasting:

Podish is an idea from Liam Burke which allows Irish people to podcast and not worry about where to upload their content or worry about paying for it. Blurb:

Podish involves Irish people embracing podcasting without having to pay to upload their items, all they need is their mobile phone. The mobile allows people to easily record an item/issue in the news that they want to express their opinion on, or maybe be adventurous and interview somebody or do a sound seeing tour of their town area. The possibilities are endless.

Podish will make a nice edition to the irishblogs sphere. Would be handy if it could get some space on a sidebar on Planet of the Blogs.

Keeping to the Podcasting theme Tom Coates talks about the much anticipated BBC podcasts and how the BBC has put up an easy guide to podcasting up on their site.

My own opinions on podcasting is that it’s a fascinating area of citizenship jouranlism and we’ll see this become more popular. It’s very rough right now and I’m sure it could evolve into something more complex or quite different. What I’d like to see is people able to upload their own podcasts as audio comments to news stories on websites along with a written summary or transcript of what they saw. Stick in a few tags too while we’re at it for the tagging enthusiasts.

Speaking of tags, Feedster are adding the ability for readers to add tags in their feeds. Handy to see a “Tag This” form at the end of posts on some blogs. It doesn’t feed into technorati though. I’m sure a little bit of greasemonkeying might allow interaction with technorati or del.icio.us.

I too can dance the funkey chicken with my iPod.

As a follow-on to my commentary on Russell Beatie’s post saying Microsoft will win the DRM war, Engadget is now rumouring that the PS3 will support iTunes. This would make sense but I feel it would need to be a necessity anyway, no new thinking went into it, more a self-defense mechanism. It must be a huge humbling experience for Sony who invented the walkman and made music totally portable and personal and now they have to become the bitch of the iPod and iTunes. I hope they learned their lesson in complacency.

So IBM has met the year 2004 and is pushing for blogs. Not really a consolation for all those they are laying off in Dublin though. “Here’s the key to your blog and here’s your pink slip”.

The IBM blogging project is being run by Jim Finn, the former chief of communications at Oracle, and now number two in the corporate communications team at IBM. “We’ve got a lot of experts in their fields and we want to encourage them to become involved in blogging and online discussions,” Mr Finn told SiliconValleyWatcher.

By the way, check out the genesis of Silicon Valley Watcher. Definitely an interesting model. One I’d like to see adopted for the irishblogs.

From Russell: Napster, Real and Yahoo! vs. Apple… Winner: Microsoft. Sounds odd? Russell does a run-through of the various online music structures and shows that despite Apple dominating the hardware section of music players and iTunes doing very very well, the fact that Yahoo! and Real are using Redmond’s DRM plus a truckload more companies and that the XBox360 is going to be a games console and a media centre means that MS is gonna kick serious ass very soon. They’ll control the routes for accessing our media. Russell himself is a Yahoo! employee so he isn’t being biased on this.

Choice quotes:

Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop, and soon they’ll have a monopoly on everything else as well: not the OS, but the DRM on which all the media is based.

and:

As the OS diminishes in importance going forward in time, the only thing that’s going to separate one system from another is the DRM which is laid on top of it

and:

It’s like 1989 all over again when everyone was begging to license the Mac OS. Two years later Windows 3.0 showed up and Apple is now at 2% market share. If you don’t think the same thing is happening in the media space, you’re dreaming.

Yeah, this is one of those “Oh Christ we’re fucked” moments.