From Sites to Blogs to Twitter

PAT QUIRKE, from PFQ.ie, spent 20 minutes tonight in front of 24 people, explaining the evolution of his business from a brochure site to a blog and onto Twitter. His audience was attending a Clonmel Chamber of Commerce event in Tippperary Institute, hearing Pat the storyteller weave a yarn from three generations back. He dropped onto the web in 2001, with guidance from a former student of mine (not the one at left). Version 4.4 of his site is one of the first HTML 5 web properties I've used because we are looking at real estate in Clonmel. Pat Quirke's evolving Twitter identity intrigues me. I think he will tap a mother lode of interest by offering direct message tweets to 30-somethings who are in the market to upshift in a down market. Pat Quirke Estate Agents already serves people who know their offerings, know the office staff, and trust their service--but don't know the centre city location of the fine plate glass window where properties can be viewed in the main street of County Tipperary's largest city. The story of Pat Quirke online makes me realise that the 50 students on my Social Media module next semester will have a local case study to learn how to monetise their tweets, blog posts and Flickr shots. And because I know Pat Quirke will spot this post, I hope he'll leave a comment below where he confirms he'll meet up with my diligent cohort of students in Hearns Hotel Library (the front bar) at 3PM on the last Thursday of January 2010. I'll serve the first round.

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Listening to Worldwide Cycles

EVERY TIME I watch a Qik clip from Barry Meehan and every blog post I read from his cycling shop, I feel guilty for idling my panniers. In an earlier life, I dropped more than a thousand of today's euros into cycling during a time when I rode 14 mile round trip miles to work. Because of Barry's enthusiasm, I know I'll have a new bike next year. He opened his shop in 1999, set up a website in 2004 and today he gets visitors that justify the name WorldWideCycles.com. Barry credits Keith Bohanna for specific pieces of guidance that have saved him bundles of money and several false starts. During a 15-minute presentation, Barry offered some cautionary notes about detecting online fraud, including some important facts about charge-backs by banks and credit card companies. Selling bikes online is challenging. And so is assembling bikes at home. When I buy from Worldwide Cycles--online or through the front door of the shop--I'll have a fully assembled bike. I'm off now to check on the gortex gear that I'll need to bash through the Irish winter weather.

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When Addicted to Selling

ALONG WITH 23 OTHERS, I spent part of the evening learning about how people who are addicted to selling fit an internet presence into their working lives. These are not idle tweeple (people with time to tweet more than 40 times a day) nor have they the patience to waste time in cul de sacs. But they know there is promise in some facets of social networking. "The stronger the image, the better the sales," says James Whelan Butchers, the five-star craft butcher in County Tipperary. That observation works in shop windows and it certainly works for well-designed online shops too. James Whelan Butchers reverted to a paper-first strategy when an all-electronic version failed to command the attention of clients. With a paper brochure outlining the site's potential in 2001, the site got traction. Today, the website extends beyond the geographical range of the butcher's livestock. James Whelan Butchers now delivers "a taste of home" into the UK through a network of distributors. "It's the most silent business in the world" is how JamesWhelanButchers.com views an effecitve online presence.

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That's smoked trout hanging in the butchers.

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To Improve Buffering

BUFFERING POWER--the one thing that has kept me away from ultraportable laptops. I'm always in search of ways to improve local buffering when I've done all I can to the bitstream itself. Sometimes Chrome gives me better buffering than Firefox. Killing all updates and anything else that might leech bandwidth also helps. I've also embarked on a Christmas goal--a new laptop--involving twice as much RAM as I currently use. I'm also tweaking my hardware acceleration (i.e., turning off hardware acceleration). Every media application needs different aspects of computer hardware. By turning off hardware acceleration, I can get better audio streaming resutls. That's because applications themselves will be able to set the requirements themselves and not be forced to use one universal setting. Hardware acceleration has been to known to cause choppy PC playback, application crashes and slow streaming video problems. Here's how you control hardware acceleration on a Windows PC:

Innovation for New Growth

IRELAND SECURED AN important portfolio in the European Commission when Maire Geoghegan-Quinn was allocated the research and innovation portfolio in Brussels. The EUR 53bn budget she will oversee is central to providing high quality jobs and prosperity to Europe. The EU wants to build smart economies. Ireland needs to pull out of the tailspin that resulted from a risky overdependence on property. I sit a few metres from several programme specialists involved in developing and delivering academic courses to students who are interested in learning about active homes and passive homes. These green tech specialisms are well suited to builders who want to diversify beyond the construction industry. I work directly with creative multimedia students who want to produce more content in shorter time frames than earlier graduates. That's happening in Tipperary Institute, accelerated by a change to semesterised teaching schedules and our use of pocket media services such as Qik. We also produce items such as the encoded graphic at left. You need a phone equipped with a Microsoft Tag Reader if you want to watch what happens to this quilt-like image.

Memory Full Limits My Main Computer

MILLIONS (14m) OF PAGES appear on Google when asking for information about "memory full Nokia" like I did. Unlike many of the people complaining online about a lack of main memory, I believe mine is totally a result of (1) too many message attachments in email, (2) too many (hundreds) of old SMS text messages inside custom folders, (3) the presence of several bloated Java programs that insist upon installing themselves on the main phone and (4) the presence of full-featured guidebooks attached to Nokia Maps. Brendan Coleman, the local Nokia repairman, tells me I could do a factory reset (*#7370# with lock code 12345), then reload sections onto the phone one at a time to see which bogs down the phone. I my case, I know the "settings" menu has issues, so I'm manually going to pull off a dozen wifi profiles and remove and replace the special profile application that I really enjoy using. I may have to remove some of the US map data from the phone as well because the phone wants to update the map guides whenever I have the GPS and map funciton running. All things considered, the Nokia E90 continues to serve me as a daily phone two years after I slipped it into my pocket. The photo (above right) shows a normal day's work on a phone that's been dropped onto concrete five times since November 2007.

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Ideagen in Clonmel

ALONG WITH 37 OTHER people, I attended Ideagen in Clonmel, coming with a fluffy idea and looking for a bright spark that might suggest a way to distill a business process from the idea. My focus: pocket media production services. The gist: to produce and deliver trustworthy information onto portable small screens or onto sitting room television sets. But as events unfolded, I discovered I was in the wrong Ideagen venue with my idea. That's ok--I know where to go (WIT Ideagen meeting) with the concept we're developing. Enterprise Ireland (EI) is leading a series of networking events designed to show the reach of industry-led research in Ireland. Specific strategies unfolded in the Clonmel Ideagen meeting, especially for those interested in green technology. At least four EI staffers worked the floor, explaining the way stimulus packages worked and helping people hook up with potential collaborators. I think events like Ideagen are helpful but I wouldn't normally be attracted to an evening as structured as the Ideagen format. That said, spending 160 minutes with a cordial group of like-minded people was an effective use of time and I'd certainly recommend anyone involved in a start-up to carefully read Ideagen literature to determine whether a nearby event suits. You can get more details from ideagendotie on Twitter and ideagen on Facebook. Below the break, I cite a cross-section of specialisms attending Ideagen in Tipperary.

Digital Culture Learned from In-Class Production

ONLY A FEW WEEKS separate academics from Christmas Break, something I realise I need more than ever when I listen to the audio snippets recorded and produced by third level students in Tipperary INstitute. Today's session [41 MB 96 kbps MP3 file], engineered by Eamonn Healy and produced by Shane Egan, includes an hour of information related to an upcoming revision session for my Media Writing class. Watching our current crop of first year students step up and create useful audio content all within the space of an afternoon tutorial session makes me realise how important it is to record audio time capsules for future review. Our current digital lifestyles are throwaway sessions. We channel surf, barely scroll down to read an entire page of search engine results, and laugh out loud on YouTube before scanning and viewing another clip. Online writing is 140 characters or boring. Attention spans have declined while digital appetites have increased. So no matter what the time pressure, I'm going to craft a way to produce at least 60 minutes of audio content during scheduled class meetings next term. Today's episode (Educast 158) includes audio harvested from Last.fm playlists, a few sections of top tier podcasts and the usual assortment of student commentary.

Educast 158

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Direct link to audio: http://podcasting.ie/podcasts/educast_158.mp3

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Emergence of Facebook Community

THREE YEARS AFTER I first started skimming Twitter and four years after latching onto Facebook, I have to say that Facebook delivers more of a community spirit. It's all the more evident when part of my Facebook newsfeed delivers real-time community-centred. This real-time evolution towards authentic communications happened because genuine people are trundling onto Facebook with really interesting streams of information, from textual to photographic to video to audio clips. This change of Facebook's value surprises me because my initial impression of Facebook came through an inundation of applications. I used to loathe visiting Facebook because I would be confronted with dozens of pokes, quizzes, and games that just got in the way. But after manually deleting or blocking hundreds--yes, hundreds--of Facebook apps, I've a clean sheet when opening my Facebook account. On top of that, real people from decades ago have connected with me on Facebook, resuming communications as though we were between rounds in the pub. But over on Twitter, things are different. What should have been an elegant microblogging platform has now evolved into a faceless mass of wannabe celebrities jostling with each other while their PAs tweet a version of Hello! Lite. Other faces have evolved their microblogging into a clever form of in-stream advertising. I'm getting a rising number of porn bots in my "replies" tab. Twitter is evolving in a direction that doesn't suit my lingering attention. Its evolution has me subscribing to selected people and to the "favorites" that some power users want to share. Next week, I'm recording a conversation with Liam Burke, the guy who cajoled me onto Twitter in 2006. I'll share those thoughts here as well.

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I am topgold on Twitter and Facebook.

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