Sunday Tribune on blogging

TRIBUNE -- This week's round-up of the blogosphere and Irishblogs takes in Flickr, Caoimhe Burke, Jason Kottke, Gerry O'Sullivan, Symbollix and Chicks Dig Unix.

An extract follows.

Snap the Full Irish. Summer is (allegedly) upon us, and that means with any luck the next time you get your hair cut you will actually have something to say when asked: "where are you going on your holidays?"

Flickr will be waiting for you when you get back--and will let you upload your holiday snaps to make them easier for family and friends to see and harder for you to lose. A basic account is free and is all most people will need.

Surfers can also (if you let them) leave comments about your pictures and start a discussion. Caoimhe spotted on on the nature of the Irish breakfast.

American Jason Kottke, a full-time "celeb A-List blogger" visited Ireland's southwest recently and posted a picture of an Irish breakfast on Flickr.

Cue row about whether the fried eff-rashers-sausages-tomato-toast package can be called Irish, English, Scottish or all of the above.

[Editor's Note: Google finds 1.19m references for English breakfast and 91,000 references to Irish breakfast.]

Two Sides or One? Gerry O'Sullivan had some thoughts about debate--a skill increasingly lost in the wider world but thriving among bloggers--and devised an experiment to assess the skill.

"Show somebody a picture of an isoceles triangle (the one where two or the three sides are of equal length). Show another person a picture of a circle, whose diameter is the same as the smaller side of the triangle. Now put them together and ask them what they saw. One will say triangle, the other will say circle. Insist that they saw the same thing.

"Now if both of these people are completely incapable of debate, they will accuse one another of being wrong. Let it go on for a while and they may even end up calling one another liars, bigots, or even fascists. However, if they are capable of debate, they may come to the conclusion that they actually did see the same thing (a cone), but from a different point of view."

Of course, sometimes it's just more fun to argue. About the Irishness of breakfast, for example.

Sigh, the end is nigh. Symbollix had the inside scop about a recent protest outside Leinster House. "(A)s a 10,000 strong crowd gathered to confront the government on their failure to bring about the apocalypse".

"This is just typical Fianna Fail," one protestor remarked. "The only reason I voted for them in the last election was because they were the only party progressive enough to include a policy of total annihilation of the human race in their campaign agenda. But now of course they have reneged on that promise and let us all down. Since returning to power this whole area has been largely ignored."

We were slightly let down, however, to find that Symbollix's mythical protest report was to promote a gig including Chicks Dig Unix.

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Extracted from the Sunday Tribune, June 26, 2005.
Caoimhe Burke -- "English breakfast me a*se"
Kottke's Irish Breakfast is at http://flickr.com/photos/jkottke/16296995/ and it had more than 30 comments during its first week online when five of the 4313 people viewing it called it a "favorite".

Bonus Link: An English Breakfast.

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