« December 21, 2003 - December 27, 2003 | Main | January 4, 2004 - January 10, 2004 »
KILKENNY -- While tossing out some old class rosters, I found one from 1997 where no more than 10% of my students had mobile phones. A mirror image of the data exists when compared to my current students--92% have mobile phones now.
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KILKENNY -- A sensible notebook is an essential part of a journalist's wardrobe. And those who strp cameras over their shoulders need to carry notebooks to tickle their memories about what they've photographed. A sensible size is something that fits into a pocket or a handbag. I often sling a sack on my back, so my A5 wireless notebooks work a treat. Writing things in notebooks guarantees you of reference points. It doesn't have to b a diary but its entries often have the same impact as a meticulously kept diary.
The Alwych Book has a durable all-weather cover in A38/90 feint. Get one, carry it discreetly, use it, and leverage the memories it will safguard. x_ref125ws
KILKENNY -- "Well, you could look that up on Google" said the voice in the High Street Mall--just like 60% of all the visitors to my blog properties do. More than 220 different visitors a day come to my blogs on the heels of search engine requests they made with Google. Most of them are attracted by titles of articles in my blogs. I cannot fathom why some blog authors turn off their titles. Failing to name a title reduces the rest of the content on Web pages to noise.
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DESIGN MUSEUM -- The Conran Foundation Collection opens next week at London's Design Museum. It's an exhibition that shows design is all around and some of my favourites make the lineup.
Catherine Roux -- "The Shape of Things" in The Guardian Weekend, 3 Jan 04.
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KILKENNY -- With a copy of the Saturday Guardian Weekend tucked underarm, I walked from Power's Newsagents to Earl's Bistro for an inside look the 78 page colour glossy. Like my day-long session with the Sunday edition of The New York Times, I enjoy scanning the advertisements as much as I like reading the articles. The first edition of the year portends a nice bounce in the UK because full page colour ads fill 21 pages of the magazine. Strong consumer markets increase the weight of the Weekend Guardian as the UK marketing machine has kept pushing product messages well after Christmas.
SCIENCE FRICTION -- Fellow journo David Stewart has evolved from UserLand to Typepad. "Shutting down isn't quite accurate," he writes. But he has transferred his blogging to Typeland (sic). "Radio Userland is a nice package but it was so temperamental." Yep. May his days of hassling with posts be gone forever. Now I wish he accepted trackbacks.
David Stewart -- "Happy New Year"
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MINDPLEX -- Like Jim Moore and John Robb, I think there's a small town mentality in the blogosphere. Here at Irish Typepad, I have a smattering of regular readers (no more than 35 different people out of the 180 daily visitors every day) and daily aggregator scrapings (just jumping above 300 screen scrapings from 60 different aggregators every day). What makes the blog like a small town is the memes that attract passersby--people use Google, Yahoo, Netscape, AOL and IOL when searching for information, pass through here to read a single story, then go on their business. They come here to hear another perspective on the Mars mission, Irish immigration or multimedia in general.
SILICON VALLEY -- Dan Gillmor opens his annual predictions quiz by listing four technologies, then he asks readers what will be the surprise consumer technology hit of 2004.
Dan Gillmor -- "Predicting 2004"
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EIREPRENEUR -- James Corbett puts social software dead-centre on his radar scope. It's a topic evangelised by Ross Mayfield and Matt Haughey. We teach the fundamentals of this important technology in our multimedia degree programme. James Corbett -- "The year of social software"
Matt Haughey -- "Colloquial mapping"
Ross Mayfield -- "Augmenting social interaction"
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CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- While I don't think any established expert group predicted the rise of the Celtic Tiger, several industry voices have forecast significant globalistic forces, such as the offshoring of programming, that are much more potent than the dotcom explosion that swept the country. These sentiments are bubbling up on Slashdot and being discussed by some Microsoft bloggers.
CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- I resolve to increase the efficiency of my weekly output and start my long distance running again which means throttling back Irish Typepad and diverting efforts to finishing several prime projects. I have listed those projects in a separate hard-backed journal because I feel I have more control of them when I can see them outlined on paper. The top priority is migrating from a pre-Y2K Windows laptop to an XP laptop with Radio installed. As Karlin has repeatedly demonstrated, this takes time. Nibbling away at my important projects and finishing some of them in the months ahead will provide me great satisfaction. I'll blog about that process since it attracts potential collaborators. But I expect that my daily blogging output will start to propagate as specific themes to other URLs, including Topgold and Underway in Ireland. x_ref1256
KILKENNY -- With all the M&Ms munched already but two bottles of Bailey's Cream waiting to be opened, three Mahers and one Goldbach spent New Year's Eve sitting around a blazing fire on New Year's Eve, making the evening one of the most pleasant celebrations I have enjoyed. I want to record where I was on New Year's Eve but some times I don't remember. I blame Guinness for that forgetfulness, what with all the brain cell damage from ingesting black stout.
So I want to revisit this blog and recall where I was on New Year's Eve in Ireland.
KILKENNY -- A noticeably thin Kilkenny People, emaciated by the lack of real estate advertisements, sits on the shelves on New Year's Day 2004, leading with a story about Christmas shopping.
CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- An energetic group of second year multimedia degree students have drafted ideas for an electronic yearbook and I need to constrain its development because of the time required to produce it. Their ideas are really impressive, especially their observations about how to manage the difficulty of the second year through an offering of a digital resource, like a yearbook. As Claire Griffin observes, "Any course in any college could have a yearbook but not necessarily a digital one."
BBC -- "The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work."
Sir Tim said he never expected his invention would lead to such an accolade. He created hypertext, which later became the glue that united millions who use the Internet today. The underlying code first let scientists easily share research findings across a computer network. In the early 1990s, it become the Worldwide Web and the fundamental element that hundreds of millions use as their mode of communication. BBC -- Web's inventor gets a knighthood"
Dave Winer
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Claire Griffin -- "All is quiet on News Years...Eve?"
CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- I'm rocketing around student assignments in the Media Studies curriculum and stumbled upon Claire Griffin who captures the moment in describing today as a quiet New Year's Eve. It sounds like Claire endured a momentous year, while developing an acerbic touch in writing about it.
Picture of Claire Griffin from the Media Studies Faceroll, taken with Fuji S602Z camera.x_ref125ms
SCRIPTING -- Say what you will about Dave Winer--he remains part of my Personal Early Warning System (PEWS) because he puts things on his blog that normally need to be on my radar scope. I moved Dave and my daily reads off the front of my blog as part of a rearrangement that will make my blog content friendlier for display on my Sony Clie PEG UX-50 and Nokia Communicator 9210i. I have discovered that if I read my daily list--something I do offline through SurfSaver--I have answers to questions before they appear from students in classes. That alone makes blogging a useful addition to the classroom culture. x_ref1256
CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- After my Sony Clie detected two hotspots in Clonmel in one short pass through pedestrianised areas, I realised Wi-Fi is not just another trendy blow-in and I wondered why those Wi-Fi zones couldn't be convinced to open up service to trusted customers--like journalists? If I could connect to a Wi-Fi access point, I would be able to file stories on the road--even from the courthouse itself. This would be really helpful and would collapse the time required to create a story. Also, the presence of Wi-Fi hotspots means there's a good potential for real-time reportage (or personalcasting as I call it in our media studies curriculum).
CE WINDOWS -- I think Microsoft will imitate Sony's design when it comes to delivering Windows to pockets. Microsoft is at least one generation behind with regards to an operating system that incorporates screen rotation and high resolution delivered by the Palm OS on my Sony Clie PEG UX-50. I believe the Clie is the form factor of pocket PCs for the next decade. Chris DeHerrera -- "What is in the future of Windows Mobile Pocket PCs?"
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CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- While visiting Lancaster, I found a small album containing photos taken by my aunt with her Brownie Camera. Seeing the images was as though I had found a portal into the 40s as America was fighting a war in Europe. I'm using printouts of the photo albums as part of a long distance correspondence with my aunt, who is now a retired nun, living in Manhattan.
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TANTEK -- More than a year ago, Tantek Çelik offered several specific ways that bloggers can handroll their content in ways that it becomes semantically rich. Simon Willison does this already. I should too. Tantek Çelik -- "Anorexic Anchors"
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CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- John Robb lists several trends (some stuff I'm already using) that we should expect to see in the mainstream in 2004.
John Robb -- "Booming Concepts"
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CLONMEL -- The biggest justification I have for a new laptop is my current workhorse does not have a Centrino chip inside. It used to be mandatory to upgrade when my laptop could not toggle between memory-hungry applications. Now that hardware capabilities are so far ahead of software requirements, I have stayed off the upgrade path and never missed a beat. The need for mobile computing changes all the ground rules.
KILKENNY -- Produce shelves in Kilkenny supermarkets provide a social welfare function. That's my conclusion as I watch elderly pensioners and bratty urchins help themselves to grapes, apples and pears at my local Dunnes Stores. They look over the fresh selections, grab something to munch, then walk around the shop while eating their choice.
I used to be appalled at this behaviour until I realised that it was very Darwinian. Fruits and vegetables have been responsible for about as many reported cases of food poisoning as beef, chicken, fish and eggs combined. But in Ireland's litigous society, some shoplifter is probably going to sue Superquinn for failing to wash its produce. Sent mail2blog using mail2blog O2 Typepad service.
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NYC -- One of the most unexpected things I saw in New York City was Yuri Gitman's Wi-Fi bicycle at the Union Square subway station. Gitman teaches at the Parson School of Design and he has figured out how to strap a Wi-Fi access point onto a bicycle. The bike sits at the top of stairs and sends a weak Wi-Fi signal down two levels to the N, R, Q, and W lines. The single installation sucks up battery power faster than a rack of boom boxes.
Gitman told the New York Times that New Yorkers need free Internet access in the subway and everywhere else. I don't know if the pasengers will expose their gear to this connectivity--you see many more laptops on Dublin's DART trains than you do in NYC subways. David Gallagher -- "Using a bicycle to uplink on a downtown platform" in The New York Times, 15 Dec 03
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KILKENNY -- Judging from the nine minutes I spent waiting for assistance when ringing O2 Customer Care (1909, +35361203501 or fax +35361203510), it sounds like the company did a fair amount of Christmas sales. I heard sales associates flogging cameraphones in every electronics shop I visited in December.
While waiting for help to activate O2 data services, I noted some useful numbers pertaining to O2.
KILKENNY -- Consecutive editions of The Kilkenny People have featured coverage of Saddam's capture. First, front page coverage was given to a local man who is stationed in Iraq. This week, it's nine inches in a letter to the editor bemoaning US foreign poicy concerning Saddam's capture.
Continue reading "International Politics in Kilkenny People " »
KILKENNY -- Thanks to flat screen monitors, affordable DSL and the presence of a hallway, Kilkenny now has a reasonably-priced Internet cafe. (Well, it's actually an Internet access point like it says above the shop.) It's run by Powers' Newsagent and it's prominently located in Johns Street just off the eastern approach to the well-known John's Bridge. You can access the Internet for €3 an hour, which means it's cheaper to check your mail now than it was in 1999. All the Irish broadsheets are at least 14% more expensive than in 1999. It's good there's value-added with easily available broadband.
FACT: All three of the flat screen PCs have Kazaa installed. That's news to Tim Power, the shop owner. It's old news for Yahoo, where more people looked for Kazaa than anything else on the Internet in 2003.
BBC -- "Music sharing tops file searches"
Sent mail2blog using Nokia Communicator Vodafone Typepad service.
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KILKENNY -- I teach a database course to third level students and although all of them have music collections, most have CDs, tapes, or MDs. Most of them have not been converted to digital media even though MP3s have become mainstream. Personal sound collections have become a bunch of 1s and 0s. They can be stored in any of the economical hard drive formats, on CDs, MDs and flash memory keys. These personal stores are likely to dangle from necks or be stuffed into backpacks alongside CDs swappped with friends. But at the moment, most of the personal stores of music I see while lecturing aren't MP3 collections--they're copies of CDs. And that should comfort the RIAA. x_ref125cc x_ref143db
BOTH FERGUS CASSIDY¹ and Matthew Magee² contribute to a full page in The Sunday Tribune that looks back on technology in 2003. [UPDATE: 10 March 2007. This blog ("Inside View") won "best Technology Blog" of 2007 at the Irish Blog Awards.]
SUNDAY TIMES -- The edifice of Irish "prosperity rests on a number of pillars. But the three most important are the buoyancy of the construction sector, the ability of domestic tourism to prosper and our capacity to attract inward investment which is higher up the value-added chain than was the case in the past." Damien Kiberd -- "Engine of economy feels the pressure" in The Sunday Times, 28 Dec 03
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SUNDAY TIMES -- In a full page story, The Sunday Times describes the work of three Irish entrepreneurs who have survived the dotcom era.
Douglas Dalby -- "Dotcom Superheroes" in Sunday Times, 28 Dec 03.
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TABLE TALK -- When in London, you might consider eating at a 4-star restaurant as evaluated by AA Gill.
AA Gill -- "Knife Work if you can get it" in Style, 28 Dec 03
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