Inside View from Ireland

Wisdom of Crowds

KILKENNY -- After scanning a few pub reviews done by Eoin James, I thought it would be an effective show of the power of blogging if five or more Irish bloggers deep-linked and tracked back to several of the reviews. If done correctly, publicans and hoteliers would quickly notice that the Irish customers who can write online will affect the rating of an establishment more dramatically than the paid inclusion in a travel guide.

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Unlike other Irish blogs, Rymus has a pub review category.   
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Copyleft Retorts

CES -- Leave it to blogs to pick up on an otherwise under-reported story about Bill Gates railing against Creative Commons Copyrights.

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Xeni Jardin -- "More Gates 'Copyleft = Commies' propaganda"
Seen by IrishEyes -- "Copyleft Commies"
Bonus Link: tamaki's looking-at-feet
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Grand Tetons

DUBLIN -- Paging through The Lost Continent in Easons, I laughed at Bill Bryson's description of part of America deeply revered by my parents. They don't speak French but Bryson does. He writes:

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there's another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That's an interesting fact -- a topographical tit-bit, so to speak -- that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in eight grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I'd known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn't button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

Who gets your files when you die

UNDERWAY -- I overheard an interesting conversation between two college students on the Waterford-Dublin train that cuts to the quick of several articles written by Karlin Lillington on electronic privacy.

"What if you had been swept away by the tsunami? Like, what would've happened to all those pictures you have of us? Could I get them back?

Friday News

UNDERWAY -- Quick looks through the Irish Examiner and The Irish Times shows the Indian Ocean tsunami is lapping into Irish homes. It's also lapping all over the viral videos and has trumpted "Poop Valhalla".

Anne Hayden writes "Irish rush to adopt tsunami orphans." Several journalists are tracing attempts to improve tsunami early warning systems. The Examiner's top-of-page "Quake Disaster" item profiles the volunteer effort of Eastway Logistics in Limerick to send hygiene hampers to Sri Lanka. Details on +353 61 411212.

Some other articles in the Friday papers reported items of interest.

When cameraphones meet Flickr

TEMPLE BAR -- Three weeks into my Sony Ericsson S700i road test, I have discovered some interesting things that were not possible in a cameraphone review I did one year ago. The most interesting thing is in the sweet spot that exists where cameraphones intersect Flickr. Searching for "S700i" as a tag on Flickr images takes me into an elite world (or at least shows me holiday destinations worth craving).  Dervala Hanley heard Clay Shirky describe another Flickr overlay. It happens when NYU students Flickrize whiteboard images or make macro shots of post-it notes. Those little bits of one's digital life can attract the attention of friends faster than an e-mail because many people monitor Flickr photostreams more intently than they manage their e-mail. And why not? At the moment, Flickr photostreams are rarely objectionable, always diverse and many times more inspirational than e-mail. Most people prefer pictures over text and that is what Flickr serves. 

In the bubble

UNDERWAY -- My bubble just got bigger because I have totally shielded myself from the traveling public with a set of Beyerdynamic headphones attached to my new iPod. Fatboy Slim helped me out of Kilkenny, Jack L took me through County Carlow, and Gwen Stefani ensured I did not have to acknowledge Athy as we slithered through its environs. Kildare brings Scissors Sisters who will carry me into Dublin with their own iTunes selections as well as cuts from their Top 10 listings. This is the only way to travel underway in Ireland when you need to get things read, written and reviewed.

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Thanks, Tim Kirby and Mike Kiely! And a big hug to Ruth!
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Note to Esat BT

DUBLIN -- An Open Note to Esat BT:

1. Please appoint an expert panel to provide a sanity check to your award winners at the Young Scientist Exhibition. In recent memory, two prize winners have been overhyped and that does not impress the world.
2. Please make your wireless hotspot  open to users in the standing-room area of your exposition booth. You can solicit the users easily with a pitch while they pull down the internet over your bandwidth and the world benefits from your generous show of faith.
3. Please commission a DVD of the Young Scientists Exhibition because there's a pent-up interest in that product.

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Referrer trends

KILKENNY -- You can learn from those who visit in search of other things. In the case of this blog, my early 2005 visitors are looking for things that reflect the pulse of the industry and the interests of consumers. I think some of my top 10 topics would make good fodder for upcoming articles in the Irish Examiner's technology section and for Electric News. Here's a Top 10 listing of referrers to Irish Eyes that generate most of the look-ins among this site's 2000 daily visitors.

Profanisaurus

CLONMEL -- My profanisaurus has gained another chapter, thanks to the work of Ian Mannion. Ian is preparing an exhibit for the Cook 2005 event, deriving work from sometimes pornographic and delusionary materials. There are plenty of samples to choose from. Along the way, Ian's downloads have created reams of log files that document his transgressions. It appears he is on a collision course with academic and company policy concerning acceptable use of internet resources. No matter how this plays out, his case provides a fascinating glimpse at academic life in the early 21st century.

BitTorrent for TV

HANDELAAR -- I stepped away from this blog for five days and most of the 2000 people visiting each day wanted to know about BitTorrent search engines. Imagine their delight if they could tap into BitTorrent for television.

John Handelaar speculates that it might be

(F)ull of relays of live sports, movie channels, cable pr0n and all other kinds of infringements when (if) it launches on schedule in about a month’s time. Shortly after that, there’ll be homebrew versions of the above as people figure out how to make a channel by making a looping playlist from from their TiVo recordings and downloaded torrent files.

Shortly after *that*, it gets interesting as the required ’substantial non-infringing uses’ get underway with community and college radio and TV channels, some of them brand new. Home appliances which can view these new channels. Auto-downloading plugins for Windows Media Player and RealPlayer/QT.

Berlin Travelogue

BERLIN -- Within a few weeks, I will have spawned all my images from Berlin 2005 onto Flickr and Typepad. Our five days in Germany's capital city flew along quickly even though the first week of January is more like an extended siesta period for Germans. Some things that we snapped:

S700i mail client

BERLIN -- It is easier to send mail2blog from Berlin than from Dublin. It seems that O2 Deutschland sends settings that help GPRS data users. That is a story for another day.

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Granny Tech

BERLIN -- You know technology is mainstream when you see pre-teens taking their grannies through the steps of Flickrising their cameraphone images. In Berlin's Sony Centre you can buy a €200 Sony Ericsson phone with megapixel camera. The local network sends you the applicable network settings as an SMS text message. You point the camera at your subject and snap away. Then without cables, scanning or a computer, you send your image to Flickr. This isn't as simple as one-push sending but it's nearly that simple. That's what Oma seemed to be telling her 12-year old who had everything sorted out for her at the counter. "Flickr macht Foto-Spass fur alles."  Point-click-share has arrived and will be sustained by generations across families.

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Ross Mayfield -- "Family Tech Support"
Bernie Goldbach's Flickr photos
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