Inside View from Ireland

Feed on Feeds

FREENEWS HAS TAUGHT me some important facts about reading the news. First, having a news aggregator in your pocket is great fun. Second, if you feed on feeds and often updating all your regular sources once an hour, you will pay in terms of reading and sometimes in terms of real money to your network provider. Third, a good news aggregator like FreeNews keeps me in sync with Irish talking points.

For those who don't have the interest in a mobile phone newsreader, there's much the same power in Feed on Feeds--a server-side news aggregator solves this. Feed on Feeds keeps track of what items you've read, and keeps refreshing your feeds while you're away. You can see your feeds by scanning your personalised web page. The Feed on Feeds team explains:

On the phone with Scoble

UPDATE: Robert Scoble is speaking in Cork at the end of November. And in Dublin at the beginning of December. And on the pages of the Irish Examiner in late October.

ONE THING I can learn after a phone conversation with Robert Scoble: how to sound enthusiastic. I lost my OTT American telebubbliness sometime during the eight years I lived in Germany. While talking to Scoble, he enthusiastically shared three main points with me.

Minus 42 and counting

CHRISTMAS MUSIC in Dublin's Westbury Mall reminds me that only 10 shopping weeks remain until Christmas. And on my caleedar, only 42 days until we move into our new home in Cashel. In the meantime, we are burning no heating oil in our rental accommodation. Note to ecowarriors: Please keep mild evenings on the Irish calendar for another month.

Another month of pocket feeds below 100

UPDATED: I read 15 MB of newsfeed text on my mobile phone every month. I get no advertisements and no images when using FreeNews.

MY MOBILE FEED diet continues costing me less than EUR 100 a month. That is the fee charged me by O2 for GPRS data each month and most of the 15 MB of data I read on my SE910i is comprised of newsfeeds. I have 80 newsfeeds on my phone because I can read those 80 during dead time on public transport while they are still fresh. If I subscribe to more than those 80, I end up paying for unread news and my data costs exceed EUR 80 per month. For the record, the Boing Boing feed costs me most. The Digg feed provides me best value, with little of noise endemic to Slashdot.

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I read this blog with FreeNews ver.1.0.3.

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Your stuff and your mix

TWO ABSOLUTES of Web 2.0, according to Tantek Celik of Technorati:

1. You control your own data. You should be able to move it around, mix and match data services.
2. Data sits in open data formats and works with open protocols. It should be web-friendly, easily downloadable, and highly interoperable.

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J.D. Lasica -- "Web 2.0 Day 1"

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Scoble in Ireland

LIKE MANY OTHERS, I am interested in getting a sneak peek of Robert Scoble in Ireland. I have an ulterior motive because I want to write about his visit fot the Irish Examiner. So my leading question: why not assume that Scoble's three main points will be the three most passionate soapbox issues that he raises on Scobelizer.com? Well, that search would be shallow since he only converted to that URL. I want to know what drives the Scoble soapbox so that means knowing what fodder Scoble examines when compiling his posts. What information is he hoovering--key phrases, memes and products? Tell me those and I could point to the passionate posts that will germinate on the back of that info fodder. So I will queue like many others and form my conclusions. And here's the cool part: Scoble's hoover will find this post before I wake up tomorrow. He might even respond on his blog, answer my leading question and just about write my article for me. The two-way web is good that way.

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Scobleizer is the URL of Robert Scoble's new blog at scobleizer.wordpress.com/. His RSS: http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/
Bonus Link: Tom Raftery -- "Scoble switches to WordPress"
Sent mail2blog using SE910i and O2 Typepad.

Best sound to the Net

FRIENDS FORMERLY FROM BUSY BEE pointed me to a Norwegian radio program called Kurer, in which Tilman Hartenstein, a project manager at Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK (the RTE of Norway), recently claimed that the internet may become the only space left for hi-fi and surround sound radio.

VJ Software

VJ SOFTWARE from Resident Alien gives me some quality content for black plasma screens around club venues. The software includes two products:

• The Club Visuals DVD Series containing 60 minutes of riveting visual loops that play from any DVD player--all without software. There are five different DVDs available.
• The VJ Pro Video Loop Series comes packages as two volumes of video loops. I got mine via electronic download. We've run it in clubbing circuits with no computer support. It runs straight from DVD.

Sharing blocklists

THOSE RUNNING IRISHBLOGS should consider sharing their blocklists. I block more than 600 IPs from commenting here at the moment, inheriting 80 of those IPs from others. Could we start a shared document, perhaps with Writely, that pools intel from other bloggers about IPs that they block? Links to that document could point from the Irishblogs group on Yahoo! The collaborative process should reduce the incidence of comment spam.

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Writely is where I have started a public record of my blocked IP addresses. It's a collaborative document.

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Dangerous Always-On Skype

MY MOBILE phone is the weakest link in my Skype world. Using Skype's newest client (ver 1.4.0.71), I've forwarded my Skype services (normal Skype as well as SkypeIn)   to my mobile phone. In doing so, I have exposed a significant weakness--mobile phone signal coverage in my residence. When I go offline at work, I normally submerge for more than 14 hours. When submerged, I can read things but I rarely speak to anyone electronically unless by SMS text. With SkypeIn pushed to my mobile, the only way I have sacred time is to switch off the phone.