Inside View from Ireland

Making a Good News Zone

MY MOLESKINE REMINDS ME that we should continue our discussion about setting up a Good News Zone in South Tipperary--an online community that connects businesses to each other through a flow of events, special offers and ideas that make money. I wrote the ideas down in my Moleskine during the first week of December. The ideas arise out of an evening run by the Clonmel Chamber with two dozen avid listeners. If we expect to deliver results, some of my thoughts will be endorsed by three or four MDs and we'll start exploring some content that could easily fold into an elegant community lifestream. I hope that community effort boosts web traffic, High Street footfall and domestic tourism for the local area. Here are a few things we're considering for our follow-up meeting.

Learning from Immersive Virtual Worlds

ONE OF THE MOST interesting discussions emerging from Limerick Open Coffee revolves around immersive virtual worlds for business and education. I have picked up some very innovative ideas from James Corbett and Keith Kennedy of Daynuv, two guys who have pointed out that I might not be seeing the impact that technology has on others. I spend more hours of each day working inside virtual worlds than working alongside people in the real world. Yet my connections to those in virtual space are often more sincere and meaningful than the casual small talk around the coffee pot. Where I work, people point out they track my Facebook banterings and my online tweets as evidence that I've got time on my hands to actually do things that benefit students.

It’s precisely because of some well-executed virtual experiences in online classrooms that I can see how technology can lift others to special places. But it's the special treatment that virtual worlds give to those in need that really impress me--people who need to be lifted from tragedy or illness. That’s part of the remit of the Puppet Portal Project, a creative use of art to address the effects of hospitalisation on children. I work with Helene Hugel, a world class puppeteer who was feted by Social Entrepreuers Ireland (in photo above left), watching her promote a sense of community and communication through creative activities. Some of those activities combine technology, connecting different hospital wards together with artists bringing artwork, puppetry, and storytelling together.

Pocket-Ready Mobile Searching

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I do a lot of searching for information while walking around shops. It's a lot easier to get quality information because of how Google Latitude behaves. Using my Nokia phone, I can get results related to “Near Me Now” and I can tell local businesses what they need to do when tweaking their online presence. Neither Latitude nor Google mobile search delivers real-time answers to my mobile phone. Real-time search involves Google crawling “live” content streams (blogs, news sites, Facebook pages, Jaiku posts, MySpace updates, and tweets. I also like using my phone to snap and use QR tags (bar codes last century) to find supplementary information. I don't like the way Google Voice Search burdens my phone. It seems to use a lot of main memory and that slows down the operation of several other features on my long-serving Nokia E90. Google Voice Search is better suited for a fifth edition Symbian phone, not my well-worn third edition Nokia.

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My No-Space Days

NO MATTER HOW HARD I try, I'm running out of space on my hard drive. It's a problem originating with Dropbox, the cloud-based storage program that I share with dozens of people. I have 50 GB of cloud space on Dropbox. Students have 2GB of swap space unless they back into my space directly. I'm using 20% of my allocation while students share files in my space (screenshot at left). Since this is the end of the term, students using Dropbox to chop and change audio projects end up dropping their work into my hard drive between editing sessions. And since an average file weighs more than 400 MB, I'm losing gigabytes of my local storage space as the files come and go through my C Drive. Even though it's a little annoying, it's worth the experience of seeing my Windows XP system tray bubble up with a stream of warnings about having "very low" storage space. My solution: remap my Dropbox storage space onto a pocket-sized terabyte drive and work away. My plan: ask students in next semester's Internet Social Networking module to write 1200 words about their shared space experience. Their cloud-based collaborative work has been one of the most beneficial unexpected by-products of first year third level creative multimedia.

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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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Phone Start-up Failed. Contact the Retailer.

YOU HAVEN'T STRESS-TESTED your phone--any phone--until you start getting messages like "Phone start-up failed. Contact the retailer." I ignored the message on my Nokia E90 for several days since I used a key-press routine to force the phone to boot back to its original settings. But I failed to consider three important side effects of overtaxing a mobile phone's memory.

Without main memory, you cannot back up your phone. For more than a fortnight, I failed to back up my main phone since the sync software was unable to execute a handhold to main memory. This was stupid on my behalf because I wasn't able to sync either to my Nokia back-up or to my desktop organizer. Why buy into a syncing routine if you're going to ignore the practise? It's a best practise and you cannot ignore backing up your phone.

Phone memory affects call handling. I failed to see that my phone was unable to direct weak calls into my voice mail. One of those calls, repeatedly attempted during times I was driving in weak signal coverage, was from my credit card fraud management team. They cut off my credit card as a precaution when my phone simply dropped them from reaching either me or my voice mail.

Phone in-box hides data when memory cannot page. For a little more than two weeks, I never knew when a new message arrived if I didn't feel the phone vibrate on a message arriving. Without main memory available, the unread message icon never illuminated and the only way I could see messages was to go into the inbox and page down for them.

All things considered, I'm happy with how my Nokia E90 behaved when out of main memory. I'm also happy knowing that I had all the short codes to revive the phone and I'm confident the phone has another year of daily use left in its lifespan before I retire it to the centre armrest of my car.

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Emergency Comms

IRELAND HAS experienced some of its worst flooding in 800 years and with the ravaging waters saturating the land, my thoughts turn to emergency communications. As a driver, I would have been served by road closures coming straight into my car radio like with German autobahn updates. Only two regional radio stations in my area use the technology that causes newer radios to boost their volumes when triggered by a critical minute of information. I don't understand why the Irish broadcast spectrum doesn't use the traffic advisory function (PTY on many car radios). Thousands of motorists would have been well-served by updates about road conditions, civil defence musterings and special services. On another note, I wonder if formalised and authenticated channels of communication exist between county engineers and semi-state agencies like the Electricity Supply Board. I raise the point because radio reports talk about Cork City Council being surprised by the hundreds of millions of tonnes of water bursting the banks of the River Lee--as though the relevant authorities weren't talking to each other. That's disconcerting, because citizens deserve the reassurance of knowing critical public safety actions are undertaken expeditiously. As someone who used to manage phone banks for aircraft emergencies, I became accustomed to working with authenticated messages nd dedicated hotlines. Listening to some local radio reports, it sounds lke voice mail and text messages facilitated part of the emergency actions. That doesn't sound right.

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Sent mail2blog using O2-Typepad Nokia E90 service while Foursquaring in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland.

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Networking on Screen for Events

BECAUSE THE FIRST SCREEN in my life is my laptop, I get most of my information about events and people through the online social networks where my eyes travel. I travel across blogs (using newsfeeds), Facebook (using a handrolled category called "baggage handlers"), LinkedIn (into the discussion groups) and Twitter (primarily with search terms). All four of these zones have a lot of noise, so I have to be ruthless in what I see and click. All four of these online social networks can be used efficiently to give some shape and colour to events like OpenCoffee, something Wannita is doing at right. If you're an event organiser, it would pay off to invite a knowledgeable blogger to your event. It's a lot easier to get the word out by asking someone who already has an audience to write clever things about your event. I'm prodded to attend events on Facebook as well and before I register an interest, I normally glance at who has indicated they're attending. I've restricted myself to attending fewer events in 2009 and suspect I will be even more selective in 2010. If I know I can hook up with friends while at an industry event, I'll let myself go. If I don't attend, I'll try to find photos from the event on Flickr. LinkedIn also has an RSVP system but I get greater value out of discussions that event managers start on LinkedIn--assuming those discussions actually map out onto the agendas of the upcoming events. Twitter can create a buzz about events through clever use of hashtags but unless I limit my flow of activity to the event hashtag and replies, I get very distracted during the event itself. That said, Twitter has helped me discover real connections at industry events while using my mobile phone to check newsfeeds, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Valuable social facilitation is happening through trusted online networks and I'm glad to be able to see ways on my screens to gather live information through those networks.

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Socnets Complement College Life

A FEW WEEKS AGO, college students in Tipperary Institute placed chairs and desks around common areas with descriptions of college societies. At the time, I thought passersby might have also enjoyed learning about the vibrant online societies that occupy students' time. While at my desk (video at right), I've seen several online networks that attract a lot of interest from our third level students. You can find more accurate information about student profiles--especially on Facebook--than by looking at profile information kept by the academic services unit in my college. Facebook's Tipperary Institute group is a virtual hive of activity with students showcasing scratch work as it evolves. Some of the artistic endeavours percolate over to Deviant Art and Flickr where a whole new circle of followers hibernates. Then there's the unofficial campus radio station, found by listening to playlists on Last.fm and Blip.fm. I'm a fan of several playlist collections that a dozen different students have cobbled together. All these online networks involve meaningful contact outside classroom hours and in my mind, they deserve recognition as parts of extracurricular college life.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service while Foursquaring in O Tuamas of Clonmel.

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When Active Citizens Spark

THE CONTINUED RESISTANCE of traditional managers in a wide cross-section of industries to ignore vibrant online social networking amazes me. At the highest levels of Irish government, the dismissive attitude comes close to incompetent public representation. Some managers, CEOs, and politicians don't think that hyper-connected snappy exchanges count in the matrix of public communications. In fact, they often want to use tax money to block, throttle or censor the avenues used by active citizens online. This is so wrong on some many levels. It's pig-ignorant and an example of professional misconduct to ignore active citizens who express themselves in online social networks.

Three years ago, when I first started poking around on Facebook and skimming through Twitterstreams, I heard the first snide comments about both of those social networks. Two years ago, when Tipperary Institute first started weaving social networking into an accredited creative multimedia degree, I had to defend my choice of networking tools (i.e., Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Flickr, Google Documents, Last.fm and Blip.fm) to students who were happy to live in a world of irregular e-mail. By mid-2009, only students older than 35 needed convincing about using community zones online. Most of them become avid members of online communities within a few weeks. Today, a third of new students check into their social networks on their phones.