Inside View

Go away it gets better

LAUNCHCAST -- I spent the past 30 days plugged into iTunes and only meandered back to Yahoo Launchcast by accident where I was met by most of the tracks I had rated with five stars. That normally doesn't happen for me so my ears are ringing with overboost. Yahoo does a better job of staying within my available CPU cycles than Real Player or iTunes. The iPod is fine for listening but there is a world of shuffle space on My Yahoo Launchcast and I like that as much as I like my own iTunes.

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My Launchcast station is too pop. Whatever. U2 is Pop. Got to get over-the-headphones without bass distortion.
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Google Wikipedia

WIKIPEDIA -- Google has offered to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects. They are talking about the terms and condition on the Wikimedia board and on the developer committee mailing list. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

14 points of facism

SECULAR HUMANISM -- In "Fascism Anyone?," Laurence Britt identifies 14 characteristics common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism.". Parallels exist with the Bush Administration.

Open Note to Robin O'Brien-Lynch

UPDATE 3 JULY 2005 -- I've chatted with Robin twice since his article published in the Irish Times and know he's not an Orlowski-styled blog basher. I think we'll see more items on blogging in the future from him that give a broader perspective to blogging in Ireland.

IRISH TIMES -- There are problems with an article written by Robin O'Brien-Lynch in the Irish Times (my fav Irish broadsheet) and I think they should be talking points for a gathering of Irish bloggers on Saturday 16 April in Dublin's Irish Film Institute. I am especially curious about the research methods used to produce the article, how the author informed his judgment and the focus on which the article was commissioned.

Serving 50000 per month

IRISH.TYPEPAD -- Six Apart has served me well since I jumped aboard Typepad in July 2003 on the advice of James Corbett. After my monthly service data showed I was shifting more than 10 gigs of traffic, I started combing through the logs to see the trend lines. They show that I have passed the 500,000 page mark after 19 months for the stuff I maintain on Typepad alone. (I have archival stuff on Radio and Blogger that attract around 200 people a day.) At the current rate, I am serving more than 50,000 HTML pages a month from Typepad servers, complemented by more than 20,000 image files each month from another server farm that does not count against my Typepad transfer rate. Multiply the Typepad HTML pages served by eight and you have the number of RSS feeds served per month. These data do not count the 404 pages served up. This is remarkable performance, delivered at four-nines reliability for less than $12 a month. And what are the people visiting?

In conversation with Mark O'Kelly

MAVIS -- Dublin-born painter Mark O'Kelly visited Studio Six in Temple Bar to talk about his practise. His show at the Limerick City Gallery of Art surveys his work from 1998 to the present day, in which the use of photographic source material is central.

Friday Filings

EXAMINER -- Today's Irish Examiner includes some very interesting filings. We will ignore yet-another-story-about-Irish-blogging that is running in the Irish Times..

Campus Companies start with BIQ

UNDERWAY -- John Gehl followed me onto the early morning bus and reminded me about Business Intelligence Quotient (BIQ). It is an important conncept for several sharp students who are thinking about staring their own campus company.

Still standing, Dad

LANCASTER -- George Francis Goldbach passed away on February 11, 2003 after a 10-year battle with prostrate cancer. If I were able to visit his grave today, I would carry with me words clipped by Euan Semple from Mary Frye. They gave me solace when I first read them and will remain with the Mass card that I save from dad's funeral.

Rise of Intermediation

EXAMINER -- After years of password-protected content, some mainstream newspapers have realised the potential of their online archives. It isn't that the subscription system is hopelessly broken. Instead, a healthy stream of new revenue offers business managers a compelling alternative to their "walled garden" model—if their archives are open to all comers. If adopted by the Old Guard of Irish newspapers, this philosophy could result in a cacophony of new viewers for the top tier of Irish publishing.