Inside View

How foreigners feel about Ireland

A VISITOR asked Google, "How do the Irish people make foreigners feel when they come to Ireland?" Google has more than a million answers but two bloggers finish at the top of the search engine results. One of them is Twenty Major. The third result is Indymedia. If you read blogs, you know the story of the 1000 Welcomes is told differently by members of the online community.

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Opinions, Connections, Conversations

WHEN I HANDED over my Irish census form, I wondered if five years from now the broadband question will be replaced by a blog question. "Do you have a blog?" Sabeer Bhatia, the inventor of Hotmail, says, "Just as everybody has an e-mail account today, everybody will have a blog in five years." He's put his finger on something that is true about talkative Ireland. In talkative Ireland, everybody has a right to have an opinion expressed to Joe Duffy. In the Bebo Republic of Ireland, people have an uncontrollable urge to connect and converse with others. This is such a basic urge that many consider it to be a basic right. If this is true, then RTE journalism needs to be as much about feedback as it is about presentation. Census takers in five years' time might be asking through which URL we take our news because many analysts believe once more than half of the population is served by broadband, people will start moving from broadcast information to broadband information. Making the move gives you access to a place where you enjoy the conversational side of the news. If you're reading this online, you're there already.

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Nokia Podcasting Software Means S60 v3

IF YOU WANT podcasts delivered directly to your Nokia phone, you should have a flat data charge package or a wi-fi S60 phone. Above all else, you need the third edition of a Nokia Series 60 phone. This means the Nokia N80 instad of the N70 (although the N71 might be a S60 Third Edition device). Phones running the Third Edition of the S60 (formerly Series 60) smartphone platform use Symbian OS version 9. Previous versions of Series 60 were based on Symbian 8, which is not binary-compatible. That means software applications written for previous versions of Series 60 probably won't work on phones with the new S60 Third Edition.

Real Italian

WHILE LIVING in Kilkenny, we ate at Italian Connection at least once a month because of its authentic Italian cuisine.  You can get this same authenticity Italian treatment at Dunne & Crescenzi, the Dublin coffee stop I frequent. When visiting Sicily, we noted the things you would never find on an Italian pizza plus we discovered the Italians have stricter animal care laws than the Irish. Some other very Italian things.

Most influential delicious

NEW SOCIAL networking features at del.icio.us means you can set up a "network" page (like a page filled with those tagging "irishblogs") that shows all links from other Irish del.icio.us accounts that you want to track. The network tab lets you easily share links inside your network with a single-click. You can get all these things by individually setting up query strings as RSS feeds. Brady Forrest is "subscribed to the feeds of several delicious users in my RSS reader and I've been able to send people links using the 'for:' tag".

Feed Henry

AT THURSDAY'S Web 2.0 event in Dublin, TSSG wouldn't say much about Henry. "What we can say is that it is a system for feeds (RSS, Atom etc.) which aims to make your reading list work as it should from wherever you read it, on any device and with any client". To make the cloud more relevant, Henry needs to be sitting on relevant feeds. If you have a feed others should read, enter your feed's URL and feed Henry. If you don't but you're interested in this idea, you should tell TSSG your name and e-mail address and you'll get more stuff when Henry goes live.

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Bonus Link: Paul Watson's Flickr contact list. It contains more names than any Bebo listing I've seen.

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100m on Skype

SKYPE, the fastest-growing Internet communication service in the world, notched up its 100,000,000th user today and because the service has proven to be robust, it's the one my mom uses to call me from the States to Ireland. Mom does not have a computer. She pays nothing for the call. She rings my SkypeIn number. You can get Skype in 27 languages. I've never seen more than 3.7m people online with Skype at any one time and I'm starting to think that some of the 100m users are SkypeIn accounts. If 100m Skype IDs exist, it's remarkable that so few of them are online at once. That's what Jaanus seems to say in his comment on Wagstaff's post.

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Jeremy Wagstaff -- "Skype's 100 Million: Where the Hell Are They?"

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Things to Do in Ireland

DOWN THE PUB after the end of the academic term, I snapped some shots and then watched electronic visitors arrive looking for "things to do in Ireland" so if that's you, look at the pictures because that's the real story.

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Ireland April-May 2006 and in the Ireland photostream at http://www.flickr.com/groups/ireland/pool/

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Post of the Day

MARC CANTER serves up the post of the day by describing the context of convergence. Marc is speaking at Enterprise Ireland's Web 2.0 conference. I snapped Marc on the streets of Dublin and told him that if his Nokia phone and my N70 were toothing, Zonetag would mark his photo with our context data. In his post, Marc takes the concept of context into sitting rooms, cars, and lifestyles. He says, "If you get the context right, you'll have a pretty good chance of surviving."

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Marc Canter -- "It's the context"

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Damien Mulley wants a widget

MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPERS at Tipperary Institute have built various web page widgets before and some are looking at a request made by Damien Mulley. Damien reads what's in the gutters of blogs--like blogrolls. You can often tell what informs someone's judgment by what's in the gutter of the blog. While I think public blogrolls are so 2002, it would be interesting to see a pop-up window that presents a thumbnail of the linked blog, a concise statement about the blog and the titles of the latest posts on that blog. I think Bilal has code that does some of this already.

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Damien Mulley -- "Build me this blogroll widget thing"

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