Inside View

Don't Get Beboed

RED MUM has already warned about the dangers of the uber-popular site Bebo. Walking through Trinity while students are studying for exams, it's easy to assume that Bebo is a revision topic in several courses because no fewer than one in four computer screens showed Bebo activity when I glanced over shoulders. You're either in Bebo or you're a leper. And you don't have to make your own Bebo page because as Ray D'Arcy has discovered, you can merely cede your name to a fan and they will make up your identity from there. I've seen some Bebo profiles with identities that I am sure third level students will want to lose in the near future. The identities are real names, real pictures of drunken behaviour, half-naked cavorting, and general messing-around that might look good in a pyramid of pictures but in no way could be used as on a CV. The problem is that once your killer photo is linked to a big tribe in Bebo, that becomes your Google presence.

Sound education in your pocket

SEVERAL IRISH PODCASTERS got together today in The Clarence Hotel and discussed "sound education in your pocket". That's a conference topic at EdTech 2006 set for IT Sligo on 25-26 May. The Dublin coffee chat promises to evolve into a vidcast that will play on iTunes before the May conference which means the presentation will be generating international comments and questions as its Irish audience watches it for the first time in Sligo.

This collaborative presentation explains the pedagogical, social, and technological merits of podcasting in formal education in Ireland. The contributions will shape this presentation into a broad coverage of the current state of "Podcasting in Ireland" as well as an introduction to podcasting for listeners. The framework:

Net Neutrality

WHO COULD HAVE imagined the internet evolving as it has today? Who does not think well of the innovation and experimentation across the internet and the free market to handle the transactions s that enable those markets? What's wrong with the US Congress keeping its hands off the internet as it continues developing? I don't think it's smart to legislate neutrality of information packets because the legislation framing this concept of "net neutrality" cedes the FCC powers that it currently does not have.

Overheard in Thurles

WHILE SEATED in a Thurles restaurant, I overheard some interesting tidbits about rejuvenating industry in that town. Planning permission has been given to Centenary-Thurles Co-op for a EUR 10m biodiesel plant. This means farmers who grow rape seed would have an alternative income to replace sugar beet production.

Never bank from a cybercafe

THE BIGGEST SCAM I have personally watched unfold in Ireland involves installing keystroke-logging software on computers. It happened within 10 metres of me at least twice. In one occasion, a foreign national (not me) in a Dublin internet cafe opened a local log file and extracted keystroke data related to a credit card transaction. He also got some bank details. I know these things because after I reported the suspected incident, the owner called his tech support who later called me and confirmed they were increasing the frequency of their hard drive scans, installing Citrix software on top of the kiosks and putting CCTV cameras into positions that could record activities in the far corners of the venue. On another occasion, an industrious student installed keystroke logging on an instructor's work station which subsequently gave him access to staff assets. He then extracted exam papers which were password-protected. I spotted him running a Russian-made password breaking algorithm on four workstations simulataneously.

388 visitors every hour

YOU CAN NEVER put your faith in a single metric because if its measuring stick fails, you look stupid. If I believed Six Apart's statistics for this weblog, then I would be watching 388 visitors trample through this space every hour since midnight. I'd also be watching a blog whose average daily visitor count is decreasing. The correct numbers lie in a composite metric.

Best pics of NYC

MATHEW SPOLIN has some of the best images I have ever seen when visiting New York City, including amazing HDR images that capture some of the best high dynamic range of New Amsterdam.

---

x_ref125dp

Dublin Blogger Meetup 13 May

DAMIEN MULLEY proposes a blogger meet-up in Dublin on Saturday, 13 May. Details should be listed on upcoming.org as they develop. I'll be on Lake Powell with a cooler full of Coors in my kayak. Gotta find my sunscreen.

---

x_ref1256

Overhead in San Diego

FROM THE SOUNDS of it, we will be sharing the sky over San Diego with an Aurora aircraft in hypersonic flight. It's using Edwards AFB or Dreamland for flights, both day and night. The USAF needs a reconaissance aircraft capable of several times the speed of sound because sometimes you just cannot wait for another pass of the satellite. We will have our Sony ICD MX-20 set to voice-operated recording mode when walking San Diego, just in case.

---

Alex Roth -- "What's behind mysterious booms?"

x_ref267

Memeorandum Effect

LIKE TOM RAFTERY and Damien Mulley who have done this before, I discovered it's relatively simple to jump aboard the links at tech.memeorandum.com if you blog about an A-List URL on a weekend. After landing there on Sunday, I discovered that the link effect from Memeorandum is twice as strong as being linked from Twenty Major. I've toyed with the idea of running 20m.memeorandum.ie and it would self-populate around words and memes designed to make Twenty proud.

---

x_ref1256