Inside View from Ireland

In conversation with Heather James

TEMPLE BAR -- Heather James raises interesting issues about the limitations of technology with nontechnical community groups. Taking her research under consideration with anecdotal evidence we see in Tipperary points to a need to set down markers concerning the use of public money for online community groups.

Remodeling

KILKENNY -- It's always a bit traumatic when you strip things down in the real world and no less traumatic when scrubbing down a blog. I'm using part of the summer to spawn several distinct sections on the side of Irish Typepad, one for my classroom activities, another focused on items of interest from southeast Ireland, and a third being a speechwriter's corner. Those are the activities that pay my meal ticket and when I make them part of my work flow, everything gets accomplished more efficiently.

Student journo competition

MENTAL HEALTH IRELAND -- A national voluntary organisation promoting positive mental health has started searching for the journalists of tomorrow. MHI needs an editorial team for an online newspaper targeting teenagers and is offering Sony Mini Disc Recorders to prime the pump in a contest closing on June 25, 2004. The contest invites entries in the following categories:

• Photo Journalist
• Sports News
• Entertainment & Travel
• Health
• Cartoon Satirist
• Social, EU & International Youth News
• Environment & Education

1940s Telephone Manual

THERE ARE HANDY tips to be learned about voice inflection and telephone manner by thumbing through this 1940s telephone owner's manual. Some things are a little dated, such as "allow at least a minute for an answer." Do that with my numbers and you're in voice mail hell. Which is why this 1940s gem provides such a perfect snapshot of our times. Today, the only real voice you'll get for a phone call is probably one in an outsourced call centre overseas. Perhaps that's where this manual is being used today. We have operating instructions from over-sized American washing machines in the attic at home and the illustrations are just like the ones in this old telephone manual. I'm collecting snaps and scans for possible use at Pen & Pixel 2012.

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Contact Sheet -- "How to make friends by telephone"

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Lushe Power Search

SAY YOU HAVE hundreds of bookmarks that support an academic journey and that by visiting those bookmarks you will reach a higher level of understanding about sophisticated concepts. You could read and revise and learn. Or you could ask yourself questions in Google and let trusted authorities help form the answers. For that, you need Lushe.net. It allows you to easily build a list of your favourite sites, and then search only those sites using Google. This allows you to only search sites relevant to you and your interests.

So you could set up Lushe just to search the A-list bloggers. You populate your personal lushe cache by pressing a button in your links bar, thus adding a site to your list or access the search functionality. This is all done without leaving the page you are browsing, making things as simple and as easy to use as possible.

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Glen Murphy -- Lushe and other projects

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About eBay

SCOBLE -- Robert Scoble offers some useful facts about eBay.

Official terrorist list

CRYPTOME -- I must remember to clean out my Sony Clie and remove any surname on the official US government terrorist list.

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Cryptome -- "Alphabetical Listing of Blocked Persons" from the Federal Register.

Patent for online matchmaking

THE REGISTER -- I like AnotherFriend because it's a well-run place to meet people but US patent office might be constraining its online polls since awarding dating company eHarmony a patent covering online matchmaking.

People still sharing

NEW SCIENTIST -- As I can see in the microcosm in academia, the threat of fines or administrative action does little to stop Internet users around the world trading music and video files. We can see this in our multimedia labs and network analysts can tell this in studies of global traffic.

Blog-only news diet

STEVE RUBEL -- If you have ever wondered whether the blogging world is in touch with the real world, you could try turning off the real world for a while. It would be like entering the Big Brother House for a week. That's what Steve Rubel is doing. He will see how deeply inside the traditional media landscape the bloggers have gone because he's leaving all traditional newscasts and broadsheets behind for a week and subsisting on a news flow only from bloggers, beginning tomorrow.