Inside View from Ireland

Trusted VoIP

DUBLIN -- I'm building a directory of VoIP friends along with pointing out to people that fears of VoIP spam often over-reach the mark. The protection technologies wrapped around VoIP will protect users better than anti-virus technlogy protect e-mail systems.

Chief executive Donald Peterson of Avaya, which spun off from Lucent in 2000, says the future of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony -- as well as follow-on technologies such as SIP (session initiation protocol) -- will be based on knowledge embedded in the network itself:

In conversation with Neil Tanner

I SPENT THE EARLY afternoon chatting with Neil Tanner, Microsoft Ireland's Business Solutions Group Manager, about a topic he will present at the INBITE 04 conference, scheduled at the Tipperary Institute in Thurles on Thursday, November 18th. After the first few minutes, Tanner had me convinced that the "C" in CRM stood for "collaboration" instead of "customer". Tanner won't attempt to rewrite business textbooks on the definition of the CRM acronym but the business processes he shares with audiences suggest an important subtext in how CRM should be handled by SMEs. "Collaboration is actually the cornerstone." And well it should be.

Kilkenny People in court

KILKENNY -- One of the best reads in Ireland are the accounts of local court cases carried by the Kilkenny People. These gems appear this week:

Red Irish

DUBLIN -- Christmas ornaments have started appearing in shop windows, red leaves hang defiantly on tree branches and bight red garments adorn kids who are itemising their Christmas lists while also trying on Halloween costumes. It seems the Christmas sales season is creeping closer to the October bank holiday weekend. Where I grew up in the States, my Irish grandmother insisted it was not proper to begin thinking about Christmas until the last leaves had dropped from the trees. This led to many afternoons of leaf-picking while ostensibly creating an album of pressed leaves.

Podcasts help the little guy

GILLMOR GANG -- One of the goals of my Mass Communication and Culture course is to spotlight "Power to the People Technology" and for that reason we have focused on the exciting prospect that we will have a podcasting channel on our own. This means our efforts will reverberate across the internet and join some of the most diverse personalities who are trumpeting the benefits of podcasting. Our academic trail starts with understanding how to support enclosures in aggregators (important for dial-up users) and culminates with making podcasts that target study material for third year courses.

There are compelling reasons to learn podcasting. It opens up a wide swath of listeners for emerging bands. What blogging did for writing, podcasting can do for music. Once you know how to podcast, you can distribute stuff effortlessly and your potential listeners can download it effortlessly too. We are teaching how to bypass big media, produce our own content, send it to subscribers who will wake up with new MP3s on their iPod (or any MP3 player).

Beyond IRC

OPEN MEDIA -- While everybody understands the virtues of IRC, there are other options worth considering, such as Flash Meeting. Tim Kirby showed me this back in the days of Intellisign. He ran it on his desktop as an easily scaleable multi-party audio/video option that did cool things such as automatically record meetings for replay. The Knowledge Media Institute runs with it as part of the Open University courses. Downside: Flash. Upside: Flash.

Tiny Mix Tapes

TINY MIX TAPES -- Here's the deal: You post the Tiny Mix Tapes gang a style, genre, word, phrase, emotion, or whatever else, and if one of the mix tape robots fancies your suggestion, that crazy set of circuits might just make a mix tape out of it -- well, at least a tracklisting for a mix tape out of it.

Saving with Online Christmas Shopping

KILKENNY -- I've discovered I can get a lot of things without the hassle of crowds. When I walk to shops, I save money parking and driving. When I click into shops, I bank the transport savings plus I normally cut the 21% Irish tax from the transaction. It's not supposed to work that way but I have a year's worth of credit card transactions that show how all the mainstream online book vendors fail to charge tax. It doesn't matter if the main storefront has a taxman waiting in the shopping cart because the microvendors don't tack on tax.

Note to Claus

cLOGm -- I use my home broadband for exceptional journeys and today is no exception. I found Hugo (I think I got this right--that's the bunny above) and the Seekirchennet Radio playlist from Claus Meyer. And his playlist gave me more of The Streets than I get on Irish radio. That's cultural exchange, isn't it? When your own culture comes into clear focus through the eyes of visitors.

Ancient Greek Harry Potter

WSJ -- The Ancient Greek version of Harry Potter spent at least one day as the No. 1 seller on Amazon.com last summer. The translation is "probably the longest bit of Ancient Greek that's been put together for the last few hundred years," notes Andrew Wilson, the retired British secondary-school teacher who translated Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone into the language of Plato.

The book includes the ancient Greek words for "Hogwarts" (Hyogoetou)and "Quidditch" (ikarosphairike), both coined by the translator who "did it for the money."

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JK Rowling -- Hareios Poter Kai he tou Philosophou Lithos (ISBN 158234826X) is reviewed by Brian Carey in "An Ancient Greek Potter" on the "Opinion" page of The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2004.
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