Inside View from Ireland

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.