Inside View from Ireland

Podcasts play on my dictaphone

TECHNOLOGY EARNS a gold star in my book if it has more than one use. So when I discovered my newly-purchased (€260) Sony ICD-MX20 could play podcasts, I was happy to know I had acquired an alternative to an iPod. I know it's unfair to allege the ICD-MX20 can double as an iPod because it doesn't do all the cool shuffle, scrub, and playlist things. But it records better and it lines in, lines out, swaps out AAA batteries, handles removeable memory quickly, and records in stereo with a thumb-sized mic set. I also found it automagically converts MP3 and WAV files to its native format without apparent loss of quality. Gorillaz "Re-Hash" from my "music" folder is lining my earbuds as I type this.

Have you signed the data retention petition?

IF YOUR LIFE depends upon conscientious handling of digital data, you should consider signing the EDRI data retention petition at http://www.dataretentionisnosolution.com/

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Sony Digital Voice Recorder in the Classroom

WE USE SEVERAL flavours of the Sony Digital Voice Recorder in our college classrooms at Tipperary Institute. For three years, the small devices served as dictaphones from student seats. Two students have grown confident in their use so they position the discrete recorders up front or at the lecturer's position. If asked, I snap my 6" Sony ECM-MS957 microphone into student recorders because sound quality improves immensely. The biggest shift in use of digital recordings has happened up front--we now use the IC recorders to play pre-recorded tracks over classroom sound systems. This has piqued interest from some unexpected corners of the internet.

Spotted in referrers

REFERRERS EDUCATE me, especially when they come in swarms of 10,000 page loads a week. Today I learned:

• Cartoon Saloon is cartoon-asdl.adsl.esat.net (193.120.103.218).
• People like old Guinness advertisements.
• Mobile video is about to explode.
• More people are looking for iPorn than motoPorn.
• This works because F-Secure says so: Putting $sys$ in front of a file name like a CD burning program makes Sony's DRM software hide the file. This means other DRM programs that try to detect CD burning programs on your computer won't be able to see it either.
• People like reading old manuals for things like telephones and washing machines. You should save your stuff for your grandchildren.
• NetVibes shows photos from Flickr faster than Flickr's Flash interface shows the photos.
• Of all the 21st century technologies discussed on my blog, the one most-searched concerns call centres. On a related note, the first cold call I got over Skype was from someone selling Boston t-shirts.
• When people land on this blog looking for t-shirts, they normally want Dublin Fire Brigade t-shirts. The most popular item of attire searched for here: thongs. Some guy (had to be a guy) came looking for "thesis on thong".
• There are five times as many references to "Irish Barbie" than "Irish Bernie" in the search engines.
• I record more searches on this blog for Ryanair than for Aer Lingus. "Kilkenny" is the most commonly searched-for destination. I used to live there and blogged about that.

French bloggers arrested

FRENCH POLICE ARRESTED three bloggers who used the Skyblog service to incite riots. They used the Skyblogs to call for violence and riots and suggested ways people could take action in the streets by burning cars and schools. Police read the blogs and arrested the bloggers. I modified a related blog posting after an IM visitor told me that the French translation could be taken as an excuse for mayhem in the streets.

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Yahoo! -- "Trois Arrestations Pour Incitation à l'émeute sur blog"
Loic Le Meur -- "Three bloggers arrested by police"
Joi Ito -- "Bloggers investigated for inciting Paris riots"
Seen by IrishEyes -- "Baghdad on the Seine"

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Inside View on IBM Blogging

YOU CAN LEARN a lot about best practice in business by watching IBM at work. One of the most productive initiatives on the IBM landscape at the moment is its use of blogging in business. Big Blue started with employees blogging on the intranet and now it's become blogging with customers, investors and blogging about the future. Philippe Borremans, responsible for IBM's European blogging initiatives, shared some of his thoughts about these devleopments in a podcast we recorded in the Tipperary Institute Skunkworks.

Netvibes First Look

AFTER WATCHING a steady trickle of visitors coming from NetVibes, I set up a dashboard for myself. Set-up was quick. Thumbing through price points for gadgets and through photostreams is faster on NetVibes than in similar albums run on Yahoo! I've started using these free digital dashboards as theme parks for niche topics. For example, my Netvibes zone tells me about ways to tinker with technology. I've given mine over to monitoring Make and its friends.

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Dulchies

WHILE SITTING INSIDE the Rock of Cashel last night, in the former dormitory of the Archbishop's choir, I overheard snippets of conversation that reminded me I am living among culchies. Fact is, most of the twentysomething culchies in my life follow a path to The Big Smoke where they intermingle with "dulchies". That's the term used by David McWilliams.

Baghdad on the Seine

UPDATE: 10 November 2005 from Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland: My original report was wrong to suggest that DEBKAfile offers a balanced perspective. As readers point out below, I failed to cite blogs from LeMonde, Liberation, Skyblog and others that would have offered the facts that appeared to be glossed over in reports viewed by me in Ireland. I've revised this posting to correct the initial errors but I need to revisit the story after trawling blog sources in French. That's tough going for me since I don't know the language.

PARIS, THE SHORT FORM of Baghdad-on-the-Seine, currently epitomises the Burning Cars Intifada. This new intifada has tossed a country into the flames. The national television station France 3 follows a typically French track--they often don't announce the number of burnt-out cars. For the record, more than 9000 police cars have been stoned since January 2005. You cannot depend on English language reporters to explain the simmering behind the current tensions. You have to look at sources like DEBKAfile LeMonde blogs for the straight story.

IBM's Blogging Guidelines

GUIDELINES FOR BLOGGING often challenge large corporations so it's informative to read "IBM's Guidelines for Blogging" and to know they evolved from an Open Source wiki populated by employees.