Inside View from Ireland

Irish Times on Podcasting

BERNICE HARRISON headlines her weekly "Radio Review" with podcasting but in her first-brush coverage she fails to point readers to either the world's most popular solo podcaster or to Ireland's senior podcaster. Harrison mistakenly equates podcasting to broadcasting and her brief article cites podcasts unlikely to be in any Irish MP3 collection. It's tiring to read journos reporting on journos in a simple, documentary way. There's more to a critique than a rehash.

The Google Story

I PERSONALISED GOOGLE (google.com/ig) when I spotted 10 or 12 daily referrers from that URL who visited my blog. After using it for a while, I discovered I was like Ari Patrinos, the scientist portrayed in The Google Story who turns to Google an estimated 50 to 100 times daily. By providing helpful responses to searches, Google helps Patrinos develop clean, renewable power. As David Vines explains in The Google Story, Google is well on its way to facilitating electronic search in genetics. I have Googled for info on my family's history of cancer and have often wondered what I would find if I could add DNA info to my search string. Apparently, that kind of search is an active Google project, one allied with the Washington-based Genetic Alliance.

Happy 21st, Misty

IN A WARM APARTMENT tucked close to the campus of Northern Arizona University, daughter Misty turns 21 today. To be accurate, her exact birthdate would be just before she awakens in Flagstaff since that would be around 9 AM in South Carolina, the place where she first breathed air. I'm undisputably tied to my youngest daughter in a side-by-side lineup and wish I could be in the States this weekend to observe her 21st. Better yet, I wish she was in Ireland for the weekend because turning 21 in Ireland is more momentous than any other event in most college student's lives.

Happy Birthday, baby girl!

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Best Musicphone

IF YOU LIKE to take your music in your pocket, then your mobile phone wish list should include the Sony Ericsson W800i. In my experience, the Walkman phone runs with easily managed removeable media sticks. After using the phone for a month, it started to feel easier to drag and drop music tracks through Windows Explorer rather than use Sony’s music management program. In fact, it’s faster to transfer tracks to the Walkman phone than to use iTunes to manage the iPod’s music collection. This is a big deal because it means you’re not trapped using a company’s media format when playing back content on a Walkman phone. All you have to know is how to rip your tracks to MP3 and then how to select them and drop them onto a memory stick.

Lillington on Scoble

KARLIN LILLINGTON chatted with Robert Scoble in a telephone interview that comes full circle. "An evangelist's role inside a company is to help software developers build software . . . A good evangelist is really a good listener. But then, a good blogger is really a good listener," Scoble said in a piece carried inside today's Technology section of The Irish Times on the run-up to the IT@Cork Annual Conference. The article is buried behind a costwall. The main points are being batted around by Irishblogs.

The End of Process

I HAVE FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE in the "process of innovation" including many years sitting in discussions where I worked on annual budgets exceeding $25m. Like Ross Mayfield, I often noted how "organizations are trapped in a spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency". This happens for many of the same reasons. "Workers are given firm guidelines," Mayfield says, "and are trained to only draw within them. Managers have the false belief engineered process and hoarding information is a substitute for good leadership. Processes fail and silos persist despite dysfunctional matrices. Executives are so far removed from exceptions and objections that all they get are carefully packaged reports of good news and numbers that reveal the bad when it's too late".

Euan Semple extracts a few paragraphs from Mayfield that I cite below. As a quick trawl of Google shows, there are health care practitioners who think a guideline is a process.

The Wikipedia Preference

WIKIPEDIA gets two billion page views every month. That is more page activity than the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and USA Today combined. Wikipedia could have interesting touristic impacts, especially considering that my new hometown is considered a "stub".

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via Terence Smith through JD Lasica.

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Is IRMA Listening?

IRISH NEWS EDITORS gratuitiously ceded column inches to the Irish Irish Recorded Music Associatin (IRMA) when it blitzed mainstream media with an announcement that it intends to threaten 50 individuals and companies with demands for payments related to alleged damages for losses they claim have been caused by these people making files available for download. This specious action, devoid of facts, follows a tactic used to rile music consumers last April. It is more bluster than action.

Google Analytics

WHAT AMAZED me more than the sheer (free) power of Google Analytics is that the system knew me when I arrived. My laptop signed into the system without my intervention. That's a scary reach of web technology. Or a lack of security-awareness in the way I handle my local passwords.

Slugger in g2

THE GUARDIAN cites Mick Fealty as part of "the new commentariat ... Britain's most influential political bloggers."

Exerting influence as a member of this new commentariat is not just a matter of how many readers one attracts; it's a question of which ones. "The freakiest thing is when you hear [a prominent commentator or politician] quote back a line or phrase that you've written, or something from a text you've brought to light," notes Mick Fealty, who runs the non-partisan blog Slugger O'Toole, covering Northern Irish politics. "Just last weekend, I read a whole sentence, in an editorial in one of the Irish Sundays, that I'd used the Friday before."

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Oliver Burkeman -- "The New Commentariat" in G2, The Guardian, November 17, 2005.
Mick Fealty's footnotes.

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