Inside View from Ireland

Why keep e-voting

IRELAND'S LOW-TECH Taoiseach sees glimmer and hope in much-maligned e-voting. Most people who uses a computer screen for more than three hours a day have outlined clear and definite reasons to abandon the machines. Even Fianna Fail politicians carefully explain why e-voting is a bad idea for Ireland. Sometimes you make mistakes--spending EUR 50m on failed technology is a mistake. Recognise that and move on. My bet is that the machines will be up for scrap before the 2007 school term starts.

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Damien Blake -- "The continuing e-voting saga"

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YouTube Deletes 29,549 Videos

RESPONDING TO a take-down notice, YouTube removed 29,549 clips after a demand from the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers that claimed TV, music and movies had been uploaded without permission from the copyright holders. Pulling down content normally avoids lawsuits. YouTube appears committed to removing content immediately after receiving a take-down request.

Those Missing Conversations

WE LIVE AMIDST soundscapes of change. I record some of them in dictapause snippets and hope that my collection will form part of an Irish podcast that totally confounds visitors searching for Irish accents. The confusion will arise amidst the discovery that today's Irish soundscape is just as likely to be Polish or Russian or Chinese as it is Hibernian English. (Note that Irish is subordinated totally in the soundscapes I capture.) Because I live on a building site, I hear Polish banter every morning as crews shuffle off to work. When I buy my newspapers, two Latvians chat about the kinds of sandwiches they should make behind the counter. Irish soundscapes become totally multicultural once you step inside a phone call centre or cybercafe. I wonder if anyone else is listening to this remarkable transition in Irish society. The sound clips prove that Ireland has shifted from being an island nation and now offers a revolving door into a marketplace of full employment.
We're discussing these facts on Sunday during the Impressions Writing Festival in Clonmel. For those attending, please note the change in venue from the Clonmel Guard to the Clonmel Park Hotel. One of the best visual arts exhibits to arrive in Clonmel occupies the main Guard space and deserves a visit if you're passing through town.

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Spam Down Delicious Up

EMAIL SPAM frequency appears to be inversely related to the activity on my network on del.icio.us, at least in my case. Both the amount of my email spam and blog spam has dramatically fallen since the start of October, something I'll remember as I revert to older spam settings for the weekend. I'm forced back to the old settings because one of my spam filters sits on a Notes server that's to be decommissioned during the weekend. The upshot is that I'll start getting no fewer than 800 spam messages into my inbox tomorrow and Sunday. Monday can't come soon enough.

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IE7 Tip 01

IE7 SHIPS with a default setting that ignores XSLT stylesheets. My blog feeds point to a stylesheet so if you use IE7 to read my feed, it may have changed its appearance in your browser. You can change that look on your local machine, however.

SIP Mobile Ireland

ON MY WATCHLIST: VoIP mobile solutions. So far only Vodafone has licensed a SIP stack for their network but it's not available to users.

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via Voylent and The Register.

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OpenID Technorati

TECHNORATI SUPPORTS OpenID which means bloggers can associate their identities with their blogs. As I've noticed with Vox, OpenID ensures you can bridge over the problem with having individual IDs from many different sites.

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Ian Kallan -- "Blog claiming with OpenID"

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Last Word Shallow Tech

MOST MAINSTREAM talk show presenters in Ireland revert to sourcing their information from their filofax call lists. So when you listen to TodayFM, you're most likely to get his collaborators from the dead tree press. Recent discussions on TodayFM failed to spotlight some facts about Google's recent stock market results that readers of Irish blogs would have known.

Growth Rates

YOUTUBE needed 16 months to get 20m users. MySpace needed 25 months to get 20m users. If You Tube's growth continues at the same rate, it will have 50m users by the end of September 2007. Flickr attracts 20m visitors every month, including visits from its 5m registered users. Put this in perspective. Every four days there are 20m downloads of the Adobe Flash player. Every single one of those Flash installations includes the new high-performance Virtual Machine used for Flex 2 apps. Many web developers have not copped onto what having a universal video codec means. Many indpendent film makers have not accepted that the future of widespread free video over cable means Flash video, not H.264 or MPEG-4. Many content companies have not acknowledged that their path to these growth rates lies alongside the efforts of micropublishers. The path starts here.

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John Dowdell -- "Audience growth rates"
Richard McManus -- "YouTube may be the fastest growing site ever"

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Why no 999 version for text

WHY ISN'T THERE a 999 version for SMS? Bobbie Johnson says one reason is because the mobile phone networks cannot prioritise the text message traffic. Besides, why text when you could call?

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Bobbie Johnson -- "Why isn't there a text message version of 999?"

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