Inside View from Ireland

Polonium 210 Chernobyl

ON THE HEELS of Polonium 210 appearing in London, public health experts wonder where it originates outside of nuclear enrichment facilities. Look no further than the scarred remnants of the power plant at Chernobyl. The stuff won't set off Geiger counters but it's certainly embedded in the remnants of the meltdown. It was one of the most threatening remnants feared by teams I manifested for flights east of the Ural Mountains in the days I worked for an military airlift control centre. Travel teams had no protocols for dealing with it back when I was on active duty. I doubt they do now.

Watch Irish Election on GooTube

ONE EASY WAY to generate a flow of conversation between mainstream politicians during the upcoming general election campaign in Ireland is to remediate television footage of stump speeches. Your activists simply archive all mutterings that make their way to television or radio (harvesting local radio because the best gaffes often stay parked down the country) and then remixing the minutes with your advocacy or your perspective presented side-by-side, in the fashion of The Daily Show perhaps. This would create a whole new touchpoint for the Irish voting public and engage hundreds of net-aware voters.

+17124323031 183523#

IN MID-OCTOBER, while reading a mailing list about an upcoming college reunion, I received an instant message from a long-lost roommate who told me that he was listening to me on the internet. The podcasts from Ireland, perhaps? Yes, he stumbled upon them while Googling to hear Irish accents. He was a little surprised when he heard my voice on some of them. I don’t sound very Irish at Googling to hear Irish accents. He was a little surprised when he heard my voice on some of them. I don’t sound very Irish at podcasting.ie but Google tags me otherwise.

It took several instant messages to understand that our podcast voices from Ireland were playing in the fire suppression control room of the US space shuttle programme. I didn’t believe that was possible because friends have told me about tight restrictions placed on computer usage by NASA. No worries, said Getz, the listener. “I listen on our conference phone.”

Have a Turkey

I wish I could find a proper Thanksgiving dinner somewhere in southeast Ireland. It would take the pain out of missing this traditional American holiday.

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Highest Info Density

ROBERT SCOBLE cites the reason he likes Techmeme over all other meme trackers: "more information density per scroll." This suggests a revision for the way memes display on IrishBlogs.ie because if the topical themes scraped by IrishBlogs were clustered like Techmeme clusters them, the display would offer greater information density. Paraphrased, this means reducing the thematic content to a single paragraph per topic, going with either a summary of the first blog post on the topic and appending the URLs of related blog posts below the summary paragraphs. The appended information should be the names of the blogs hyperlinked directly into the related posts written by the leading story.

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Robert Scoble -- "Memetrackers Revisited"

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Waiting for Nokia N95

EXTORTIONATE ROAMING fees have made me a "double diamond O2 upgrade" customer. I am ashamed to admit the amount of money I have paid Ireland's mobile telephone networks during the past six months. And if I have my way, I will translate that loyal payment record into getting a Nokia N95 mobile phone. Occasional reader Danuta Gray, are you listening? Geeks need GPS in their pockets.

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Doc Searls -- "Waiting for the N95"

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Pogo Sticking

ENQUIRO MAY BE suggesting that content developers consider embedding icons in titles or inside paragraphs to enhance search engine placement. In its Eye Tracking Report ($149 for a single user license to read), Enquiro points to “pogo-sticking” and explains how users go back and forth between search results. Icons inside the search engine results attract a searcher’s attention. When searchers click on a search listing, they often continue scanning the search results page, while waiting for the new web page to load. Another thing that points to the power of paid listings:

100% of clicks go to organic results, when a searcher is “researching”, while “purchase” searches result in 44% of clicks going to sponsored listings.

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Enquiro -- "Eye Tracking Report"

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Clean Collaboration

SOME DAY I MAY live in a world that provides the identity of email servers on all the mail that trickles into my in box. When I ran Eudora as my primary mail system, I looked for IP addresses in the "Received: from" line. The incoming IP address was the only measure of comfort I had of dealing with email truly originating from the alleged sender. At Tipperary Institute, the institutions's mail server performs reverse DNS on the sender's IP address. It's helpful information when trying to ensure whether an email is legitimate.

I have several rules in Outlook that try to kill all incoming attachments as well as to scrub all HTML mail.  I wish I could educate friends instead--educate them with the understanding that the opening of email attachments is probably the singlemost important way of countering the propagation of mass mailing worms. Furthermore, I'm trying to push people into using online editing suites such as Google Docs because I'm further ahead when I collaborate the moment I open someting. With shared online spaces like Google Docs or SouthEast BarCamp, every click becomes a live action. You can edit, save and send with one stroke. No email services need enter the mix.

Fastest Growing Podcast

THE WORLD'S FASTEST growing podcast is the easy-listening Leo Laporte's "This Week in Tech" which is a netcast or "TWiT" to those in the know. I think more than a half million people will download today's show (TWIT 77) because it's good radio you can enjoy without having to understand geek-speak. We play TWIT on the car radio, jacked in through a SonyEricsson Walkman phone. On several occasions, passengers have asked, "How do you get AOL radio in Ireland?" Laporte is sponsored by AOL Radio, he sounds like a broadcaster, and his production levels leave many mainstream Irish broadcasters in the dust. If you've never tried a podcast and you start with TWIT, you might be disappointed with all other podcasts on the planet afterwards.

Fractious Lists

A MINOR DUST DEVIL swirls among Irish bloggers concerning expert lists. What began as a well-intentioned attempt to expand the same old circle of experts who comment to mainstream media has descended onto familiar turf of balanced perspective. Since one measure of balance is gender, anyone listing a paucity of one gender or another will face challenges from parts of the Irish blogging community. You cannot slight someone for revealing a listing of those who inform their judgment, even if it reveals a compilation too white, too dark, too Irish or too male. Just as you cannot slight contributors who do not know men from women. ("Bernie" can be male or female. You have to listen to know for sure.)