Inside View from Ireland

TWIT Deserves Your Vote

LEO LAPORTE'S excellent podcast, This Week in Tech, (TWiT) is up for a Best Podcast award at The Weblog Awards. TWIT is the world's best technology podcast and deserves your vote. The public votes run through 7 November 2007 and you can vote once a day.

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The Irish Property Bubble

AT THE RISK OF BEING accused of talking down the Irish economy, I think the Irish property market is helping to skewer prosperity by artificially pushing up the value of housing. This fact landed dead centre on my kitchen table as my brother, a long-time California and Silicon Valley resident, remarked that some Kilkenny homes cost more than his acreage near the Valley. And he has the weather that makes his swimming pool a regular part of the daily routine. Try that anywhere in County Kilkenny. David McWilliams makes overpriced housing a main point in his analysis of Ireland's declining competitiveness. From personal experience gained after selling a home in Kilkenny, I believe there are appraisers and estate agents who have tweaked plans and who have played the property game themselves in order to directly affect demand, which then directly inflated the price points of limited housing stock. The Irish Independent carries a related story when discussing how "Hooke & MacDonald have never been shy when it comes to larging up the property market. Their breathless rhapsodies have been a part of the property scene for well over a decade.     The auctioneer’s tennis-playing figurehead, Ken MacDonald, politely took exception to Final Word’s musings a few weeks back that, like it or not, the market was dormant. Wrong, he said, there’s plenty of action out there in the new homes arena." But wait, how is the market doing at Ken's doorstep? Geckko, the property magnate on Property Pin, did a little probing.

Broadband at OpenCoffee

SITTING ALONGSIDE LOUGH DARO in the AbsoluteHotel on Sir Harry's Mall (recommended for its lovely spaces and free wifi access) for Limerick OpenCoffee (lobby shown at left), a snippet of conversation turned to the depressing state of broadband in Ireland. The conversation was all the more remarkable because my laptop was connected to O2-Ireland's HS network and I had recently used that 3G network for a three-screen event powered by OnlineMeetingRooms.com so I was entering the conversation from the point of view of a guy who had been blessed with ADSL at home and 3G internet access in major towns across Ireland. But it remains easy to find people who live within five miles of my home who do not have broadband. I hope to help correct that shortfall by mounting an access point on top of my three-story home and using it as part of a broadband relay system that can turn an 802.11 signal around the corner of the imposing Rock of Cashel. That aside, Ireland is sitting on top of a large in-country market, a market populated by people who would probably conduct business transactions online. All they need is decent high-speed, always-on connectivity. Some numbers from the States offer an example.

InsideView of Shelfari

ALTHOUGH I RARELY respond to invitations to join widget-based communities that revolve around objects instead of people, I started an account on Shelfari because it relates to a social networking experiment and then violated a second operating principle by failing to scroll down on an "invite friends" screen before hitting the "send" button. It turns out that the Shelfari invitation system is spring-loaded to automatically send invitations to people located in your address book if you permit Shelfari to access your Yahoo!, MSN, or Google Mail accounts. So you might guess what happened next. Shelfari started sending invitations to many people who are stored inside of my Yahoo! address book. These are legacy addresses, some gathered from the early 90s. One hour after I pressed the button, Shelfari invited two dead people, one prisoner (he should probably read books but his warden is reading his mail), the CNN news desk, four European editors--and potentially a boatload of others who I hope I never meet. Their names are in my address book since my Yahoo! account is an amalgamation of a filofax, ACT! database, Notes record set, Exchange mail records, as well as contact data shoveled into Yahoo from a minimum of 20 different phones I have used, owned, borrowed or tested. I would never send a bulk mail from my Yahoo! account. I would have never had a bulk mail sent under my signature so this embarrassment means I have loads of work ahead as I may have to go around and apologise to hundreds of people. I hope that is not the case.

When Copy Goes Walking

IN 2007, THE AVERAGE number of visitors to the pages of InsideView have decreased from 1005 per day to 1003 per day (measured since 2003) while the number of syndicated visitors to the blog have increased from below 630 to above 740 on most days. Although there are several reasons for this occurrence (e.g.,  my blogging has decreased markedly and I've unfinished tasks related to changing the URL of the blog), some of the readers who might have arrived here in search of information about technical fixes now go to more prominent locations featuring the same content. That is, the potential viewers are finding my content in other places. This is not an unusual occurrence because once a mainstream article runs on some gadget, the copycats follow. If I offer a deeper explanation to a gadget reviewed by a glossy magazine, I expect my explanation to be lifted and reused somewhere else. It comes with the territory, although it's not very ethical.

Hallowed Socialising

UPDATED 1 NOV 07: You should stop work and watch Kyle Ford's video about OpenSocial. Assuming this technology catches hold, we are observing a seismic event on the internet.

AND TO CELEBRATE GHOSTS in the tubes, today Google will let people peer deeply into the scary realms of OpenSocial networking. The announcement rumbled across the tubes of the internet around the time a small earthquake pulsated under the Googleplex, possibly because the revelation of Google's involvement in the technological side of social networking is part vapourware (the scale of Google's ambitions have not been successfully tried before), part embargo-busting (several tech bloggers were told that their coverage of OpenSocial MakaMaka was embargoed until early November). The press coverage dovetailed nicely into Euan Semple's related OpenBroadcast theme at the BBC.

OpenSocial (URL won't be live until early November) helps Google increase everyone's use of the web by hooking into established social networks such as Ning, Linked In, SixApart, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Orkut. OpenSocial makes easy work of creating a web presence for a machine (like a bus carrying a Nokia Series 60 phone while traveling on Irish roads). OpenSocial means people have another touchpoint to begin searching and that means another space on the web to place Google advertisements. OpenSocial means the appearance of my iGoogle page will change, possibly with the inclusion of an embedded social graph, similar to the details revelead by my Flickr DNA. I believe OpenSocial will make it easier for someone to clone themselves electronically, which is certain to rile some social networking purists. Adam Nash, senior product director for LinkedIn, offers a use case for OpenSocial APIs where the Conference Calendar grabs the industry information from a LinkedIn profile, associates relevant conferences and lists people from other social networks who will attend. This alone would save me countless minutes normally spent scouring hallways.

First Touch

TRYING TO FIND SOMETHING to help a nearly blind student engage with his third level college lectures, I played with an iPod Touch to see if it would aid someone who wanted to review lesson materials stored online. It wins in one respect by rendering web pages crisply and in an astonishingly clear fashion. However, the size of the fonts will not expand as high as with a dedicated screen zoomer. Nonetheless, its screen presentation deserves full marks. Assuming the student will lose more eyesight as the academic year continues, it's important to be able to play audio files and the iTouch does this but you need to work your way around a touch-based user interface. I don't think this will prove viable for a nearly-blind student because the industry recommends devices with large, tactile buttons. A sighted student would be well-served by the iPod Touch's capability to play audio files. And its wi-fi networking makes quick work of connecting up to an internet collection point where the lecture notes would await immediate download. Better still, students can download a raft of creative multimedia notes directly through iTunes or by subscribing to educasts at podcasting.ie.

Facebook Spam

WE ARE GIVING Facebook a one-year flight test, imposing membership in Facebook as part of two modules in the creative multimedia degree programme at Tipperary Institute. By April, several dozen essays will reflect on the experience of being inside the Facebook ecosystem. Some students are not impressed with this academic requirement "because it's stupid". When asked to explain their perspective, they reveal a facet of Facebook that has bubbled up inside some focus groups: some students find Facebook applications very annoying and consider them to be the equivalent of spam.

Spotted on Sunday

NO CLOUDS IN THE Cashel sky and 10 things spotted in the Sunday papers, not counting Sue Denham's reference to Twenty Major and Sarah Carey in the same sentence. Guess who has the book deal. Guess who has the personalised dot-ie domain name.