Inside View from Ireland

Bailout for Irish Entertainment Industry

ONE OF THE MOST STRESSFUL topics of discussion in the online community of Ireland concerns the statutory instrument to amend the Copyright Act 2000. Once you crack the discussion open, you discover it's actually no more than a bailout for the entertainment industry in Ireland.

As things stand, a simple stroke of the pen could impose higher fees on everyone using the internet in Ireland. Those increased fees would be needed by internet service providers as they became the online vigilantes for the music industry. This allows the music industry to cling to its outmoded business models instead of focusing its efforts on providing better subscription services for a rapidly growing market of connected consumers.

A lot of people consider the ideas mooted by Deputy Sean Sherlock to be no more than an "Irish SOPA" because of the draconian nature of the stipulations engrained in proposed legislation crafted by Minister Sherlock. Irish Internet Service Providers (ISPs)  have "very practical and simple business reasons” to reject Sherlock's solution to a problem created by the Irish music industry.

Speeding Along with O2-Ireland's Dongle

I HAVE A HUAWEI E585 WIFI DONGLE on its last legs but when it's working, it occasionally delivers faster upload service than a higher spec Vodafone broadband USB modem.

I can normally get the Voda USB modem to run two or three times faster than my O2 dongle, especially in the Dublin metropolitan area. Today, along the banks of the River Liffey in County Kildare, the O2 dongle is kicking its Voda brother in the speedtest stakes.

I can't imagine life as a mobile warrior without a mobile tethering service. I use both the dongle and the USB modem to successfully run Online Meeting Rooms video sessions and Google Hangouts. Last week, I used the O2 dongle as a wifi hotspot service for third level students in LIT-Clonmel when a piece of network hardware failed. The Huawei E585 permits the connectivity of five devices simultaneously and that was fine for several project teams working on campus.

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My speedtest screenshots.

mobile

Best Circles Ever Shared

BECAUSE PEOPLE MEASURE THINGS by numbers, I know it's significant to have more followers on Google Plus than on Twitter. But mere numbers don't reflect the depth of conversation or the control of privacy.

I know it's best to use the tool that delivers the best results. In the minds of most people in my life, that means descending into Facebook when you want a casual conversation. It also means watching the flow of tweets sail by to get an idea of who's traveling where or what news someone spotted on their big screens. I get both of these effects and more because I spent a few hours tweaking Google Plus Circles until they delivered more for every two inches of screen scrolling than on any other social network I've used.

And I'd like to share some of the circles that helped me develop this system of business intelligence. Like Gabriel Vasile, I've categories like Bloggers, Celebrities, General, Hangouters,  Journalists, Photographers, and Social Media.

Preventing Flash Slowdowns in Chrome

I LIKE CHROME because it's a fast, safe browser. But I've discovered Flash can slow down and crash Chrome so I've a work-around.

Unlike Firefox and other browsers, Chrome handles Flash content via an internal Flash installation. That's normally ok because Chrome updates Flash whenever it's updated.

However, in my experience, Chrome can get confused when both its internal Flash player and my Windows 7 Flash player both run in attempts to play content. This occurs on my blog's web pages where embed codes help run audio files. It happens with Flick where Flash is the uploader I prefer to use. It happens a lot when visiting mainstream news sites where I play video news clips.

Unless I control things, Chrome will get confused and attempt to utilize both my OS installation of Flash and the internal Chrome installation of Flash. This causes browser lag, temporary lockup, and then a browser-wide crash of all active Flash instances. On some days, I will get five Chrome tabs locking up with "The following plug-in has crashed: Shockwave Flash” so I've done a few things.

Learning Etiquette with Lillington and Technology

ETIQUETTE ON SOCIAL NETWORKS continues to evolve, as both journalist Karlin Lillington and communicator Damien Mulley point out to their readers and followers.

Karlin's piece in the Irish Times continues this thread of discussion as she points to stupid people tweeting. Actually, the examples she cites reverberate through the mainstream press as celebrities and attention-seekers continue using Twitter as a form of public texting service--as they're entitled to do.

That kind of communication isn't my cuppa tea and that's why I manage Twitter via lists and alerts. And yet, plenty of savvy communications professionals use their Twitter pulpit to open the day, share their breakfast menu items, moan about public transport, scream about customer service (see screenshot) and then wind down the day with dozens of tweets telling anyone listening that it's time for bed. That all sounds like noise to me so I don't listen. However, as Karlin's piece suggests, the masses want voyeuristic Twitter chatter like this and in many slow news weeks, the tabloids depend on tweets to fill inches of space in their papers.

As I was reading the Irish Times technology section, I was also listening to Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Purdy talk about the "new rude" of business communications. I snipped ten minutes of their conversation from This Week in Google because it's relevant to a Public Relations practical exercise we're doing in LIT-Clonmel. I especially like the idea of getting a free meal from undisciplined mobile phone owners. Let me know if you want to join me at a dinner before Dalkey Open to put your phone in a stack on the table.

The New Rude

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Karlin Lillington -- "Think before you tweet" in the Irish Times Technology section, February 13, 2012. I read the Irish Times on my Kindle and bought the subscription because of Karlin and other fine journos.

Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Kevin Purdy -- "You must be this dope to enter" on TWIG 129, January 9, 2012.

etiquette

Thinking on my Red Bench

MY RED BENCH IS my thinking spot. It's the best place for me to get uninterrupted space and time.

On the best days for my productivity, I can sit down on my red bench an hour before sunrise and scratch out notes that help me get things done. On the worst days, it rains. An overly powerful street lamp washes its light on my red bench before sunrise.

A simple unruled notebook safeguards my hand-written notes. I can cram four months of notes into a single Moleskine and then flick back through those notes and doodles for content to share on my blog.

Unlike a lot of my friends, I go outside and sit on my bench instead of peering into my mobile phone for a look at my email. I've discovered that if I start my day by sitting on my red bench, I'll generate 200-800 words of original content that others will read a few hours later. Sometimes I think my red bench ideas are among the first things friends of mine read in their newsfeeds.

And it all starts with the red bench.

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Other red things in my life.

GTD

Toughening It Out Teaching LongReads

WORKING ALONGSIDE THIRD LEVEL STUDENTS who are constantly inundated with Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter DMs, e-mail exchanges, text messages, and push notifications, I stress the need to carve out time to read 5,000-word essays on our creative multimedia curriculum.

I'm watching the decline of long form reading in LIT-Clonmel and I know it's the same across the Irish university sector because our slavish uptake of technology is often a distraction from long-form journalism.

I'm trying out a system where I push out long-form content in such a way that systems like Evernote,  Read It Later and Instapaper can make it easier for students to share long form items for viewing in times and places more convenient for them. Just the act of opening a link in Twitter and then using the phone's or browser's sharing capabilities can help carve out attention. The secret lies in the apps themselves because they help focus attention on the long-form content. 

The Best Are Growth Hackers

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL output we can cultivate in third level is to graduate a select number of growth hackers. No more than one in every ten of our graduates from LIT-Clonmel achieve this standing.

I watch for students who can think in terms of "impact" and "scalability" in everything they do. They respect "sustainability" but are more focused on meshing their coding skills with a marketing vision and in the process, influencing the marketing vision with a clear pathway for company or sales growth.

Our growth hackers have an entrepreneurial drive (perhaps being too willing to accept risk) linked to a burning desire to make things work. They have creative solutions to problems that have not yet appeared on company roadmaps. They can build on solutions shared in code libraries that they visit and they can take snippets they find in mailing lists, discussion boards, and IRC chats and leverage those snippets through a disciplined process of prioritizing ideas.

We have several project modules where we want to see our creative multimedia students testing ideas, analysing things that break, and sharing their decision on why certain things were kept as part of a final portfolio piece. We know that our growth hackers graduate with an innate ability to repeat this development process in the real world and that they will refine this skillset while producing scalable, repeatable ways to grow in whatever business they work.

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That's James Hogan in the photo accompanying this blog post, a certified growth hacker from Tipperary Institute, with a hand-on appreciation of GitHub. There are 20 growth hackers on LinkedIn, most involved in digital strategy or people with a strong presence in community coding projects like Sourceforge.

creativity

My Family Album Scribr

MYSCRIBR LETS ME DISTILL my family's digital lifestream into a book that I am already writing. Add a plastic sleeve for the multimedia elements and I have compelling sitting room transmedia.

I've been stuck into lifeblogging since I discovered my Nokia 9210 could fire a blog post directly up to my Typepad blog in 2003. Then I realised I could use Zonetag to automatically push every image shot with my Nokia 9210i to Flickr in 2004. Two years late, I watched my Nokia 9500 perform magic as it let me produce 25 frame per second video for uploading to YouTube. Its Nokia E90 baby brother did live video with Qik and also made Audioboos that I shared. But a problem emerged with all this content. It was dispersed but not collected. That's where Scribr comes in handy.

Automating Information Traps

I HAVE THE CLUTTER GENE. I have to overcome its debilitating effects by maximising the use of information traps.

For years--years as a packrat--I measured my success by the pile of stuff I could save in corners of my life. I have now run out of physical corners because I have ceded the control of corner real estate to the rest of the family. During the first month of 2012, I will clean each of the 10 corners in our home where I have created rat's nests of paper and books. I will also clean out the digital corners of my collections.

I started culling my personal online collectives by reviewing my archival content and marking it for Pinboard and Evernote. That's a very healthy process but one that will submerge me in the quicksand of my digital existence if I do not simultanesouly manage personal information overload coursing from the time I spend connected online.

As 2012 rolls into its first short week, I'm well into the process of creating, maintaining, distilling and curating digital content. My success has started to grow as a direct function of the selective filters and information traps that I use every minute of the day to constantly monitor information I need to know. This is a bit of black art because as Donald Rumsfeld would expalin, "I don't know what I need to know." (See below for his seminal quote.)