Inside View from Ireland

The First Viral Video of 2012

PLENTY OF VIRAL VIDEOS will emerge in 2012 but Walk Off The Earth's work is the first one I've spotted in 2012. At its current rate of viewing, I reckon the first of March will show that more people will have watched the cover of "Somebody That I Used To Know" than the original.

 

Bad Anti-Piracy Law Emerging in Ireland

IN HIS WEEKLY Sunday Business Post column, Adrian Weckler publishes some of the thinking of the Irish government concerning online piracy and it's not good for innovation or technology. It appears that proposed measures will cede authority on the matter to judges who can decide what online content or services to block.

This could result in judgments that shut down web hosting and dynamic content services. Because of the pattern of lawsuits already filed by the recording industry and record labels in Irish courts, citizens of the Republic should expect a frontal assault on their fundamental rights similar to the kind of stifling effect the Stop Online Piracy Act would have in the United States.

I have first-hand experience as a third level educator, working to cultivate creative multimedia graduates at the Limerick Institute of Technology and can state without reservation that the legislation mooted by Minister of State Sean Sherlock will damage the growth of innovation in Ireland. It will also inject "intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland," according to barrister TJ McIntyre. [2]

If Only Tech and Entertainment Could Harmonise

I SPENT HALF A DAY talking about the battle between our growth-oriented technology culture and the disruption-prone entertainment industry. The conversation arises on the back of TWIT 332 in the audio clip below and Paul Graham's call for a tech startup that would kill Hollywood.

Graham wants shot of Hollywood. “The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.”

Alexia Tsotsis (her poster at left) asked Paul Graham what he thinks people are going to be doing for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now. A lot of  smart people in the tech industry thinks the best part of our online lives will involve “something like Zynga.” That's good news for the software developers on the Games and Culture module I teach at the Limerick Institute of Technology.

The YCombinator crew sees "a lot more games. Zynga type games are likely only the start. Console video games are already essentially interactive movies.  Smartphones and tablets are making games more accessible than ever, in the future it’ll be bizarre to think that people ever purchased devices with the single function of loading games from a disc."

Blackout for SOPA

Thousands of web sites across the Internet are shutting down today to protest proposed U.S. laws SOPA and PIPA) that would make it difficult for websites to host community-generated content on the Internet.

If you spend more than four hours a day connected to the internet, you really should take 20 minutes to learn more about the bills and why they would be harmful to the open Web, to open education in Ireland and beyond, and to present and future collaborative projects for the benefit of the global knowledge society.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non-profit organizations dedicated to preserving freedom on the Web have ways that you can make your voice heard in the national and international debate about these proposed laws.

---

This is about our culture as much as it is about very obstinate and well-lobbied public representatives.

culture

One Hundred Year Cemetery

I RESPECT CEMETERIES and observe the centenerary of the Dunure cemetery in Scotland. It contains a 1939-1945 special plot of 47 war graves bearing special meaning for me.

Sharing and Sharing Alike

I PAY FOR A LOT OF MUSIC. During the Christmas period, I bought more music in a 10-day period than I had purchased in the previous 10 months.

My bank knows how much I feed iTunes so they blocked payments to Apple until I called to confirm that everything was fine. I spent EUR 14 today so I could compile a 49-minute listing of the tracks deemed by Thomann to be the "Ten Best Guitar Riffs Of All Time". I'm Huffduffing the track below so appreciate afficionados like Niall O'Brien (pictured) can discover it via social audio networks. Like all the music I share, I expect appreciative earbuds will go out and get the higher fidelity versions. That's what music sharing is all about and I'm glad we've developed the plumbing to make it a great success.

---

Top 10 Guitar Riffs [67 MB MP3 file]

Previously: Watching Revenue Leakage on my blog, December 15, 2004.

music

Meeting But Not Online

I COME FROM A generation of internet users who often prefer meeting in real life over meeting online. My expansive online profile renders me unclean in a lot of their minds.

Their cautious perspective is also echoed by some of the mature students I teach, by people I nudge into new online communities and by many in very traditional corporate sectors. On the one hand, they know they should sprinkle Twitter dust on their personal brand. But on the other hand, they don't want to alarm conservative colleagues.

Who Isn't Connected?

BACK IN 2003, when out walking around the sunny southeast of Ireland, I'd try to figure out who was living in places served by a sagging phone line.

An old telephone line would tell me a lot about the potential for internet access in a structure. As it turned out, the resident in the building at left couldn't get stable dial-up access to the internet. He wanted ISDN as a freelance writer because of the drop-offs he got across standard phone lines. At the same time in late 2003, the Information Society Commission concluded that specific portions of Irish society remained offline. They figured 78% of all women with home duties did not access the internet. I doubt that high a figure remain clear of Facebook today. Pensioners, specifically 90% of all retired people were not online in 2003. Of all employed sectors, 85% of all workers in agriculture, forestry or fishing did not have a connection to the internet. And 73% of unemployed were offline too--something that you would not find today with the strong interest in flicking through online advertisements and on uploading CVs to jobs sites.

---

Previously -- "Late internet adopters", October 30, 2003, on Irish Typepad.

cyberculture

Learning from Archaeology and Graveyards

SOME CLEVER ARCHAEOLOGISTS are bolting handheld technology onto paper records to make media-rich heritage that might attract the global Irish diaspora to visit Ireland.

The Historic Graves project uses a system and sequence to co-ordinate and standardise an historic graveyard survey. I've talked to the facilitators and want to work alongside a few workshops as well as perform some fieldwork. I'm convinced that some of the data entry, data upload and publication overlaps our creative multimedia degree programme.

Der iGod ist Tot

WHEN STEVE JOBS PASSED away I turned off the three Apple iOS devices we have in the house, knowing that I would be snipping communications with family eight time zones away. It was like lighting a votive candle.

Woz on Jobs