Inside View from Ireland

Darraghdoyle Might See

OCCASIONAL READER Darragh Doyle may see this short blog post because he uses Twitter to graze Irish blogs. This clever process happens because of bosca, an Irish aggregator that monitors content related to Ireland and then pushes out short summaries of the blog items as tweets. I think it's useful to aggregate bosca, then to read dozens of Irish blog summaries in each refresh of your blog reader. I get bosca aggregates delivered to my mobile phone and up to 40 line summaries hit my phone every time I open FreeNews, the Java-powered news reader that runs on my Nokia E90. I'm interested in seeing whether Darragh Doyle, an astute blogger in Ireland, will spot his name in this post and then click over to this blog item from his twitterstream. I'll only know for sure if he drops by and leaves behind a comment.

Adsense on Steroids

YOU CAN BET that Google Adsense will pay more for video advertising placement than for text ads on websites. Now that Google is testing advertising for video, the natural by-product will be a revenue sharing with content producers. I have to get a new laptop so that I'm able to play in this new space.

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Saul Hansell -- "Google is testing ads for video service"
Robert Scoble -- "Another reason I'm getting into the video business"

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Blogs Sell Servers

ROBERT SCOBLE cites Netcraft's conclusion concerning one of the effects of weblogs. "The Internet experienced its strongest site growth ever last month, powered by a surge in blogs and free Web sites." This is helping Microsoft, as the Netcraft survey documents.

"Microsoft continues to gain share in the web server market, chipping away at Apache's commanding lead. The number of hostnames on Windows servers grew by 4.5 million, giving Microsoft 29.7% market share, a gain of 4.25% for the month. Apache had a decline of 429K hostnames, and loses 3.5% to  61.25%."

Connecting Typepad to Feedburner

CONNECTING A TYPEPAD blog to Feedburner takes less than 20 seconds if you're signed into your Typepad blog. Go to the blog you want to connect, edit your blog's configuration, click the radio button to indicate you want to connect your feed through Feedburner, log into your Feedburner account, select the blog feed you want to redirect through Feedburner and you're done. This set-up changes nothing for existing feed readers--Feedburner merely tracks their downloads on the Typepad server. This is a clever Typepad service. It tells you more than you think you need to know. It suggests content for podcasts. It can track downloads of enclosures. In general, I like Typepad more than the Wordpress installation I use on other sites because Six Apart's servers are more robust than the community servers I use elsewhere. Six Apart's spam controls are much stronger than anything else I've used or seen used in Irish blogspace.

Dad's Blog 1950

KILKENNY -- While rummaging through some stuff prior to moving to a building site, I stumbled upon some things I hoarded from a travelogue that my dad kept from the late-40s. He began taking photos back then and he kept his film in an ammo box that was clipped to the side of his company car (an Army jeep) while he meandered around the ravaged countryside of Bavaria during the Marshall Plan days of Germany. Parts of his travelogue (a 50s-style blog) included pictures of the Muslim community in Munich.

Lunchbox viewing

POYNTER -- Steve Outing describes a "Lunchbox" used at the New England Cable Network to highlight stories. The "Lunchbox" stories will be highlighted on the homepage only during that hour. This newsy technique has merit in an Irish context as well.

Podcasts worth buying

REXBLOG -- Although it's doubtful that the solo podcaster will ever make a working wage from writing and producing podcasts, several kinds of podcasts deserve highlighting because they have commercial value. Rex Hammock offers a list of podcast material worth buying in a pay-per-track fashion.

Learned from logs

KILKENNY -- After scrolling through the server logs accompanying 1538 page loads from the last day in May, I learned three things from the people visiting this weblog.

1. I am just as likely to be visited by a drug spammer than a sex spammer. That's probably logical since drugs cost more than sex.
2. Yahoo is watching the reuse of its Launchcast videos through the action of its video spider.
3. Google advertisers often pay more to run advertisments during known holiday periods. However, those designated holiday periods are normally American in origin.
4. Since the Memorial Day holiday opened the official beach season in the States, people are making bikini videos. This results in more people looking for bikini videos in the summer than in the winter.

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Yahoo tracks its own videos with spiders like idev15.yst.corp.yahoo.com.

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Reading list for holiday hackers

TIPPINST -- We run a Media Writing course that requires first year students to compile listings of useful URLs. Some students are into DIY weaponry (not required by the course) and others are into e-books (as distinguished from e-learning). A few of their recommended links suggests some intriguing conclusions, like they've been reading over madfrog's shoulder. Some of the IRC listings like irc.scr3am.com 6667 #ebooks have thousands of files updating regularly and the range runs from hacking to programming fundamentals to website design to security essentials. The range of information far surpasses that available on the shelf of a college library and it exceeds what would fit on my O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf.

Sunday Tribune blogging extracts

TRIBUNE -- The Sunday Tribune has a weekly column that pulls around 800 words from blog items and lately it's been looking at what Irishblogs think about current events. In one small slice of a broadsheet, you could conceivably get a recap of significant items from the previous week. The selections this week include reflections on the Meath bus crash, Conor Lenihan as a kebab chef, a Star Wars horoscope, cyberstalking, and deranged art. The short piece in the Sunday Tribune is incisive. Too bad it's buried behind a cost wall.