Inside View

Music in court

THE CARPET IS frayed in the hallways of many of the major music labels and suits occupy corridors where music was once made, according to Adam Curry, ex-MTC VJ and now world-class podcaster. It's no different in Ireland where Ian Kehoe says "Ireland's top four record companies will appear in the High Court on Tuesday seeking the names of more than 50 people who they claim are illegally uploading (sic) thousands of songs from the internet."

Stress is good

ONCE A WEEK, well-informed multimedia students land inside Studio Six at Tipperary Institute where they have 60 minutes to produce a half-hour podcast. You can tell there's anxiety in the air because you can smell sweaty bodies at work. That perspiration is good stress. I think college students need healthy doses of good stress so they know how to handle themselves in the real world. Yet several of my colleagues are hired to reduce stress for students. This state-funded seesaw creates interesting collegial tension in my workplace.

Jobs in Kilkenny People

MORE THAN 10 people from Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are advertising their availabilty for employment in the classified advertisements of the Kilkenny People this week. This is the first time I have seen more than 10 foreign nationals advertising their availability in a local paper. Need a day worker? You might consider these people who identify themselves as speaking good English in your search:

Free News Updates

ONE SIMPLE pleasure in my life is being able to depend upon a flow of news always ready to be read on my mobile phone. I use both a Nokia 9500 and a Sony Ericsson P910i to run Free News and that news aggregator scrapes 112 sites for my viewing whenever there's a television advertisement or a delay in road traffic. Since I watch less than six hours of television each week and only experience road delays on Fridays when headed to Dublin, there is always plenty of FreeNews on my phone. The bloated aggregation appends to the reading of the Sunday papers.

Feeling disconnected

UPDATED 23 Jan 06: I have to count the connectedness of Micheal O Foglu who regularly reads blogs via Opera and Bloglines on his P910i. He also runs an SSH client which means he can login and use PINE for work email and also reboot his servers. Plus, he also has a Sony ICD MX-20. However, he did not attend the IT@Cork Annual Conference so I missed him in my roughshod analysis of techies using mobile technology.

THANKS TO the monopoly enjoyed by Eircom, I am looking at weeks before I get a telephone dial tone in our new house. I get a bill every month for a service that works outside at the junction box. If I knew how to string that connection upstairs to our box room controller, we would have dial-up internet access in a heartbeat. Instead, I am queued for eircom service to repair a "major fault" that has existed since October 2005. I have to be home to let the repairman inside during the work week. I will not take off a day from work to accommodate eircom so they continue issuing me bills for phone service that I do not have. I will arrange to sit on my hands inside my house during the last Tuesday in February since I have that day free. I tried booking repair service for 9 January 2007, another free day, but eircom customer service won't accommodate a booking that far out.

Getting paid to blog well

DEARBHAILE SHINE'S podcast today includes a segment from John Hannafin when he explains how the Java Lobby community is paying up to $50 for the best blog post of the week. The rest of the Inside View podcast (#19 17.2 MB mp3 file) involves snippets from Adam Curry and fragments from the campus of Tipperary Institute. It's easy listening material. (DISCLOSURE: I'm one of those interviewed.)

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Photo by Debbie Ryan in Studio Six, Tipperary Institute.

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Naked Conversations

FROM THE INTERNATIONAL publishing house John Wiley & Sons comes a new business book with an interesting twist—it integrates conversations from Cork about the way businesses talk with customers. The new book, “Naked Conversations” by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, provides pointed examples on how businesses that cultivate effective (human) channels improve both their image and their bottom line.

With a forward by Tom Peters, author of business bibles as “In Search of Excellence”, Scoble and Israel share more than 50 case histories to explain why blogs can efficiently and credibly work as part of a company’s business communications. Those with an ear to Irish business channels have heard the business blogging message from Cork IT expert Tom Raftery both in conference seminars and through electronic media. Irish mailing lists, discussion boards and blogs attest to the possibilities leveraged by those with business, marketing, and technology interests.

Desktop audio production

DESKTOP CLUTTER reached redline this morning as we mashed together an educast for the Public Relations class in Tipperary Institute. Through clever use of our mixing desk, we spent an average of 2.45 minutes producing every minute of the 42-minute podcast. Squeezing production time is equivalent to searching for the Holy Grail--it's where you save money by saving time. Plus, in a crowded marketplace that puts tough demands on student time, saving time means getting follow-up reinforcement into students' heads as close as possible to the original lecture.

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Download the podcast (29 MB MP3 file) or get it free through iTunes.
Image of Bernie's cluttered workdesk snapped with Nokia 9500 during the production of an educast about "evaluative research".

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New Subs

NOT HAVING a home landline means I miss at least half of the traffic among Irish bloggers. It took me until last week to subscribe to new feeds from Tim Willoughby and Adrian Weckler. Willoughby (Local Government Computer Services Board with a podcast) drags Mobhaile into blogging and Weckler (Sunday Business Post) takes tech photos better than some of the professional photographers who I've commissioned for that role.

Establishing authenticity

YOU CAN TAKE steps to help others perceive you as an authentic leader--worthwhile if you care about running an effective organisation. The short list of "authenticity" involves getting to know yourself, getting to know others, and connecting to the organizational context better. The expanded list offers an effective prescription.