Inside View

Worthy Pod Listening

WE SAY POD stands for "personal on-demand" and I cannot leave my Friday broadband connection without downloading worthy content for weekend listening. Here are three podcast shows I think make high-quality listening:

Info at the back door

THE BACK DOORS of my blog sites tell me interesting things. Back doors are comments, referrers and trackbacks. Today, while looking at trackback spammers who find my post about ethanol for cars interesting, I also watch referrers trickling into a podcast with the same interest. One listener made an audio comment worth repeating.

Shortlist as Trati Favs

TECHNORATI FAVORITES lets you create and share lists so I have set up the shortlist of the Irish Blog Awards on it. James Corbett's readers will appreciate the way it's a mix of OPML and blogroll. It gives me an easily searchable Irish aggregate as well. This has become more important recently because the Irish blogging community has burgeoned dramatically during the past 12 months. I doubt that anyone had blogrolled the IBA Shortlist before it was announced. That means deep reaches like a self-selected grouping of Technorati favourites give a more accurate trawl of the Irish blogpulse than other views that merely show the most recent traffic. Reading my information aggregate on screen through something like Technorati is much faster than reading each summary on my Nokia 9500 screen.

Surprise finding: A-Listers Doc Searls and Dave Winer have slipped down the Technorati Top 100 Listings and could be relegated to the chattering masses before the summer. This is the same thing that has happened in Ireland where top-flight sites like Gavin's Blog or Natterjack PR didn't make the short list in the 2006 Irish Blog Awards. Having a strong history of incoming links does not win popularity contests because many who link consider hyperlinking to be stronger and more permanent than once-off voting.

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James Corbett -- "Be a web filter"
Bonus Link: Aggregate OPML of some Irish bloggers

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Irish Blog Awards as PR

THE IRISH BLOG AWARDS promise to put Irish bloggers and podcasters in Ireland dead-centre in the cross-hairs of mainstream Irish media because the PR agencies have joined the show. The PR handlers aren't pulling the event together--it's a self-organising event gently nudged along by Damien Mulley. And he deserves an award as well, perhaps one sponsored by my PR class in Tipperary Institute because he's doing the 10 basic tasks that PR account executives normally perform for clients, stuff like these that are part of a primetopic in the third year course:

Social skills learned online

BOTH JUSTINE CASSELL, PROFESSOR of Communications Studies at Northwestern University and Niall Power, presenter at Beat102103 in Ireland, ended up as topic of discussion in the Mass Communications and Culture course at Tipperary Institute. Both people talk about how teenagers can learn social skills while online. Cassell presented research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis. Power followed up with phone call that should appear as part of a radio interview tomorrow morning during Beat Drive. We will try to snag it and podcast the conversation.

Register to attend Irish Blog Awards

IF YOU PLAN TO attend the Irish Blog Awards, you should register now because my gut feeling is that hundreds of people are interested in attending the 11 March event in Dublin since more than 1000 people voted already. When I worked on the Irish Animation Festival, we used a 70% dilution factor when calculating from votes to attendance at special events.  Charging into an event kills off no more than 10% of the dilution. If those numbers hold up (and they assume no vote-rigging by people posing with multiple aliases during the voting), you can expect 230 people milling around inside Buswells on the night. Registration starts at http://awards.ie/blogawards/event-registration/ for the 7PM kick-off on the Scotland-Ireland rugby weekend.

Fruitloops on a string

From Michael Czeiszperger's photostream comes the source of my hunger pangs. The world revolves around fruit loops on a string.

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DRM and my cat

JEFF CARR picked up on Tim O'Reilly's blog entry about Sony vs. Apple, and posted a comment that deserves to become part of the Mass Communications module in Tipperary Institute. From Jeff's blog entry on the subject of differences in DRM at Sony and Apple, to which the comment pointed: "The key to protecting rights and getting paid is as simple as the difference in how dogs and cats are handled at the veterinarian. When trying to control a dog, you tighten your hold. When trying to control a cat, you loosen your hold. DRM, properlyexecuted, is a cat. " Remember, DRM stands for "don't ripoff musicians".

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Tim O'Reilly -- "DRM: Dogs and Cats"
Jeff Carr -- Digital Rights Management: Sony and Apple"
Bonus Link: Open-Sourcing Music on the Podsafe Music Network. And that is Jack the cat in the snap.

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DIY videos

MY DIY SESSION on restarting my oil burner attracts no fewer than 10 people a day to the podcast about the problem so when Sean McGrath pointed out the video DIY potential at Showmedo, I started thinking that I should hook back up to Typepad's videoblogging service. The first thing I have to do is upgrade the laptop. There's no way I have the space to edit over Firewire. I need two gigs of free hard drive space before I'm going down that path.

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Sean McGrath -- "Don't tell me. Show me. Showmedo." Showmedo -- "Make a perfect cup of coffee"

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Paying with Western Union

BOTH OUR FIRST year students in Tipperary Institute and Colm Lyon during an IIA-CEB event in Clonmel have pointed out problems with paying for online transactions through Western Union. The bottom line is that your Western Union payment gives you no comeback. If the only payment option is Western Union, I walk away.