Inside View

How to work smarter

JOHN BURNS offers stres-busters to those adults who complain about stress at work. I have modified some of his tactics below with a little seasoning from the Twenty Major Desktop Guide to Office Protocol as well as experiences extracted from my professional life as a Pentagon Action Officer, freelance consultant, journalist and special airlift director.

Facts Learned in Sunday Papers

IRELAND'S SPORTING TRIUMPHS will sell lorryloads of Sunday papers this weekened in Ireland with stories about Derval O'Rourke's gold medal for the women's 60m hurdles at the world indoor championships, 10 Irish winners at Cheltenham, including a 1-2-3 in the Gold Cup led home by Michael O'Leary's War of Attrition AND a Triple Crown for Irish rugby. Other facts in the Sunday papers:

Four in the green

THE POSTMAN brought me a Netopia Wireless Gateway router and after I plugged it into my home office ethernet cable, it gave me four green lights. One was for power--it was switched on out of the box because the box had opened somewhere in transit. One was for Line 4 because that's where the ethernet cable connects from the gateway to my laptop. One was for "wireless link" because my Nokia 9500 picked up the system right after it turned on. The fourth green light was the best.

The Day Ireland Shifted to Berlin

ST PATRICK'S DAY for Irish in the States brought a clear signal from the highest echelons of government that if they live in the lower 48 without proper documentation, they will be granted no quarter as residents. In fact, living off the grid for an extended period in the States will bring jail time. Friends in the other two States (Alaska and Hawaii) say immigration controls are friendly to Caucasians so Irish can roam without real concerns.

Copyfighters Talking Shop

SOME WEEKEND I will get to one of Cory Doctorow's Copyfighter's Drunken Brunches. Tomorrow's runs from 1100 through the early afternoon at Stanhope Centre, Stanhope Place, London W2 2HH. It's where you can eat, drink, and learn how record labels all have "obsolete business models" and therefore must be destroyed.

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via Cory Doctorow and copyfighters on Flickr.

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Limited Network Model of top-down Podcasting

(See podcastingireland photos.) UPDATED 22 March 2206 to correct inaccurate URL and outage report.

JOHN COLLINS fingers one shortfall in the current top-down network model of the Digicast perspective on podcasting. The shortfall: assuming that the Digicast portal model network gains its strength through the top-down programming set down by the executive team. Digicast has launched Making Waves, a well-produced "channel" of entertainment. In today's Irish Times story¹, Digicast head Helen Shaw describes Making Waves as a book club: "I pick the book this week, you pick it next week." As the article explains, subscribers' picks first percolate into the Digicast system where the producers ensure the sponsor (O2) and the target demographic (15-35 year olds) suit the subscribers' best choice.

Doing time on Paddy's Day in Ireland

GAVIN SHERIDAN, elder statesman of Irish blogging, uses part of St Patrick's Day in Ireland to muse about those retiring from blogging. This thought would occur to anyone who has scaled the Croagh Patrick of blogging. Have you walked those steps? Like Gavin, it would mean you've been blogging more more than 1000 consecutive days, been viewed more than one million times, read more than 10,000 comments or trackbacks to your posts, noted more than 100 inbound links from non-splogs, clicked off at least 100 people who read your stuff via aggregators, push around 10 gigabytes of server traffic every month and serve a minimum of 100 people every day on your front page who have returned no fewer than five times in the past fortnight.

Note to Shrinking 20

WHILE CHATTING with Twenty Major in the men's at the Alexander Hotel last week (he was the one doing the snot test on the smooth marble above the urinal), we discussed how his blog pushes full feeds to all aggregators and how that could have boosted his reach and prominence among Irish bloggers. At the time, Stinky Pete (the one below the brown cloud in the middle cubicle) sniggered something about how full feeds give better reach for RSS advertising generated on-the-fly. So it's troubling to see 20M shrivel in size when viewed through aggregators. Neither Bloglines nor FreeNews show Twenty Major in full flow to me anymore. Seems I have to go back to the men's to see that again.

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St Patrick's Day Spam in Ireland

COULD ST PATRICK be an ISP's protector against spam? I woke up to a morning mail download that equates to a spam low-water mark. Of 82 new emails, only eight were spam (unless I count the six pieces of "send all your friends this" mail that invariably comes from fellow staffers who do as they are told). So I'm marking St Patrick's Day in Ireland with snowflakes in Tipperary and an in box as clean of spam as my freezer is free of frost.

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Programming the News

IN COUNTY TIPPERARY, I occasionally listen to Beat102103 FM where the content of news bulletins often confuse me. I just don't get why some items on Beat News are news-worthy. Until I remember that I'm older than the Beat target audience. Beat 102103 FM works outside the narrow definition of news and that has helped the radio station hoover up a wide listenership. Beat researchers have discovered interesting things online that they rewarm as news stories. That means "news you can use" in pub quizzes, casual conversations and text messaging.  What's relevant to the national broadcaster does not matter. What I think is important often reflects my American roots or a property owner's perspective so that's not how a youth-oriented radio station wants to program its news. I'm surprised that a local radio station has redefined "news" for me. Perhaps that's why commercial or community licenses are important institutions--if they safeguard diversity in our working definition of "news" media.

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