Inside View

Dublin Blogger Meetup 13 May

DAMIEN MULLEY proposes a blogger meet-up in Dublin on Saturday, 13 May. Details should be listed on upcoming.org as they develop. I'll be on Lake Powell with a cooler full of Coors in my kayak. Gotta find my sunscreen.

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Overhead in San Diego

FROM THE SOUNDS of it, we will be sharing the sky over San Diego with an Aurora aircraft in hypersonic flight. It's using Edwards AFB or Dreamland for flights, both day and night. The USAF needs a reconaissance aircraft capable of several times the speed of sound because sometimes you just cannot wait for another pass of the satellite. We will have our Sony ICD MX-20 set to voice-operated recording mode when walking San Diego, just in case.

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Alex Roth -- "What's behind mysterious booms?"

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Memeorandum Effect

LIKE TOM RAFTERY and Damien Mulley who have done this before, I discovered it's relatively simple to jump aboard the links at tech.memeorandum.com if you blog about an A-List URL on a weekend. After landing there on Sunday, I discovered that the link effect from Memeorandum is twice as strong as being linked from Twenty Major. I've toyed with the idea of running 20m.memeorandum.ie and it would self-populate around words and memes designed to make Twenty proud.

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Advice for avoiding libel charges

IF YOU FEEL the chill wind of anti-defamation blowing up your backside and you know you're likely to be at the receiving end of a libel charge in Ireland, perhaps you should leverage technology before you get too snarky online. First, you should configure your browser so that it blocks all referrer information. Second, I suggest that you connect to the internet through a host that does not keep full archives of web sessions. By looking around, you might discover an internet service provider who does not store complete IP addresses with their server logs or a provider whose limited storage capacity occasionally results in corrupt records of internet access. Third, while trying to find the most accommodating host, you should also connect through an anonymiser, perhaps using rima-tde.net, the service preferred by the most creative Irish bloggers.

Conn O Muineachain and mainstream Irish podcasting

CONN O MUINEACHAIN becomes the first independent Irish podcaster to get a syndicated slot on broadcast radio, starting at 1730 today on Flirt FM in Galway. Conn's professionally produced podcasts set the standard for Tipperary Institute students who try their hands at making educasts [iTunes feed]. With 120 episodes online already, An Timeall is a favourite for an international Irish-speaking public. You have to think that the Irish government has noticed this already because an Irish language podcast returns more to the taxpayer than Irish translations of planning applications.

We Do Not Ship to Nigeria

SAYING THIS only attracts spam: We do not ship to Nigeria. It also lands this blog on the sidebar of Yahoo! News when it uploads and every time someone makes a comment on it--give it a try. I'm writing advice about Nigerian shipments in the knowledge that more than 13,000 pages on Google say the exact same thing: "we do not ship to Nigeria". That search engine result has increased from 6,400 when I first wrote about the Nokia 9500 mobile phone. And the scammers just keep on coming. Tip: deal with Nigerian shipment requests only after receiving full payment by bank transfer in advance. Never accept a credit card transaction unless you have a taxing need to write off a bad debt.

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10 Questions from Sunday Papers

TODAY'S SUNDAY papers made me wonder about 10 things. Perhaps you know the answers.

1. What is the URL of the website belonging to celebrity lawyer Giovanni de Stefano? On its front page, the Sunday Tribune cites the fact that the lawyer's website makes "bizarre allegations" about an Irish crime journalist but does not cite the URL.

Clarkson on Chelsea Tractors

JEREMY CLARKSON offers advice to those considering the purchase of a 4x4 Chelsea Tractor for their trips down the shops and for secure double parking on yellow lines outside primary schools. "A large 4x4 is not an option for the weak," writes Clarkson. "That's because some people, usually on bicycles, bang on your roof as they go by and say they find your conspicuous consumption offensive.

0834 3 Oct 07

MARK THIS DAY: October 3, 2007. That's when Russ Beattie thinks the number of people browsing the internet on phones will exceed the number of people browsing with computers. Trendlines show a billion internet users with PCs and two billion mobile phone users. Ipsos says that 28% of those mobile phone owners (560 million people) use the mobile internet now. Future growth of PC users is flat. Future growth of mobile phone users is on an upward trend--mobile subscribers should exceed three billion people within two years. Beattie says, "Even if you took the worst case scenario - PC growth booms, mobile growth softens etc., before the end of the decade, we'll at least have parity." He believes, "it's really not a matter of if the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more, but when.... I bet if you wanted to sit down with the numbers you could probably pick out the exact day. I'm thinking it'll probably be around October 3rd, 2007 (at 8:34 a.m)." I've made a calendar entry about this event in my mobile phone.

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Russell Beattie -- "Juggernaut" was written shortly before Russ shut down his blog.

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Save the internet or exit now

JEFF PULVER'S campaign and Viral Marketing Contest to Save the Internet has received little or no play among Irish bloggers. From Pulvuer: "I am fed up with the current wave of soundbites, platitudes, ads and marketing flooding the airwaves that profess to speak for the advancement of the Internet and communications. These ads are influencing Congress and governments around the World as they write the rules that will shape the future of the Internet and communications." 

Pulver wants to hear "the voice and message of the Internet community -- the Internet innovators, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts -- in this world-changing discussion"  Pulver has a point--people who care about important things take the initiative. You would think on an issue as big as tiering the internet by ratcheting in additional costs would interest consumers enough to talk about it. So Pulver has a Save the Net campaign worth reading. I'm in.