Inside View

Fill up with NYC podcasts

IF YOU PLAN a trip to New York City--and that's essential in the run-up to Christmas for all Irish citizens--you should consider loading up your MP3 player with NYC podcasts. Dave Winer has created  a  sub-directory of NY Times podcasts and the ones he lists are excellent. If you have an aggregator that supports reading lists, you can subscribe to all the Times podcasts by subscribing to the OPML file. If not, you can click on the orange XML icon and subscribe to each podcast individual. Nice one, Dave.

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Thousands of EU domains stopcocked

JOHN McCORMAC points out that "EURid has put over 73K .eu domains on hold." These domains belong to Ovidio Limited Cybersquatters. Until the EU domain registrar interceded, domain warehousing was a legitimate European domain name operation.

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John McCormac -- EURid puts over 73k .EU domains on hold"

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10 Questions Over Sunday Coffee

SOME OF THE Sunday items are starting to feel like a broken record. That's par for the course during the silly season of summer. No worries--check your knowledge of current events in Ireland by answering a few simple questions.

Bleeped Out With a Face Blob

WHEN AMERICAN soldiers return home and give their first-hand views of their experience in Afghanistan or Iraq, they may not be able to air their viewpoints on mainstream US television without significant editing. If network television broadcasts the President saying a swear word--like you can hear Dubya uttering all across YouTube, they can be fined. This is the result of a new law, forged by the Christian coalition. The PBS documentarian Ken Burns ran afoul of this new law in post-production of "The War," a soldier's-eye view of World War II. Those who have seen parts of the 14 hour documentary say it's authentic. Imagine Twenty Major with a helmet talking about the horrors of war and you have the picture. Stateside viewers won't see the real thing when the production airs in September 2007. I wonder if there's a director's cut.

Susan McReynolds on Blogging

SUSAN MCREYNOLDS held a 17-minute chat with Annette Clancy, Damien Mulley and Claire Wilson to offer RTE Radio One listeners an answer to the questions of why people blog, how much you should reveal on your blog and the merits of citizen journalism. It's a 12.2 MB MP3 file with shownotes to follow.

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Listen to RTE's audio. When the RTE link dies, you can find segments of the show as part of Underway in Ireland #37 (On the Show). I blog because it enrichens my work. Funnily enough, Google finds my blog as result #3 when searching for the word enrichen.

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Suspended by eBay

IT IS EASY to find people who have been suspended by eBay or Paypal. My suspension is more than two years old now, which means I cannot use a credit card with Paypal unless I anonymise myself. I signed up to Paypal's terms and conditions which means I have to jump through hoops if I want to reclaim $810 Paypal has locked down in my account. As a result, I cannot recommend Paypal to friends. In fact, I've purchased several things from online vendors by posting money to them. People take money in whatever form it arrives. I've also discovered that an earlier thread about eBay suspensions has been targeted by the copyright police and it's occasionally impossible to post comments on the thread--it's locked down at the server. Rather than preventing people from telling their stories, I'm opening another thread about eBay suspensions.

Back door to iTunes Directory

FROM KEOLA DONAGHY comes a way to get a podcast listed on the world's largest podcast directory without ever visiting iTunes. "I had tried to get my Hawaiian music podcast into the iTunes music directory the very first day it launched... A fellow podcaster recommended FeedBurner so I tried it, and submitted the feed to iTMS that evening. The very next morning I received an email from Apple acknowledging my submission, and my podcast directory about an hour later."

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Google Video Finds Frames

GOOGLE VIDEO can now parse a query term added to the URL and them jump directly to a particular time in a video asset. (Example: "#2m45s" appended to the video address jumps two minutes and 45 seconds into the play time.) This isn't startling functionality -- Kevin Lynch showcased some samples a few years ago, showing how to handlenapplication-state variables appended to URLs. This Google Video functionality is brought to you by Shockwave Flash Video Shell timestamping.

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John Dowdell -- Google Video Quoting
Kevin Lynch -- "Making Rich Media Apps Internet-Friendly"
Jon Udell -- "MP3 sound bites"

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Most Viewed Artist

DENNIS HWANG may be the most-viewed artist in the world. "His work doesn't hang in galleries or museums, but it's been viewed hundreds of millions of times. The 28-year-old webmaster designs the whimsical logos that decorate Google.com's otherwise Spartan Web site on specialo ccasions. Meanwhile, back in Ireland, there's the net.art Open.

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David Williams -- "Google's unknown artist has huge following"
Image of Dennis Hwang from CNN and Google. Check out the Google logos

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Walkman Phones Stifle iPods

IF YOU WANT a phone that works and you also want a replacement for an iPod, look no farther than the SonyEricsson Walkman phone. We're using the W810i now. It's black and it rocks. We used its older brother the W800i and it's still running well, more than a year after its first carpet bounce and Guinness splash. It is orange and it rocks too. If you don't have the pocket money to buy an iPod but you need your music and podcasts close to hand, consider the Walkman phone. I believe it will outlast any iPod that uses a hard drive to store its music. Your mileage may vary with your operating conditions but enough people have drawn this same conclusion to affect iPod sales.