Inside View

MBO at Odeo

EV WILLIAMS and team have bought Odeo from its investors. During the past two years, Odeo stumbled alongside producing some very clever technology. Its lessons learned deserve to be scribbled into journals of Irish entrepreneurs. Evan writes about starting up and failing in very transparent terms. His Obvious (Odeo's new name) plans:

Another Limitation of Irish Telecom Poodle

CONN Ó MUINEACHAIN, the Irish language podcaster who needs broadband to create subscribable content, cannot get broadband. Comreg tells him that he should expect a reply from his complaint to Eircom, the Irish dominant telecom. If no response comes on time, Conn has no recourse because the Irish telecoms poodle has no regulatory function in relation to broadband. You would expect as much from a country that guards its place near the bottom of the European broadband table. Comreg exists to sustain existing business interests. Comreg is not a consumer advocate.

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Conn Ó Muineachain -- "Formal complaint to eircom"

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Corporate Blogging Conversation

DEBBIE WEIL, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, chatted with Six Apart about blogging on Typepad. She explains why businesses are blogging, who's doing it well and offers some advice to business that are just getting started with blogs.  You can listen to our conversation here, or you can grab the 9.5mb file directly.

The Web as a Workplace

OM MALIK revisits the old theme of using the web as your workplace. He points out the prospect has become more viable because a new generation of browsers from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple will appear with features specifically tuned for Web applications. This means you will be able to run basic ECDL applications through the internet rather than on your hard drive. As we're experiencing in Tipperary Institute, this means you can write with Writely, e-mail with Yahoo! Mail, set appointments with Trumba, or jointly edit planning notes via Google Calendar. If you want synchronicity, you can choose Skype or Google Talk or a variety of chat applications. Jason Calacanis thinks all these things point to the emergence of a Google Operating System [3.5 MB 96 kbps MP3 file from The Gillmore Gang.].

Make This Page Dance in Circles

BORED? You can make the images on this page dance with a little Javascript snapped into the address bar. Copy the code below and paste it into the address bar, then use a few keystrokes to see the images circle around the place. Here's the code:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

After you paste the code into the URL address bar, use the following keystrokes:

CTRL + C
ALT + D
CRTL + V
ENTER

Enjoy!

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via via Ursi.

YouTube Knows You

XENI JARDIN SAYS that YouTube keeps tabs on users' personal data, and it shares some of that identifying info without users' awareness. Responding to a subpoena served in May by Viacom subsidiary Paramount Pictures, YouTube handed over data on at least one user to the movie studio's lawyers.

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Xeni Jardin -- "YouTube gave user data to Paramount lawyers "
Ben Charney -- "YouTube shared user data with studio lawyers"

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ThinkHouse PR Should Converse

ONE OF THE BEST ways Thinkhouse PR could clean up its online reputation is to engage in conversation with the stream of commentary written about its business practises concerning e-mail spam. Several prominent Irish bloggers have written about Thinkhouse's tendency to fill inboxes with spam instead of useful public relations content. Damien Mulley has explained as much but it appears that Google has dumped Mulley's criticism from its results, along with everything else he posted on 23 August 2006.

Podcast for New Homes

HAMILTON OSBORNE KING and Glenkerrin Homes offer a podcast (their term) of the "brand new launch" of homes located in St Edmunds adjacent to Liffey Valley Shopping Centre, Palmerston, County Dublin, Ireland. It's a well-produced audio segment that makes Palmerston much more desireable than I've ever encountered while walking its pavements.

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Download the 11.1 MB MP3 file. Don't expect to find metadata in it.

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Missing Paragraphs from SBP

SOMETHING GOES MISSING in the Sunday Business Post coverage of music downloading. The article points to causes and effects of the digital music revolution but misses the key point that today's digital download market is now big enough to make digital-only music distribution a viable approach. As Chris Anderson says, "That market is only going to get bigger, so I'd expect many other music labels to follow this approach (as they're already doing with their digital-only labels for new releases of smaller bands, an effort that was led by Warner's Cordless and Universal's UMe)."

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Sorcha Nic Mhathuna -- "Slaves to our MP3 players"
Chris Anderson -- "Universal's Long Tail Experiment"

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Why keep e-voting

IRELAND'S LOW-TECH Taoiseach sees glimmer and hope in much-maligned e-voting. Most people who uses a computer screen for more than three hours a day have outlined clear and definite reasons to abandon the machines. Even Fianna Fail politicians carefully explain why e-voting is a bad idea for Ireland. Sometimes you make mistakes--spending EUR 50m on failed technology is a mistake. Recognise that and move on. My bet is that the machines will be up for scrap before the 2007 school term starts.

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Damien Blake -- "The continuing e-voting saga"

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