Inside View

Ripe for Suits

A DOZEN teenagers are inside the Clonmel campus of Tipperary Institute for Schoolworks 2007 and if their predominant attitude doesn't mellow during their college years, a few of them are ripe for lawsuits related to ripped content. Simply stated, they grew up with Bebo, MySpace and easy MP3 access. They buy some music but share the experience more than I ever did as a teen because their sharing is jammed deep into their ears with gigs of tracks in their backpacks. If they head to the States for an academic year, they will certainly climb to the uppermost reaches of file-sharing space and once there, they could encounter the suits that protect the licensed artists. The RIAA has sued thousands of college students since 2003 and it's a little unusual for Ireland to avoid a high profile lawsuit related to music downloads. The industry's latest tactic is a page borrowed from debt collection agencies--start with an invoice for payment that leads to a negotiated settlement. If the recording industry keeps chasing its customers with lawsuits, it would seem logical to target Ireland before the end of this decade because if the Transition Year students I see are any indication, college campuses won't know the meaning of licensed music by the start of the next decade.

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Ellen Lee -- "Record industry introduces new strategy to combat illegal file sharing"
Mixfits 16 -- 18.1 MB 96 kbps MP3 file of Transition Year favourites.

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Ning Risen

EVER SINCE Diego Doval left Ireland for the 24-hour laundry (aka Ning), I've wondered what ver 2.0 would bring. Now Scoble gives a video shortshot of Ning's social networking tools. If you're nimble and smart, you can use Ning's tools to brand your very own social networking site.

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Robert Scoble -- "Social networking with Ning, version 2.0"
Ning -- "Create your own social network for anything." My dog wants one to rehome rescued puppies.
Hmmm. -- "Russell Beattie's group has been taken offline by its owner."

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Twitter Lingo

SINCE ENCOUNTERING blank HELP pages at Twitter, I decided to write a note to myself that lists all the Twitter text commands. These are essential when you need to quickly turn off updates from Twitter by using your mobile phone alone.

• off temporarily disables phone updates
• on turns phone updates back on
• get username Gets that person's last update
• get gets recent updates from all your friends
• nudge username encourages someone to update

Now you know.

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Thanks, Twitter Help.

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Win Free Stuff

IF YOU LIKE Feedburner, you'll probably like a Feedburner t-shirt. Interested? Then head over to the First Partner's blog, leave a comment on this FirstPartner post, identifying yourself and writing that you arrived via IrishEyes. There are three t-shirts to be won today!

Schoolworks Learning from Mobiles

AT THE 2007 Schoolworks programme in Tipperary Institute, Transition Year students are learning from mobile phones by using a Nokia N70 to snap and send images directly to Flickr. And why not? Social media is part of the global neighbourhood. Every teenager in the classroom has a mobile phone and our Schoolworks classroom is the first learning environment where the phones are squarely in the centre of the education process. Many Irish schools ban phones because they distract the flow of teaching and learning. We want to follow Marc Prensky's line of thought and embrace mobile phones as a pedagogical tool. It's an idea based on research offered online more than two years ago.

Schoolworks 2007 Starts

TIPPERARY INSTITUTE hosts another week of Schoolworks, this time in Clonmel, County Tipperary. Transition Year students will complete a variety of multimedia tasks, including snapping photos, producing web pages and creating a podcast by using wikis when preparing shownotes.

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Photos of gadgets and bling tell stories.
Photos of shoes show where we've been.
Photos of hands are most creative.

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Ever Clever from Podcamp Toronto

FROM THE LOOKS of its photostream, the flow of its twitterings, a cross-section of blog posts, live streams during the weekend and podcasts that will follow, Podcamp Toronto looks like the best technology unconference to arrive in 2007. I did not attend but I don't think I'm over-reaching with my appraisal because the congenial exchange of tech tips, business conversations and all-around friendly dynamic emanates from Podcamp Toronto. Parts of the information flow should be replicated by Barcamp organisers in Ireland because everyone benefits from sharing.

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Bonus Tip: Stream your podcasts through corporate firewalls by using the Winamp player. Thanks, Chris Penn. And Mitch Joel.

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Test Embed

UPDATED TWO HOURS LATER: Google Reader does not permit the Flash rendering of Twitter badges. The up and down hours on the Twitter badge are "undefined" in the Google Reader Ajax pane. Oh well. If you really want to follow twitterings, you need to subscribe to the RSS text feeds.

WONDERING WHAT a Shockwave badge looks like when it aggregates as a microblog into a newsfeed. Like the one from Twitter. Liam Burke was doing this microblog thing for weeks. Now a good cross-section of people attending Podcamp Toronto have used Twitter to connect at the event. I've pushed Twitter technology too far too fast and it made my mobile phone choke so I'm a little nervous about giving it access to my main phone number ever again.

 

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From topgold on twitter.com

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Journalism on Flickr

JOURNALISM ON FLICKR. Some good mainstream media images offered as one big photostream.  Some good journals too. The most common camera used is the SonyEricsson K800.

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Loadsa Love for Adobe

YOU CAN CITE several reasons that the developer community loves Flash but most people look no farther than YouTube where Shockwave powers the biggest boat of spontaneous content ever produced. Infomaniacs I know have hurdled the podcasting channel and they spend hours of meandering through user-generated Flash-powered videos. This is a powerful testimony to the ubiquity of Flash and it's accompanying by a "stunning growth of Adobe love among developers", as Scoble has seen. Everywhere I go I hear “Flash, Flash, Flash.”