Inside View

Tom Murphy Moves Up Feeding Chain

LONG-TIME READER Tom Murphy (at left) moves to the Microsoft main campus in Redmond, effectively moving up the feeding chain in the Irish blogging community. His pre-emigration send-off session happens at 8PM 18 Feb 09 in the Market Bar, Dublin 2. Years before the Irish Blog Awards, well before digital media associations gave out awards for best blogging, the Irish Independent profiled Tom and his blog. Tom brings an air of cordial communications to blogging, a skill set that everyone who blogs would do well to emulate. It's easy to use blogging as a bully pulpit, as a place to drop names or to spout inanity for the masses. Those tactics will not ensure you can hold onto your job while blogging. Tom Murphy has a mother lode of advice on best practise when blogging in the workplace that deserves careful attention for anyone reading this on their employer's time.

Best Tech Bloggers in Ireland

THE SHORT LIST for Best Technology Blogger in Ireland includes five people who inform my judgment regularly. In fact, I depend on software that gives me smooth-running email from one of the guys and another patron saint of Irish technology saves me a minimum of €110 every month when I use my mobile phone as a web browser. I get design ideas from one of the technology finalists and dependable hosting support from another guy. My money's with a repeat win for the most clever digital engineer I've met in Ireland.  I'm looking forward to hooking up with these technology experts in the Irish Blog Awards Hotel this weekend. I'll be in the hotel lobby listening to the action since the main conference centre is all booked out with standing room attendance.

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Direct link to MP4 clip: http://www.podcasting.ie/video/2009iba_tech.mp4
Embed this video.

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Unwilling Truncation

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I have tried living in a microcommunity of 12 second-long exchanges. In 12 to 15 seconds, you communicate around 140 characters of information. I don't think that leads to effective communications and I'm turning the boat in another direction. I'm going to focus on communicating through my blog and through rich media (i.e., podcasts and short video clips) instead of posting tweets. If successful, I'll reach my 5000th post on InsideView.ie before I make my 20,000th tweet. I'm changing my behaviour because I get a strong human experience on the heels of commentary flowing from blog items, Skype chats, Online Meeting Rooms conferences, FriendFeed comments and Moodle discussion with students. I don't think Twitter needs me pumping short text snippets onto its public timeline because Twitter has refocused online attention spans of millions of people down to a smaller interval than the 30-second spot. Since I never liked that short form of information anyway, I'm naturally moving the use of my time back to blogging and podcasting. That doesn't mean I'll stop using Twitter. I'll keep listening to Twitter through aggregation of flows, reading special searches I've invoked inside Twitter, and I'll get some direct message traffic from Twitter to my mobile phone. But I'm throttling the two-hour long periods that I used to allow Twitter to run in a tab on my laptop. I'm killing the bookmark for Twitter on my Nokia E90 because it's not delivering a meaningful conversational experience anymore. I will respect Twitter for its simple "how's it goin" flow and to detect trends and interesting pop-up ideas. As mechanisms for the crowd, add-ons to Twitter contribute to smart results. But I need more than a buzz monitor in my life and I'm not willing to watch idle chatter for hours of my work day.

I'm off to record something useful (see kit shown above left).

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I make Qik clips and experimental Quickcasts, some with Media Virgins.

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Mail2Blog Power

WITH THE START OF Irish Blog Week, I want to thank the blogging tools carried in my pocket--my cameraphone, my digital still camera, my Moleskine journal and my digital dictaphone. I have used those tools to produce blog posts while out and about (see above from a shot in late 2003). Most of the content recorded on those pocket-handy items hits the internet through a mail-to-blog capability. Through the years, I've also used mobile internet pages to upload text, photos, video clips and audio content. My level of service with O2-Ireland has improved year-on-year. It's costing me more each week to feed my mobile data habit than I spend in my favourite Irish pubs every week. Over the years, I've learned that it is much less expensive to fire away an email to my blog, as opposed to opening a web browser and typing the post into a web form for upload. And it's dramatically less expensive (and much faster) to read blogs through an aggregator like FreeNews. The web form method is the only way I can control the level of spam that I accept on my blog and via my e-mail.

Four years ago, when I roamed and wrote every day on my smartphone, I would post as may as 14 items from my Nokia Communicator to Irish Typepad. That level of activity didn't result in anything special. I didn't achieve any special standing. In fact, years after I started blogging, I know I'm writing to a niche audience that moves along, year on year.

Sunday News via Qik

CLAY SHIRKY gets the short treatment in the Observer Magazine. [1] John Naughton explains why you should send important documents as PDFs, and certainly not as Word files. [2] David Smith explains why quality TV spots can become viral content on the internet. [3] Ajesh Patalay gets an entire page to show how the Twitter family has infiltrated our cultural world. [4] The "business" fly-outs (i.e., Twitter for PR, idea sharing and offshot services) are quality ideas. In the Sunday Business Post, the Mini gets treatment in two sections. [5] [6] But in Ireland, the biggest news is Ireland sinking into default as a nation. Many pundits believe it is essential to cut public spending, but in an entitlement culture, severe cuts will bring down governments. Ireland also has a big problem with the soft touch of regulation in its financial sector. Some believe a wholescale clear-out is required there as well. [7]

Auto-Located Sunday News from Ireland

WHILE OUTSIDE TODAY, I tried to make a short clip about the Sunday news in Ireland but I dropped my wifi connection since relocating my wireless router behind a granite pole. While outside, Qik found me in Ireland and put a pin in the map next to my Qik clip. I need to fix the location problem associated with my Wifi router as fast as Ireland needs to clean up its economic mess. The G7 ministers refer to the current issue as the "Irish problem", one letter and six months removed from the Iceland problem. In front page broadsheet headlines, the Irish Sunday papers reveal toxic facts emerging from the Anglo Irish Bank, market fears about the undisclosed bad loan percentages in other major banks, exceptional levels of unemployment approaching Ireland before the summer, and public union unrest. Ireland's population is smaller than Philadelphia's, yet its government pays its ministers in annual pensions more than the Pennsylvania state government pays its top-flight electred officials in annual salaries. This level of comfort is unsustainable. The international community knows it and has redlined Irish debt at 350 basis points, meaning that for every €100 of debt taken on by the Irish government, at least €3.50 must be paid to insure against that debt. [1] But it's not all bad news in Ireland, as I explain in my Qik clip [19 MB MP4 file].

IrishEconomy.ie Gets A Nod

THERE'S A LOT WRONG with the Irish economy and you cannot depend upon the voices of the elected government to make sense of the mess. However, IrishEconomy.ie, cited as one of "the 100 best blogs" in the Culture magazine supplement to the Sunday Times, is a trustworthy group blog, written by economists. As described by Bryan Appleyard, "this blog is particularly essential thanks to its wide range of accomplished contributors (largely drawn from the academic world), its informed  yet jargon-free clarity and its commentary on both the latest cataclysmic economic developments and their coverage in the media." Recommended, even though it fails to make the cut for the "best group blog" shortlist at the Irish Blog Awards. It's shortlisted for an award for the best specialist blog.

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Bryan Appleyard -- "The 100 best blogs" in the Culture supplement to the Sunday Times, 15 February 2009.

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Losing Irish Payphones

THE PAY PHONE will be largely absent from the outdoors Irish landscape as a nationwide programme of removing underused fixtures gets traction. Small notices have been placed on the glass of dozens of payphones near where I live and work, including 85 in Limerick. Local residents have up to 16 March 2009 to loadge objections but they have to make a strong case for retention. Eircom recently interviewed more than 1000 people and discovered that four out of fie people had not used a public phone in more than a year. In my social circle, the only people using pay phones have run out of credit on their mobile phones. Either that, or their batteries were flat. It's not hard to find pay phones used as public urinals in Ireland. They're also subjected to exceptional vandalism, involving fires and smashed glass. When I first came to Ireland (before the Celtic Tiger was a cub), there were 8,500 public phones in the country. My first three phone calls were from Irish pay phones to international numbers.

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Decline of Penmanship

FIVE YEARS AGO, Wired asked, "Is the keyboard killing penmanship?" Two days ago, I stood and watched modern day scribes tap away on their wireless keyboards, connecting to a virtual neighbourhood miles away from their feet in the west of Ireland. Some of my well-regarded teachers would argue against permitting everything to be written on keys.

• Rich Gioscia, Director of design, Palm One, has said that when  you type, you tend to join ideas with "a sense of urgency" and that can lead to "rushing things. It may even get worse when we have things like voice recognition and speech-to-text input at our disposal."
• Lisa Marnell, Director, Handwriting Help: "Fourth and fifth grade kids are learning keyboarding when they would've been honing cursive writing, which is much faster than block printing. Note-taking becomes extremely unpleasant if they go off to a high school with just two or three computers per classroom. Also, many younger kids are starting school without the hand strength they need to write well--holding a mouse or playing with a Game Boy simply doesn't develop fine motor skills."
• Edward Tenner, Author, Our own devices: "Much everyday 19th-century handwriting was bad. But people had clerks who wrote in standardised scripts, or they did so themselves when necessary. Contemporary cursive tends to be all draft mode except on formal occasions, often delegated to calligraphers. Laser-printed uniformity has become meaningless because it can be achieved so cheaply. Today's recipient cares less that a personal note is half-legible than that it has been handwritten at all."

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Five years ago -- "Killing Penmanship" on Irish Typepad, 13 February 2004.
Pictured: The Universial Penman (1954) ISBN: 978-0486206165
Edward Tenner -- Our Own Devices ISBN: 978-0375707070

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Core Skills in Ireland

LISTENING TO LIAM NOONAN chatting with Matt Cooper on Irish drivetime radio reminded me of the difference between core skills and upskills in Ireland. It's a distinction made by Chris Horn who contends, "there is not so much a need to upskill, but to 'core skill'--to get back to fundamentals and thus ensure that we have a solid foundation of lifetime skills." It's something I think goes all the way back to primary school mathematics. Chris Horn believes to suceed as a knowledge economy, Ireland must ensure core intellectual skills enjoy a high priority treatment.