This has led to a class division in the financial affairs of the nation. There are now two monetary classes in Ireland: the ‘investor class’ and the ‘lotto class’ (see Barbara Defoe Whitehead, ‘A Nation in Debt’; www.theamericaninterest.com).

A Nation in Debt, July 1.

Or maybe we just read the same stuff.

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Of course the blog didn’t start out in its current form. I started in pure HTML, and later moved on to Dave Winer’s Radio Userland. After losing a month or two of posts I abandoned the unreliable software. Since it was client side rather than server side, it just ran into too many problems. I then made the move to Movable Type, which was not a bad piece of software. I think the version I used for the longest period was 2.661. It ran into some problems too, mostly to do with spam comments.

After evaluating a few options for blogging software, I settled on Wordpress, which I still use. It has always proved reliable, and since installing it it has captured over half a million spam comments. Big thanks to Donncha for helping to create this cool software. I think in the early days his blog was on a linux server, bit I still remember reading him back when there were very few bloggers in Ireland.

Other bloggers back then were Karlin, Bernie, Tom, the lads at Back Seat Drivers (including Jon Ihle of the Sunday Tribune and Dick O’Brien of various publications).

I would especially like to thank Bernie though. We met via blogging, and ended up discussing a good few subjects over the phone in the early days. He prodded me into using blogging software in the first place, and encouraged me no end over the years. Karlin also passed on some media inquiries in the early days which was very helpful for getting noticed, though I’m not sure if she reads my blog!

Blogging has allowed me to meet some really cool people over the years, and not just in Ireland. In 2003 I moved to London and got in touch with lots of trail blazing bloggers, the lads at Samizdata, Tom Watson MP (blogging got me into the houses of Westminster several times, usually boozing with Tom), my internship at the New Statesman and writing I did for them was with the help of Roger, who I knew via Chris.

After the whole John Gray controversy (Which drove a large portion of that 1.4m visitors to this blog after being mentioned on all of the top US blogs), I holidayed in Toronto and met some of the coolest Canadian bloggers, including Rannie Turingan a several time blog award winner. He also took the portrait photos I still use to this day. A really cool guy.

And then even in Washington in 2005 I met up with Steve Clemons, who’s blog continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Steve introduced me to Juan Cole and at the conference Steve organised I got to see George Soros, Wesley Clarke, Francis Fukuyama, Madeleine Albright and many others, live and in person. A truly amazing experience. But it didn’t end there. Blogging seems to get you certain places, so after the conference myself and some other people from the New America Foundation went back to Steve’s house for beers and music. A brilliant night too, and you could not meet more welcoming people.

Going back to university impacted on my blogging, but over the years it has more than paid for itself in experiences and people. As well as getting a job in the Examiner on foot of my blogging. Anyone who asks why I would write for free, or put all this time and effort into something that I get little direct reward… well just look at the indirect rewards.

Blogging rocks, to say the least.

Update: Thanks to Steve for the shout out!

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My paternal grandmother died at 7.30 this morning, after a long illness. My abiding memory of my grandmother is the best baking you can imagine. As a child I would visit her home and delight in her apple and rhubarb tarts (always tonnes of sugar on top), she would always treat me to potato bread with eggs, the best boxty I’ve ever tasted, and home made jam that was right from the back garden.

She was a deeply Catholic woman, who had 14 children in her lifetime. This means I have a heck of a lot of cousins.

I will always be proud that I was one of the first relatives (along with my uncle and brother) to visit her uncle’s grave in the Somme. Despite him having been buried there after the First World War, we were the first to venture there and visit the grave in 2000. She was very pleased with that indeed.

As long time readers will know, I rarely talk about personal things on my blog, it was a decision I made right at the start. And it is a decision I usually stick to. Maybe some find it cold to put the two together, but normally I would not have posted the news at all, were it not for the significance of the date.

I guess death makes you think a little more about life. I appreciate the times I spent with my grandmother, and I don’t believe I will ever see her again. When you die, you die. And memory is a powerful tool when you apply it, that seems like the best way to an afterlife - live in people’s memory.

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UK Counter Insurgency Operations Doctrine 2007
Secret Ritual of Sigma Phi Epison 1984
US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual FM 31-20-3
UK Tactics for Iraq and Afghanistan 2007
US Suppression of Enemy Air Defense chapter 2
Venezuela buying millions in spy equipment from US Phoenix Industries 2000
US Army CALL 05-6 Operation Enduring Freedom III 2005
UK and Danish Rules of Engagement for Iraq 2006

Some very interesting reading.

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Update: Sorry, posted with an iPhone 3G. Maybe I will get one.

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Hehe.

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It might take a while to get his blogging mojo going, but it is definitely a blog to watch.

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The main thing I’d try to communicate to the newspaper-industry readers of the Forrester report is that RSS and blogs are not unfortunate necessities, they’re one of your brightest hopes. Few US newspapers will ever be able to compete with the NYT in terms of attracting inbound links for the nation’s biggest stories. But when it comes to local content, the field is wide open: the NYT isn’t even the best newspaper for metro news in New York City, let alone anywhere else.

So embrace the bloggers in your area, encourage them, feed them, give them full RSS feeds sliced and diced to whatever specifications they desire, and let them bring you the new generation of readers which will replace the old print subscribers who are dying out. Don’t worry if you don’t make a lot of money serving ads to those bloggers directly: they’re much more useful as traffic drivers in any case.

Interesting too are the questions of why the NY Times should be bought by Google.

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Incidentally, he isn’t too happy with other blogs ’stealing’ the name of his finance oriented blog. The LA times also recently launched a blog with the same name.

Who next? An Irish paper?

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Best of luck Shane!

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