Month: March 2006

Thanks for all the links guys…

Total raised in Paypal: €75 + €25 + €30 + €20 + €5

= €155

+ Awards night €275.20

= €430.20

Thank you all! Feel free to keep donating

The Reg have a story on bloggers in the UK who are policemen, it appears the Met are cracking down:

The Metropolitan Police is the latest organisation to warn its members about blogging. The “guidance” was issued earlier this month and some blogging coppers have already stopped updating their online diaries.

World Weary Detective said: “It is therefore with deep regret and great sadness that I must announce that I will no longer be submitting posts to this blog. I cannot challenge Scotland Yard. I am weary indeed and cowardice is my bedmate.”

The advice makes clear the Met cannot stop officers blogging but they should “consider the impact of expressing views and opinions that…bring the organisation into disrepute” – some bloggers fear this “catch-all” offense could cover most blogs.

The best summary came from the Policeman’s Blog: “I can’t help thinking that by issuing this guidance the Met is trying to wrestle with a problem that simply doesn’t exist. For one thing, hardly anyone who calls the police on a regular basis is able to read, so there’s no chance of regular customers not dialling 999 because of something they read in a blog.

“Secondly, hardly anyone reads blogs, despite what the media says.

“Thirdly, most police bloggers could give official police press officers a lesson or two in connecting with the public.”

Something strange happened last week. Readers may remember that last July, I noted that my first name, Gavin, had put me near the top of Google searches. On Google.ie I was ranked third, while on Google.com it was usually about fifth, along with Gavin Friday and Gavin DeGraw. Now this is something I have checked out of curiousity, and maybe a little vanity, for a number of years.

Last week I was mysteriously dropped from the rankings. Not only am I not in the top 10, I am not in the top 100. Now I have a fair idea how Google’s technology works, and this could be a temporary blip, but it is very strange indeed.

It was the case that 20 to 30 people a day visited after searching simply for ‘gavin’. My traffic fell through the floor around the same time, perhaps Google have reorganised the index, tweaked the algorithm, or ominously, perhaps I was removed. I shall wait and see.

‘Who goes, you [don’t] decide.’ Cheers big brother.

Great to watch it again, my we are a rowdy bunch!

Jon Ihle’s piece is in the Irish Times today, and is figured prominently. It is great to see it, and Jon has done a nice even-handed job.

For those without a subscription, here’s the full text :

An anonymous online writer understood to be from south Dublin won the award for best blog at the first Irish Blog Awards at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin on Saturday.

The blogger, known only by the name of his idiosyncratic website, Twenty Major, also scooped awards for best blog post and most humorous blog post.

A man identifying himself only as Tim, a self-described “childhood friend” of Twenty Major, accepted the awards on behalf of the blog and its author, but declined to offer any comment apart from a brief apology on behalf of the mysterious blogger.

“Twenty couldn’t make it tonight,” he joked. “Maybe he can next year when there aren’t so many people after him.”

More than 160 members of the Irish blogging community attended the awards. A total of 1,700 people, not all of them bloggers, submitted votes in an online poll to decide the winners.

Founder and organiser Damien Mulley, a technical writer and chairman of Ireland Offline, a voluntary organisation that lobbies for the development of internet infrastructure, said the idea behind the awards was to expose Irish blogs to a wider audience and “to encourage passionate people to blog themselves”.

RTÉ 2fm DJ and blogger Rick O’Shea, the MC for the night, said the awards showed “blogging had gone from something done in dark rooms at 3am to something more mainstream”.

Members of the audience were disappointed but not surprised that the man behind Twenty Major – whose anonymity is as much a part of his authorial persona as is his frequently scatological approach to social commentary – chose not to attend.

Other winners included Annette Clancy, a management consultant, whose site Thinking Out Loud was honoured with best fiction and best personal blog awards.

Sinéad Gleeson, winner in the arts and culture category said: “Thank God some women won awards. With these things there’s a perception it’s male-dominated.”

The winner of best use of the Irish language, Conn Ó Muíneacháin, started his blog after getting tired of “looking for content I couldn’t find”.

“Maybe next year we’ll see some Irish language blogs in other categories moving into the mainstream,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Mr Ó Muíneacháin, a software engineer, is the first person to begin podcasting in Irish. He recently reached the 100 mark and currently does one podcast per day. Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video online for downloading, often through subscription services.

Microsoft Ireland was the largest sponsor of the awards, having offered €2,000 to pay for the function room at the Alexander after the number of registered attendees exceeded Mr Mulley’s estimates for a smaller venue.

“What I’d like is for [ the awards] to show that this isn’t just about online diaries,” said Mr Mulley. “We had stuff worthy of journalist prizes.”

Blogging: a beginner’s guide

Blog is short for “weblog”, a website or online diary to which items are posted on a regular basis in reverse chronological order.

Blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as politics or technology, although this is not a requirement of the medium.

A key characteristic of blogs is real-time reader interactivity and participation, usually through comment software.

Blog entries typically contain some combination of text, images and links to other websites, but video, photo and audio blogging are becoming increasingly popular as broadband becomes more widespread and multimedia technology becomes more robust and affordable.

There is some dispute as to who was the first blogger – some credit Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, others an American college student named Justin Hall – but it is generally accepted that blogging began in the mid-1990s. Although the term “blog” came into currency in 1997, blogging didn’t take off as a mass movement until the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, dramatically expanded the global appetite for political commentary, news and media criticism, which bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo) supplied in abundance.

By the time of the US presidential election in 2004, blogging was cemented in the American media landscape, as bloggers began breaking news stories, most notably discovering a story by CBS news on president George Bush relied on forged documents.

Blogging in Ireland emerged in the wake of this upsurge in the US. Apart from blogs such as best political blog winner Slugger O’Toole, which covers Northern Ireland and has won a loyal global readership, much of the Irish blogosphere steers clear of politics, preferring to focus on overlooked art forms, cultural ephemera or just the vicissitudes of daily life, among a huge range of topics.

Many of the first reports and images of the Dublin riots of last month appeared on blogs.

Annette Clancy, whose site Thinking Out Loud was honoured with best fiction and best personal blog awards describes blogging as the gathering of “communities of interest”.

“There’s a discourse out there that we’re wannabe journalists, but that’s a naïve understanding,” she says. “Blogs are curatorial spaces, individual statements of voice where sophisticated conversations about identity can take place.” -Jon Ihle

Irish blog awards: winners

Best Blog: Twenty Major – twentymajor.blogspot.com

Best Blog Post: Twenty Major – twentymajor.blogspot.com – “New York Diary”

Best Fiction: Thinking Out Loud – www.thinkingoutloud.biz – “47 Hours”

Best Comment: Kevin Breathnach – disillusionedlefty.blogspot.com

Best Technology Blog: Tom Raftery

– www.tomrafteryit.net/views

Best Use of Irish Language: An tImeall

– imeall.blogspot.com

Best Political Blog: Slugger O’Toole

– www.sluggerotoole.com

Most Humorous: Twenty Major

– twentymajor.blogspot.com

Best arts and culture: Sinéad Gleeson

– www.sineadgleeson.com/blog

Best group blog: The Community At Large – www.tcal.net

Best photo blog: In Photos – inphotos.org

Best personal blog: Thinking Out Loud

– www.thinkingoutloud.biz

Best contribution to the Irish blogosphere: IrishBlogs.ie

– www.irishblogs.ie

There are some excellent photos of last night’s events. So excellent that they are hot on Flickr:

I-drank-way-too-much.

Total raised 4 Victor on the night: €275.20
Total raised in Paypal: €75 €100
Overall total thus far: €375.20

Thank you all!

I rarely talk about personal things on my blog. People may have noticed that over the last 4 years I have almost never mentioned anything related to family or friends, and I did that for a reason. I chose to seperate my blog ‘persona’, if you will, from my own interactions in the ‘real’ world.

It is something which I believe works, I don’t think people lack an understanding of my personality from not hearing about family/relationships/friendships – though I don’t discount bloggers who take a different line.

The reason for my bringing this up now is that a cousin of mine (yes I have alot of cousins – due to large Catholic families on both sides), was playing rugby last year, and I believe while in a scrum, my cousin Victor was seriously injured. He is about the same age as myself, but since he lives in Longford and I live in Cork, and I come from a big-ass-Catholic-massive family, I haven’t met him in more than 10 years.

I do have fond memories as a child of going ‘blagardin’ in fields in Longford during my heyday in the ’80’s, this along with my brother and parallel cousin (we were the ‘townies’), and visiting those strange folk such as Victor who lived on farms, out in what I considered then, the middle of nowhere.

And how on earth could people live way out there anyways- there was just, like, nothing to do. Such were our urban views anyway.

I was always felt like such a weak-ass townie to Victor because I got hayfever.

Yes I was even allergic to the countryside.

So Victor, a man of a similar age to myself, related to me on my mother’s side is now very seriously injured, paralysed largely from the neck down. Effective quadriplegia. He appeared on the news today to talk about it, his Rugby club, Longford RFC, are going to extraordinary lengths to fund raise for his care and rehabilitation. This is no mean feat. 250 fundraisers will be at the Ireland match this Saturday to collect money for my cousin Victor. The injury has been described as one of the worst sports injuries ever sustained in Ireland.

You can watch the RTE news report here.

The Irish Independent today reported briefly Victor’s story, where he was pictured with Keith Wood, Gordon D’Arcy and Simon Easterby. (Pic not published but the story is there)

I don’t have alot of money by any means, and I don’t have a huge readership, but I want to help in some way.

I would like to ask that any of my readers who feel they want to contribute to this fund to either use the handy Paypal button below or on my sidebar:

(I am the account holder, but I will disclose any and all amounts donated publicly, and pass any funds donated directly to the Trust Fund, I stake my 4 years as a blogger as my worth), or if you don’t want to use PayPal, lodge money, of whatever amount, however small, to this account:

Ulster Bank, Longford (a/c no 54437094, sort code 98 60 30).

A website has been setup with some more information.

I would ask that any of the Irish bloggers specifically, who read this blog to link to this story and send traffic to it in order to maximise any donations made to Victor. If any bloggers have any specific ideas on technology related to people suffering from this type of condition then please leave a comment or get in touch. Donations of hardware or software, since alot of my readers are tech people, would also fit in. But it is at your discretion entirely, all suggestions are welcome.

This post will be the first for a some days, and I will place a permanent link to this post in my sidebar.

Update:

Total raised 4 Victor on blog awards night: €275.20
Total raised in Paypal: €75 €100
Overall total thus far: €375.20

Thank you all!

[via Jeff] This is probably the most important speech since Rupert Murdoch’s address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April last year.

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, made a speech to the Online Publishing Association last week. It’s in .doc format here.

Some key bits (I’ve ended up posting most of the speech, it’s all good):

My message today in this opening session of the OPA’s “Forum for the Future” is simple –our industry faces a profound challenge from home-created content – everything from blogging and citizen journalism to video mash-ups.

As media historians look back on this period, they’ll probably identify News Corp’s recent acquisition of Intermix Media, parent company of MySpace.com, as a turning point.

Looking at the numbers cold, $580 million was a lot of money to pay for a company with barely $20 million in revenues.
But sites like MySpace are redefining our world and providing an online forum for kids, music groups, their promoters and basically anyone with anything he wants to share.

Look behind the weirdness of some of MySpace’s inhabitants and Murdoch has now gained access to 54 million users (including one called Tom Glocer) – all potential customers for News Corp’s content.

More importantly he has the kind of market data that would make consumer industry bosses giddy – an early warning system of future trends and brand choices for the world’s youth market.

Mainstream media companies are now catching on to why 170,000 new members are signing up each day, and using this community to launch new albums, like ones by the Black Eyed Peas or the Arctic Monkeys.

Through Pepys and Boswell to Scott, Woolf and Bridget Jones – the diarist has always been a common thread through literary history.

But in the same way if we want to best understand the plague years in London we read Defoe, future generations will turn to our bloggers to decipher current events.

But let’s be really clear about what’s changed. It’s of course the nature of publishing. A Gutenbergian transformation has resulted in wooden and metal letters being replaced by the laptop computer and the Internet.

It’s only taken over five hundred years.

But of course just because anyone can now publish their own diary of views (and it is estimated that there are more than 80,000 new sites each week) it doesn’t mean that there’s a ready market of consumers.

Not everyone has the potential to be a Salam Pax.

The difference between now and the 1990s is the scale of distribution and the ability to search.

On the day the Tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists positioned around the world, mercifully none were on those beaches. On that fateful day we also had 1,000 stringers around the globe – but none of them were there either.

So for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones, digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story.

However, by day 2 our journalists got to the affected areas and it was a Reuters professional cameraman, Arko Datta, who took the iconic images which made the covers of the Economist, Time and Newsweek that week, and which won us the World Press Photo Award.

So in the end, you have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely. There is no monopoly on being in the right place at the right time.

So… we are now at our Crossroads. Old media (and ironically enough) that now means on-line publishing as well, has a choice – adopt these three roles to prosper or risk becoming less relevant.

1) To be the seeder of clouds;
2) To provide the tools for creation and;
3) To filter and edit.

We cannot be the choke-hold in a desperate effort to close the pipe – to block the new creators of content in a bid to protect our businesses.

But we need not be so fearful either. It’s easy to paint a disaster movie of a fragmented media world where millions of bloggers and “citizen journalists” offer an alternative to the BBC, CNN and, god forbid, Reuters.

But I don’t believe this will happen for two compelling reasons:

First, too much choice often means no choice at all.

Imagine going into a restaurant and being given a blank piece of paper – “order whatever you want” you are told. What do you eat? How do you know what the chef considers his specialities? While it is important to have the illusion of choice, people generally like less choice not more.

The consumer consciously or not, focuses on what he knows, what is familiar and, above all, what is trusted. This is why brands really matter.

Look at multi-channel TV or the Internet.
On digital TV in the UK you can access around 500 channels but what are the most popular? It’s not the Dating Channel (although I can’t speak for everyone in the room)- it’s BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4.

The Internet has millions of websites to choose from but how many do you actually visit regularly? I would argue that it’s probably no more than a handful.

The second reason to suggest content fragmentation does not mean disaster is this – we don’t have unlimited time to spend looking for new content.

Time is a non-renewable resource and one of the major influences in decision-making –- there are only 168 hours in the week, and evidence shows that people don’t want to spend extra time searching for new information. Again, brands serve a filtering function.

So in summing up, I believe that the role that “old” media companies have in the truly “new” media age, is that of content facilitator or seeder of clouds, tool provider and editor.

We are the go-between – providing the structure and support – the connective tissue between the information supplier and the consumer, even if they are often today the same person!

I believe that increasingly in a media market dominated by multiple sources, trust will become a key differentiator and a critical determinant in consumer decision-making.

Now what does that mean for Google and its decision to accommodate the Chinese authorities? I don’t think we really know yet. Reputation is hard won and quickly lost.

Just look at the impact on reputation that the Kelly Affair had on the BBC or Jason Blair on The New York Times.

These institutions recovered through decisive action, but if you lose the trust of your audience you lose your audience. Full stop.

In conclusion then, while writing a diary, publishing photographs and making videos aren’t exactly new phenomena, access to the printing press is.

But in an echo of the fears that Hollywood studios had after the success of the Blair Witch Project, not all media consumption will be home-created blogs – in the same way not all movies were made on a shoestring budget filmed on a shaky camcorder.

Don’t make the same mistake we made as an industry at the birth of on-line.

Protectionism doesn’t work – but neither does total surrender.

As media companies we have access now to a rich new world of sources, of talented writers, photographers, film-makers, would-be journalists, political diarists, stand-up comics, actors, musicians.

Let’s not turn away from the potential of all of this. But understand it and unlock it.

User created content has become part of our media world – but it’s part of the overall mix not the sole component.

Understand it. Encourage it.

Recognise that if you act now, you might just make it to Web 3.0.