Not Christopher Guest’s best movie but I always liked the title.
I’ve been shortlisted in the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards as front-man for LouderVoice. It’s in the Innovation category. If you have a spare minute, pop on over to the site and vote for all your favourite Irish web businesses. Your support is appreciated by us all.
I know the tech stuff annoys the foodie readers here and vice versa. So last week I started up a new Posterous blog over on conoroneill.net. It is much more high volume than this blog and consists mainly of pointers to interesting tech stuff, opinions thereof and the odd funny bit. So basically pretty much anything except food/Bandon, which will remain here.
I’ll do the odd cross-reference when it makes sense. And hopefully the volume here will improve over the Spring as I get into a gardening groove. next post up is one on Jimmy Doherty’s “From Crop to Shop” which may be one of the most educational programmes about food broadcast in the past ten years.
Fantastic mix of features in the PsiXpda. For those who loved Psions, this will suit you. For those who work in the corporate world, your IT department will love it, as it runs XP!
The PsiXpda handheld computer in action at Le Web from Conor O'Neill on Vimeo.
We have buildings all over Cork, empty. We have a recession. The hospitality industry is crippled. We need something that encourages tourism, makes use of some of that property and points the way to the future.
Can I suggest a Cork Computer History Museum?
What’s one of the biggest attractions in Silicon Valley? The Computer History Museum
What’s one of the biggest tourist draws in London? The Science Museum.
What’s one of Cork’s main tourist attractions now? The Butter Museum.
Where is the biggest cluster of successful tech companies outside of Dublin? Cork.
Randy Jordan has assembled one of the most incredible collections of classic computers anywhere. From IMSAI to Osborne to DEC PDP and Apple Lisa, he has it. Randy has offered the collection to be housed by those who should jump at the chance. They didn’t get it.
Those of us who do _get_ it have despaired when talking to Randy about his computers and the fact that they are almost never seen. The mini-collection he showed today at BarCamp Cork III blew our minds.
Watch this video:
Then think about the thousands of people who fly in and out of Cork every week and work for tech companies. Think about the brilliant but now sadly delayed idea of transforming the Cork docklands into a new tech hub. Think about all those tourists looking for something different. This could be the first step. A building full of technology that shows us the past so we can figure out the future.
Do you have a building lying idle and a vision for where you want Cork to be in 10 years time? Step up to the plate.
I’ve gone to Le Web every year since 2006. It’s the stand-out event for those working in the Web in Europe. Every December I head over to Paris and come back wit h a head full of ideas and plans.
Ewan Spence is another regular at it and it’s pretty much the only time we see each other every year. He has a great post over on his blog about what computer to bring this year. It seems like we are all going more and more lightweight each time (well our computers are anyway).
It inspired me to take this set of photos.
Le Web 2006:
Le Web 2007/2008:
Le Web 2009:
Le Web 2010?:
The stats around Facebook in Ireland are staggering, they are racing towards 1 millions active users here. That just blows my mind. Some are predicting they’ll have more pageviews globally than Google by next year!
Whilst I initially didn’t have much time for it, coming from the open blogging world, bit by bit its value for me has grown. Even at the simplest level, it is the only site where many people I know from school and college ever congregate online.
In our business, LouderVoice, we have hooked ourselves into Facebook so that when people review products/services on our clients’ web-sites, those reviews can be published to Facebook too. It’s an amazingly powerful marketing tool. You can see it in action here. That system can be placed on any web-site in as little as 10 minutes.
If you are on Facebook or you are thinking of joining, why not become a fan of LouderVoice there? You’ll see a sample of the best content from our site and customers posted there along with questions, ideas, polls and competitions.
If you are a small business, then you should really consider creating a Facebook Fan page. It only takes a few minutes and can be a great way of interacting with customers and fans. You only have to look at the success of the Hairy Baby one to see how well it can go!
If you had never heard of Twitter before, the relentless coverage of it on RTE and elsewhere recently must surely have changed that. It’s a simple system for messaging people who follow you but in a completely public way. You can pick whose messages you see by default too. Here’s a quick snapshot of those I follow:
One of the nice aspects of Twitter is that it leads to real-world interactions too. There are regular meet-ups called Tweetups where people can have a few drinks, maybe a bite to eat and have a bit of proper social interaction.
Ann Donnelly is organising West Cork’s first ever Tweetup in Clonakilty this Friday. It’s on in the Courtyard Bar in Clon from 8pm. If you are on Twitter or want to find out more about it or just want to meet with some friendly people then why not head on over? All details are on the blog.
Here are some of the West Cork (I’m including up to Ballincollig and Macroom in West) Twits that I know about: Ann, Mike Kane, Matt Kane, Anthony Creswell, Catherine, Simon Whelband, Calvin Jones, Walter Higgins, Me, Randy, Margaret Jordan, Gordon Murray. If I’ve missed you, leave a comment with a link to your profile!
I’m sure you bought a USB stick or portable harddisk with the best intentions in the world but how often do you actually backup irreplaceable files? How would you feel if those wedding pictures disappeared in a puff of smoke?
That’s why I consider online backup a must-have. I only recommend two services and the one at the top of my list is PutPlace. This low-cost solution by an Irish company is simple to set-up and then you just forget about it. All of your important files are kept safe on Amazon’s amazing storage system S3 and you can recover what you need with a few clicks.
The important thing about PutPlace is that it for consumers. So whilst HP gives up and shutters Upline, PutPlace goes from strength to strength.
Backup is boring but the day you lose those files is the day you wish you’d signed up for PutPlace. My buddy Joe, the founder, will even give you 3 months free. Just use the discount code “joe”!
I’ve mentioned Twitter many times on this blog. Bit by bit, it is going mainstream. It’s a great way to hang out online (or on your phone via SMS or mobile web) with people you like and who can fit their thoughts into 140 chars.
But Twitter has a ton of practical uses too, one of which is saving money. My buddies in Nooked have created a ryanair_ork account there which publishes some great special offers regularly on Ryanair flights from Cork.
Signing up on Twitter only takes a moment, then just “follow” ryanair_ork and enjoy the savings.
I just got a mail from the lovely people in The Good Things Cafe in Durrus to tell me that the awesome Carmel was on the Foodtalk programme on Newstalk Radio.
Foodtalk is hosted by one of the best food bloggers anywhere, Caroline Hennessy from Bibliocook.
If you want to listen online and subscribe so that you get each broadcast, then there are a bunch of different ways of doing it.
On your PC, one of the best tools is MediaMonkey. Install it, tell it about Foodtalk, leave it running in the background and it’ll automatically download the new episodes so you can listen at your desk.
If you have a newer car stereo or (like us) one of the replacement Lidl/Aldi ones, then you can copy those audio files onto a memory card or USB stick and play them in the car when you like.
Lots of the newer phones with Wifi also have podcasting capabilities. The Nokia N95, N95-8GB, N96 etc come with the software built in. Owners of the E51, E63, E71 etc can download it from here. You have to manually tell the application to check for new episodes but it takes care of the download etc once you do that. You can listen directly on the phone or plug it into the line-in on your stereo or car-stereo.
If you have an iPod, I’m sure it’s all very similar.
Note that most of the radio stations, in particular RTE, have a ton of podcasts you can get like this. I recently listened to all of a year-old series about De Valera I grabbed from the RTE site on my N95-8GB.
