Blogger billionaire Cuban is being sued by the SEC over alleged insider trading. An interesting turn of events given his involvement in Sharesleuth.com.
I wonder how he will fare....
I’ve been helping Red Mum out with her Facebook group on the cervical cancer vaccine debacle. The figures are nothing short of staggering.
In just over 30 hours the group has gone from 1 member to nearly 900. The number of invites has gone from 300 to more than 5,000 in the same time period. Wall posts, many of them quite personal, now number 34.
At current levels of participation, the group should reach 10,000 in a few weeks, an unprecedented uptake for an Irish specific group. The ad promoting the group on Facebook has been displayed more than 50,000 times.
I fully support Red Mum in her efforts to get this nonsensical decision reversed, and look forward to the Government changing its mind....
This picture sums up my memories of DC pretty well:...
To the other side of the Atlantic. I guess I would call my trip eventful....
Gerry has pointed out that I somehow managed to call the US election back in January. I remembered one of those posts, but not the other two. My most clear cut prediction was in April. I guess I was reasonably confident throughout the year that Obama would win, as were many people I expect.
I was only slightly worried in the two weeks prior to the weekend after the September 11 shift in poll numbers - Obama was on the back foot for a good two weeks, in polls, and being on the defensive in the media.
On Sep 11 the Obama campaign said they would shift gear up until election day, and that they did. Lipstick on a pig was quickly forgotten and from about September 17 to November 4, McCain was almost entirely on the defensive. He never recovered from it.
The last week was an incredible...
I have no excuse for the lack of posting here other than the usual busy-ness of life. I’ll get back into writing mode very soon. Lots of blogposts and book reviews in my head, I just need to get them out through my fingers.
Speaking of reviews, I hope my loyal readers don’t mind me doing a very quick bit of blatant promotion of LouderVoice. We have just kicked off our 2008 BES offering. If the mayhem of the markets has you spooked, then you may find our tax-efficient offering interesting. All details over on our corporate blog.
So for my next post, should I do a rant on Annaghmore (greatest idea since the invention of the square wheel), a review of “Drive On” by LJK Setright (stunning), a review of “Full On Irish” by Kevin Dundon (patchy) or something...
Andrew Sullivan in the latest edition of the Atlantic.
An interesting observation about paper:
The points of this essay, for example, have appeared in shards and fragments on my blog for years. But being forced to order them in my head and think about them for a longer stretch has helped me understand them better, and perhaps express them more clearly. Each week, after a few hundred posts, I also write an actual newspaper column. It invariably turns out to be more considered, balanced, and evenhanded than the blog. But the blog will always inform and enrich the column, and often serve as a kind of free-form, free-associative research. And an essay like this will spawn discussion best handled on a blog. The conversation, in other words, is the point, and the different idioms used by the...
Sarah, a stalwart of the Irish blogging community, is finishing up at the Sunday Times and moving to the Irish Times. I wish her lots of luck, and I look forward to her latest columns....
My posts on Georgia have seen a spike in visitor activity and number of subscribers over the past week. Welcome to any new visitors or subscribers, I hope you like it round these parts. :-)...
The Irish Times have started a business blog, with Laura Slattery and John Collins. It’s a good move, but why does the Irish Times insist that I click “more” to read full posts? Just publish the full posts!
I have a roller on my mouse and can happily skim down the page. One cannot run out of room on a screen…unlike print....
For the last few months I’ve added a link to one of my favourite Irish bloggers to my sidebar. If your eyes wander over there now you’ll see Green Ink, Riemann’s Cut, and this month’s blog, Inside View by Bernie Goldbach.
All eyes are on the Irish Web Awards (this weekend!), Irish Blog Awards and the “Blog Post of the Month”, but why not show your appreciation for the great blogs you read by highlighting them? Have your own “Blogger of the Month”!
The blogs I add to that list are those blogs that no matter how much they post, I’ll always try to read every post because they’re entertaining or informative. Thanks guys (and gals in the future)!
Related PostsIrish Blogs and BloggersIrish Blogs Directory, the new...
My cousin Victor, injured in a rugby accident 3 years ago, will be on About the House tonight talking about his new home in Longford. It’s on at 20.30 on RTE 1....
Like blogs? Like wine? Then Julian over at Bubble Brothers is having a wee tasting this coming Thursday. All details over on the blog.
This coming Thursday, 25th September, Emilio Saez van Eerd of Casa de las Vides and Javier Navarro from Tintoralba (earlier tasting summarized in this post) will be making a flying visit to us, and I’d like to give them and their wines as much publicity as possible. Check out the EWBC stuff on Vinus TV.
The day’s events have not yet been decided - but I think it would be great if as many blog and twit and wine folk as possible could come along to a leetle tasting here at the Marina on Thursday 25th. I’ve already had encouraging responses from a number of people, both on the wine side and in techno-trousers....
Reader Ferdia has started a new blog over here.
Uncle Anthony has started a personal blog over there.
Welcome!...
On Kathryn’s advice I’ve been playing with some new tools. I added Apture via a plugin, and I must say I do like it. It makes it easy to add extra media to text-driven blog posts. I’ll keep it on for a while and see how it goes.
Next to test is Thomson-Reuters’ OpenCalais. It seems to do pretty much the same thing but in a different way.
What do you think of the addition of popup style links in prior posts, be it Flickr, YouTube or Wikipedia?
I might also start playing around with NowPublic.com, perhaps during my trip to Georgia....
Michael Hyatt, book publisher and fellow-twitterer, is probably not "my kind of guy". For one thing, he is a golfer. For another, he is a fan of Sarah Palin.Nonetheless, he is a thoughtful and successful man who often writes insightfully on his website. His latest article, entitled "Defending Your Brand Online" is one that I heartily commend to you (and, remembering Friday's post, to the EU...
They still don't "get-it". Locked in symbiotic obsolescence with the media that have served it so well, the EU elite is nonplussed by the Internet.The Irish Times has obtained a copy of what is apparently an internal Commission memorandum addressing the role of the media, as broadly understood, in the outcome of the vote.The story is here, while the full document is here.Looking at the document on its own terms, and allowing for its understandably biassed point of view, it is a fair enough survey of the "old-media" marketplace. Especially valuable, not least given the demographic analysis provided earlier of the composition of the majority, is the reminder that the Irish media space is populated to a very significant extent now by "Irishised" (not my neologism, I hasten to say) UK...
I seem to be getting deluged with people visiting from StumbleUpon… I’m not sure why though?
Welcome to the blog and feel free to browse around. :-)
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I’ve been working hard to prepare for a significant amount of traveling in the coming months. I have pretty much finalised my timelines, with all flights booked and accommodation sorted. Blogging, in a variety of forms, will be as regular as circumstances allow.
I should warn everyone that I will be playing with and testing a variety of new formats and all of these efforts should be considered strictly BETA. Some of it might be iffy, some of it might be boring, some of it might be something you could laugh at, but it will all be genuine effort to better tell stories.
During my travels I hope to update and upload regularly, using this blog as a testing platform for new ways of telling stories. Video, photos, audio and the written word, with the intention of using technology to...
Big thanks to Niall Paterson in Sky News for the link, praise indeed from a much appreciated longtime reader.
Eamonn has also been kind enough to offer advice and link up. I have also been in touch with Michael Totten, who I have exchanged emails and tips with, but unfortunately we won’t be in Georgia around the same time. I have left a comment with Doug Merrill, hopefully we can meet up in Tbilisi for a chat. I’ve been linked to by afoe in the past, and hopefully again in the future.
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It's a well-known tip: when you want to see if the turbulence you've just hit really was something to worry about, you look into the face of the air staff. If they look unhappy, then you should be too. On the journey from Lima's Jorge Chavez Internation Airport to the centre of Lima, I looked into the faces of one or two pedestrians that our driver almost decorated the front of our minibus with. I could see in their expressions that this was not standard turbulance.We had read, and been told, that Lima was not an interesting city to visit - just another big city with all the disadvanges that go along with that. But having heard the same things about Auckland, and found them not to be completely true, we were prepared to suspend our judgement for a while. That suspension of judgement...
Those of you who read this blog and were on my twitter knew I was fairly good at updating that in Germany but since I got back I'm useless! There is a reason for this. My tweets fell off after they had problems with the IM use. Thats how I used it so I havent used it really since then. Tough I went mad on it last night!On Friendfeed tough I discovered a new (well new to me) site and its like twitter in the fact that its micro blogging. Those with eagle eyes will have noticed the new box on the sidebar but, for those who haven't check out my plurk and have a poke around and maybe join it?I prefer it to twitter as to me its more fluid and interactive. its great that it keeps track of conversations so there is no searching through pages looking for stuff. Its all neat and tidy and there is...
8 years after I first registered conoroneill.com, this blog is finally hosted in Ireland where it belongs. Based on all the great feedback I heard about Blacknight and the fact that they are great supporters of the Irish tech startup community, I went with them.
We’re on the SOHO package with is just €35 per year ex-VAT and it does everything I need. The move was extremely easy to do. I just copied all the Wordpress files off the old host, copied the Wordpress Database, loaded both up on Blacknight and told GoDaddy that the blog is now there.
All in all, maybe an hours work including email account setup? The one glitch I had was solved by their support people in less than 10 minutes. The blog feels a lot faster, I hope it’s the same for you.
Full review coming soon once...
Ivan Santry has started a top-notch food blog over at Messy-Chef. Recipes, reviews and thoughts. The blog design looks gorgeous too.
Check it out....
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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Well it’s that time of year again. I started blogging on July 19, 2002, making this blog six years old today. Coincidentally my visitor numbers will pass 1,400,000 today too. A rather cool coincidence.
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...
Besides the coincidence of 1.4m visits on my sixth blogiversary, it is also the birthday of an old and dear friend, who I only met after my blogging started. And today the coincidences grew.
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...
I always find Wikileaks a source of amazement. The latest leaks included:
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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Where are all the listeners coming from? My first podcast from May is still being listened to and downloaded a few times a day. Almost nobody has left a comment. I have no idea where all these people are coming from, can anyone help? Are the podcasts being crawled and skewing the download figures?
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