Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Buzz, Facebook, Google, information, Readr, twitter, video, YouTube

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Sara and I have been plugging away at out pet project, humor site Daily Shite, for months now. We’ve been watching it grow slowly and celebrating as we’ve hit various milestones. We’ve watched with pride and more than a fair few glasses of wine (to celebrate the occasion) as 100 views a day went past, then a 1000, then 5000, 10000 and 20000. We whooped and cheered like we’d one the lottery when we broke our first 50000 day, and last night we sat back in sheer amazement as we soared beyond our first 100000 (one hundred thousand) day.

This post isn’t to pimp out Daily Shite although you really should visit and join the Facebook page while you’re at it. It’s to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, stumbled and dugg posts, retweeted us and pimped us to their friends. To our authors for their contributions and to our readers and friends who have been emailing and sending contributions via IM.

Most of all I want to thank Sara. She’s done a ton of work behind the scenes, not just putting up posts and pimping Daily Shite left, right and center and deserves more credit than I for us hitting this milestone.

Now, bring on our next challenge – the 200000 day

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Daily Shite, Sara, thanks, traffic, visitors

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Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see what I mean. None of the people above @John_C are on the “Daily Shite Authors List” yet there they are on the list page, clear as day.

I’ve also been seeing something similar happen when I view my @ replies, where there are results that quite plainly are not replies to me in any way, shape or form.

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3. Daily Del.icio.us

© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: broken, lists, replies, twitter, users

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Trust me the numbers are fine!

It’s a rare occasion that I break away from reading an excellent post to write a post of my own. Usually I wait until I am finished, have digested it and then put fingers to keyboard.

My friend, Steven Hodson, wrote what has so far, been an excellent post called “The return of the LP and the future of book publishing” for the Inquisitr, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read it all because I was rudely interrupted by The Inqusitrs need to auto refresh their pages.

I don’t run into this problem too often and normally Inquisitr posts aren’t lengthy enough for me to ever encounter it but I have to ask why sites make their pages auto refresh?

For those of you who don’t know you can make any web page automatically reload after a set period of time by putting a small piece of code in the header like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />

Inserting code like this is good for only two things:

1. Updating a page that pulls some sort of dynamic content and would otherwise require the user to hit refresh.
2. Artificially inflating your page view numbers.

FYI: Unless it’s for point number 1 all it does is piss people off.

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Post tags: Inquistr, intrusive, refresh, reload, scam, shady, Steven-Hodson

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Service or Computer?

Let me preface this post by saying that I will not be buying an iPad (not in the foreseeable future anyway). I own an iPod Touch and that is the end of my Apple affiliation.

I’ve been reading all the complaints about the iPad: No flash, no multitasking, it’s just a big iPod Touch, it’s a fanny pad sanitary towel in disguise etc…

What nobody seams to realize is that the iPad, just like its baby brethren the Touch, is not a computer (not in the traditional sense), it is a service.

It’s much like a TV. You can turn it on and watch or play what you like, but that’s it. You can watch channel 1 or channel 27 and you can install more channells (applications) when you take a bigger sattelite or cable subscriptions(the App store).

The iPad is not meant to be a desktop, laptop, netbook replacement.

It’s a stylish little one trick pony for people who like to be locked in and like to do one thing at a time.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, computer, Flash, iPad, iPod, service, Touch, TV

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Where am I?

A bit of a laugh for Saturday. I just couldn’t resist posting this!

Go to Google.

Type “Where is Chuck Norris” into the search box.

Hit the “I’m feeling lucky!” button.

Enjoy

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Post tags: Chuck Norris, funny, Google, humor, laugh

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Bound by the law?

Sourceforge is now blocking access to sites from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

Since 2003, the SourceForge.net Terms and Conditions of Use have prohibited certain persons from receiving services pursuant to U.S. laws, including, without limitations, the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security. The specific list of sanctions that affect our users concern the transfer and export of certain technology to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list. This means users residing in countries on the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanction list, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, may not post content to, or access content available through, SourceForge.net. Last week, SourceForge.net began automatic blocking of certain IP addresses to enforce those conditions of use.

In all the commentary I am seeing, nobody has asked the very simplest and perhaps most obvious of questions: Why now?

These terms have been in place for nearly 7 years now. (The Entities list has existed since 1997)

Lets forget for the minute that one hell of a lot of the software hosted by Sourceforge is developed with the help of, or even entirely by, people living outside the U.S.

Lets also bear in mind that SourceForge has claimed that this is because of the “transfer and export of certain technology” to foreign persons and governments on the sanctions list, yet doesn’t give any details about what this technology is?

Surely everything on SourceForge can’t contain dangerous technology? Why not just restrict the programs which contain those technologies?

Not to mention the fact that everybody knows that any idiot, never mind some evil axis human overlord wannabe wouldn’t be able to use a proxy or Tor to get past the IP filtering!

Or is there something more at play here?

Google and China perhaps? Did the U.S. government pay SourceForge a call and “politely” remind them that these laws exist? Maybe because the government wants to show that it is willing to enforce it’s laws and send a subtle hint to China that the hacking of U.S. companies and theft of their I.P. might get them added to these lists?

I find it very hard to believe that the guys at SourceForge have had a sudden moment of conscience and, out of the blue, decided to comply with laws that have existed for almost 12 years and to their own terms and conditions which they have ignored for the past 7 years.

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Post tags: america, Axis, blocking, China, Google, governement, laws, open-source, Software, SourceForge

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In fact, if every single internet user in North America were to shuffle off this mortal coil simultaneously then the internet would loose less than 1/7th (one seventh) of its user base.

Just compare the numbers for 2009 as posted by Royal Pingdom and ask yourself why people look to America and the U.S. market for everything when even the European market has almost double the users?

1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).

18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.

738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.

418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.

252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.

179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.

67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.

57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.

20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 48 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: america, American, centric, Internet, markets, numbers, Pingdom, Royal, users, web

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Tell or Don't!

You’ve got  real life friends so you know that privacy is never a simple “yes or no”, “tell or don’t tell” matter.

There are things that you tell your spouse or best friend that you wouldn’t tell anybody else. There are things you would say to some friends and not to others. When you are out a party there may be pictures that you would let your friends and your brothers see, but would result in a serious ear bashing from your mother.

I’ve always been a strong proponent that our online activity is an extension of our offline activity. That online relationships mirror the dynamic and complex relationships that exist in our offline lives.

Believing that, I find it counter-intuitive to have social networks like Facebook push us further and further into a binary way of thinking about privacy. Essentially boiling privacy down to a “post it or don’t” issue. Forcing us to treat all of our online “friends” as equals.

As much as we may not like to admit it in front of our friends, we know that even our offline, real life, friends are not equal in our eyes. That is why the terms “best friend” and acquaintance exists.

Instant messaging clients, with the exception of ICQ (or at least it used to be when I actually used it), do the same thing. We are either online or off. Visible or invisible. Not a case of  visible to some and not to others. We’ve all put our phone on silent from time to time to “ignore” that call from a friend or family member. Or simply turned it off. While we might not want one person to know we are online, or available to talk, we might and sometimes do desperately need other people to know we are available to talk and that we want to talk. Skype are you listening?

With social networks, instant messaging and almost every other form of online communication pushing us into a binary way of thinking about privacy, we have to ask ourselves if that is what we really want? Would we stand for it, or be able even to successfully get through our lives if privacy in real life was dual choice only?

Tell everyone, or tell no one?

Shouldn’t we be pushing for finer grained control and groups rather than simply eradicating privacy? Or do we want  everyone to be burdened with a lot more secrets and worries that they would never be able to get off their chest and for confidentiality to cease to exist?

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: binary, Facebook, friends, ICQ, life, Messaging, Privacy, realtionships, Skype, social-networks

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Search Better!

It can be very frustrating to click through page after page of results on Google to to find the result you were searching for.

Contrary to belief of many “non-geek” types the issue is not with Googles result but rather with how we search for them. A lot of us search for just one word when we search, I know I do, and the differences between searching for “car”,  “honda”, “red car” and “red honda civic” are substantive.

If you tried searching Google for the terms above I’m sure you’ve already figured out that the more descriptive you are the better the results will be, but being descriptive is not the “end all and be all” of efficient searching.

Google (and most other search engines) accept a lot of search commands, or operators, which you can employ to further narrow the results.

For example, earlier today Sara was searching for “romance” while researching material for Everyday Love Stories. Much to her chagrin she kept getting results involving Lady Gaga, so I suggested using the “minus” operator to remove Lady Gaga from the results (now if only that would work from the air waves).

romance -”lady gaga”

There are a lot of operators which work on most of the major search engines such as: wildcard (*), OR, phrase search (“phrase”) etc…

If you you want to make your searching more efficient and by extension your day more productive a good place to start is Google Search Basics help page which lists a lot of the operators and explains their usage.

Happy searching.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, how-to, Lady Gaga, operators, productivity, Sara, Search-Engines, searches, tips, wildcard

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With a little help from Sara, I spent tonight getting my podcasting rig working and set up for properly recording podcats over Skype (or any input) and it looks a heck of a lot better than it does in the picture below now that I’ve tidied all the cables away.

Once I’ve located a good place to host the MP3’s for the show, then I’ll start cranking out the podcasts again.

Any recommendations for a good host?

Getting the gear set up

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: audio, files, host, MP3, picture, Podcasting, Sara, Skype

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Simple, genious and I love it.

I am wondering two things though:

First, how did Microsoft not own that already? I thought it would be obvious to most people that when you own a major search engine (or any site) that you also buy as many of the typical typos variations as possible.

Second, how long before Microsoft tries to get a hold of it and take it down?

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bing, domain, Google, Microsoft, Patrick McAuliffe

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A right to think?

You might not think it was possible to be arrested for a joke you made on Twitter, but that is exactly what happened to Paul Chambers.

He was due to fly to Ireland on January 15th but after the extreme bad weather on January sixth which resulted in the closing of the airport he was to fly from, he jokingly posted the following:

You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

We’ve all done it. We’ve all said and though things similar to this, but for Paul Chambers it resulted in being arrested by police to whom he had to explain what Twitter was because “they’d never heard of it”. It resulted in having to pay to be bailed out, being suspended by his employer, having his laptop, iPhone and home computer taken away and he is still waiting to find out whether or not he will charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax.

It’s overkill, it’s ridiculous, it displays a complete misunderstanding of the law (by the police no less) and it is about to become the “norm” in our society.

Everyday we make statements such as the one Paul Chambers made. While watching a match on TV – “I’ll kill him if he doesn’t score”. Parents – I’m sure you’ve said “I’ll kill (enter child’s name here) if he’s late home” and other such things.

We do it on blogs,  on social networks and we do it in our day to day conversations. If you need convincing just do a search on twitter for “I’ll kill” or “I’ll blow up” and watch the comments scroll by.

What people and police don’t understand is that expressing the desire to do something does not mean that we *will* do something.

I have a desire to throttle Hugh Grant. I can’t stand they guy. I’ve expressed that desire verbally and in writing a number of times. However, expressing the desire to do something does not mean that I would, have or will. I have (apparently) the ability for rational thought, for self control and to know the difference between right and wrong.

Just because I don’t have much money and say that I would love to “rob a bank”, it does not mean that I will do it or ever had any real intention of doing it. I know it’s wrong and desire aside, I will be driven by my own moral compass. Or to put it another way I know it’s wrong so I won’t do it!

As I said, these types of arrest are about to become the norm rather than the exception.

As governments and law enforcement agencies continue their futile attempts to crack down on terrorism (lets be honest, if you want to do it they can’t really stop you until it is too late) they continue to disregard the difference between “thinking about doing something” and actually “doing something”.

While arrests like these are becoming more common place, we continue to be ourselves, to use social networks and forums, expecting to have the right to think what we want. At the same time companies like Facebook continue to make our previously private data open in the name of data-mining, page views and advertising revenue, providing law enforcement agencies, which are supposed to be protect us, with the means to criminalize use because we choose to think and express ourselves.

To quote civil libertarian Tessa Mayes, an expert on privacy law and free speech issues:

Making jokes about terrorism is considered a thought crime, mistakenly seen as a real act of harm or intention to commit harm.

The police’s actions seem laughable and suggest desperation in their efforts to combat terrorism, yet they have serious repercussions for all of us. In a democracy, our right to say what we please to each other should be non-negotiable, even on Twitter.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arrested, crime, criminals, Facebook, freedom, Paul Chambers, Privacy, speach, terrorisim, thought, twitter

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All talk?

David Drummond, SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer for Google, just dropped a very provocative post over on the official Google blog.

Normally a post of this nature would go pretty much unnoticed (except by the tin-foil hat wearing security freaks) as it details an attempted attack on Google and a number of other companies operating within China.

What makes this post truly interesting however is the tone of the post, which, to my mind at least insinuates that the Chinese government were themselves responsible (or at least played a part), without ever coming out and actually making that accusation.

While that was provocative enough, the real sensationalism was to be found in this bold statement:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Wow, it sounds like Google is going to pull out of China. After all we know the Chinese government won’t back down, so what choice will they have?

To be honest, it’s all saber rattling. Google is trying to put pressure on the Chinese government, a regime that it knows doesn’t even generally bow to the massive weight of global political and public opinion.

In fact, Google is so aware of this that they provided themselves with a back door within their statement:

and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law

I’m confident that the settlement will come, one way or the other, and there are a number of reasons for it.

First and foremost there is the financial situation. Simply put, the amount of money Google will lose.

In Q2 of 2009 there were 338 million internet users in China and Google was the search engine of choice for 23.7% (about 80 million) of those users in Q3. That’s more users than North America which had 246.8 million users.

Add that to the fact that the Chinese market is growing rapidly as internet penetration is only 26.9% (or 1 in 4 people are online) compared to the saturated US market which has 74.2% (or 3 out of 4 online) penetration.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is too much at stake to walk away and too much potential for growth.

Could Google really walk away from that? Could they honestly allow their market share in China to be eaten up by Baidu (the number 1 search engine in China) or to allow Ballmer to walk Microsoft in there and expand their market share? Or even better have Ballmer cut some sort of a deal with the Chinese government?

Sara, Steven Hodson and others have pointed out that Ballmer wouldn’t walk into that hornets nest. I think he would. What is there to lose?

Microsoft already operates Bing in China so it won’t be as if they can be demonized for pushing into the territory.

The digiratti may get up in arms about it, but who in the real world listens to them? Once they leave the geek twitter/blogosphere they have no real influence over the masses, no matter how they may delude themselves. Lets make it very clear-being famous in the blogosphere is nothing but an ego trip. It comes with no power and you won’t be recognized if you walk into the average pub.

Mainstream media will pick up on the story, but they’ll likely focus on the fact that Google is pulling out and not who is staying in. Even if they did, you can be sure Microsoft would have an army of PR experts ready to be on the tube and tell everybody how they’re trying to do the right thing, by sticking it out and fighting for the Chinese peoples right by providing them a service, working with the government and trying to affect change. Not like childish Google who couldn’t take the heat so took their toys home to play in their room alone.

The number of activists who may give out about Microsoft (and others) staying in China will be many, they will be loud, rant and rave on twitter, get their backs up and shout from atop their high horses, but very few of them will do anything about it.

Only a very minute percentage will actually bother to stop using Bing, or to not buy a Microsoft product and even their outrage will be short lived before they go back to their old habits.

Most will forget what they were angry about after a few days, and the real world will have forgotten about it within 24 hours of the mainstream media miking it.

The bottom line to a company like Microsoft would be an increase in revenue from the Chinese market that would far, far outweigh any potential loss or fall out from the few malcontents who actually do something about it rather than just rant on twitter and blow hot air on their blogs.

Public opinion can be a wonderful thing, but it only works as long as the public pays attention. In this day an age the public has an attention span that can be measured in minutes. The next time Angelina and Brad adopt, that Madonna farts or Obama stares at a girls ass, it will all be forgotten about.

The Chinese government has a stubborn streak and disregard for international opinion that is beyond legendary and Microsoft are definitely not above doing something that may not immediately be popular in order to gain a long term advantage and the public is too wrapped up in dealing with their own economic woes and miserable lives to really care who is providing search results to the Chinese.

Finally and above all, Google is not a public service. They are a business and their primary responsibility is not to their users but to their shareholders. Leaving China would not be in their shareholders best interest.

Google are testing the waters to see if they can get a concession. It would take some serious brass balls to pull out of the Chinese market and give their foothold over to competitors. Brass balls, which for all Google has done in the past, I think are more like two rolled up socks stuffed down the underpants.

They may look impressive from afar, but they don’t hold up to scrutiny.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: attack, Baidu, Ballmer, Bing, censhorship, China, Google, market, Microsoft, Search-Engines

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The chart is tongue in cheek but I wonder how many of it’s “predictions” will become reality.

Countdown to extinction?

(Click the image to see the chart full size.)

There are two predictions that I have a problem with:

1. The extinction of “A Good Nights Sleep” in 2040 – That died with the invention of curry, alcohol, women, work… society in general!
2. The death of “Cher” in 2050 – That woman has so much plastic in her she’s likely to exist until the planet itself is consumed by the expansion of the sun.

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, chart, Cher, european union, extinction, humor, predictions, sleep

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How do you know?

While writing my post about what to do with draft blog posts, I typed in the word “repurposed” into the editor and the spell checker in Firefox highlighted it as being incorrectly spelled (it’s doing it now as I write this post).

It offered me the options of “re purposed” or “re-purposed”. The spell checker built into the WordPress editing panel also offered me the same alternatives.

I know how to spell “repurposed” and a quick Google supported it so I just ignored it and continued on with the post. Yet, I am sure that the vast majority of people will either not bother to question the suggested alternatives and go with the one that “looks” correct or simply not spell check their posts at all.

When I questioned the results offered by the spell checker I, as I’m sure most of people who question the results do, typed the word into Google and compared the results. Unfortunately as more and more people accept the spell checker version, more and more results online will reflect that spelling and it will appear in the Google results as if the incorrect spelling is in fact the correct version.

Over time this will lead to the incorrect version becoming the “normal” and predominantly used version as both the spell checkers and the search engines reinforce that it is correct.

It’s an obvious conclusion then that spell checkers have a great potential to change how we spell words in the English (and any for which they are employed) language.

There’s a lot of responsibility with that. Language and spelling will always evolve but I believe that it is the duty of applications which employ spell checkers and those who maintain such databases to ensure that they are accurate and comprehensive in order to prevent the unnecessary dilution of the language.

I wonder if there is the need for a central spell check database or authority to maintain these databases from which applications like Firefox and platforms such as WordPress can pull  spell check data, as opposed to everyone pulling from different sources.

At least that way there would be one know place to report errors omissions and corrections and perhaps then we could finally start trusting our spell checkers and maybe complete a game of scrabble without a squabble!

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© Paul for Paul O'Flaherty, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Firefox, language, spell check, spelling, trust, WordPress, words

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Managing Drafts?

Sometimes I get an idea and start bashing the keys faster than an epileptic tap-dancer having a fit and churn out post after post. Other times it’s a slow laborious process that could best be compared to pulling teeth as I try to pry that scared little idea from the warm dark recesses of my brain and expose it to the bright light of the screen.

I’m sure as bloggers, you’ve all experienced the same issues, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, but you always end up with a post of some sorts.

But what do you do with the posts that you never got to hit publish on? The ones that for some reason or another have remained a draft?

I just deleted a number of draft posts form this blog. I didn’t really feel that they could be taken down from the shelf, polished off and proudly displayed in the store front that is my blog.

Either their time and relevance had passed or they were simply crap, but no amount of viagra or shocks from a defibrillator would get the blood pumping in those posts again. They were dead.

It’s very rare that I manage to breath life into posts that I have started and left languish for more than a few days? Am I alone in this?

What do you do with your drafts?

Do you leave them sitting on the shelf gathering dust in the hope that someday they will become relevant again or at least able to be repurposed? Do you keep them in hopes of future inspiration and have a mountain of them sitting in your blog platforms draft folder? Or do you do like I just did and delete the buggers before they start to look like blog rot, growing moldy and smelling like really stinky feet?

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3. Daily Del.icio.us

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WordPress

Much of this post applies to all CMSs (Content Management Systems) and blog platforms but I’ll be talking about WordPress as that is what I have been dealing about the last few days.

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for themes lately. Not just for this blog but for projects as well. I’ve also spent time talking to folks who are in search of themes and hitting the same issues I am.

This is what I’ve discovered while searching for WordPress themes:

The WordPress theme repository sucks ass.

It’s full to the brim with out of date themes that in some cases, haven’t been updated by the theme author in 16 months. It’s also full of themes that are essentially the same theme that have had  few of the colors swapped in the CSS and been given a new header. Why is this? Why is there no apparent quality control beyond the exclusion of themes with encoded and embedded advertising links (sponsored themes)?

Searching for themes outside of the repository is near pointless unless you want to either pay for a “professional” theme, get a freebie functionally retarded version of a “pro” theme or get a freebie infected and designed to allow you blog to be hacked theme. Either that or you get themes that the designers were too embarrassed to include in the WordPress theme repository.

95 percent of theme creators are cloners.

Either lazy or they just create bog standard, shite themes so that they can drive traffic to there sites and annoy the piss out of people who are searching for usable themes. Why bother creating a theme that is a literal clone of all your “other” themes other wise.  When two separate themes are so similar that they would probably both validate on the same hash check you should know that you are doing something wrong!

What is the point dear theme cloners (I won’t call you designers – that’s reserved for the 5 percent that pump out quality, usable work) of rereleasing the same theme over and over again? Or even worse, what is the point of spending ages crafting a beautiful theme, releasing it, and not maintaining it?

I’ve seen some gorgeous themes out there that have never made it beyond the initial release. They are useful, perhaps, to people like me who hate to reinvent the wheel and love to use existing themes a kick off point to build upon, but to the average, not much if any coding experience, HTML or PHP scares them more than meeting Michael Myers in a dark alley, end user?

If you’re not going to maintain it, don’t release it!

I love WordPress. I love open source. I love that we have the freedom to build, to build upon, to fork and release pretty much anything we damn well like.

I hate that by having no quality control, by being simply lazy or unscrupulous we are damaging the user experience for new users and utterly frustrating the crap out of experienced users.

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Post tags: designers, ecosphere, repository, themes, WordPress

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I'm Back!

It’s been almost a month since I posted last. Christmas, New Years and the fact that due to some misfortune I nearly lost all of the data for this site, it’s been hard to find time get things back up and running.

The long story short is that I lost all of the data for this site, but was at least able to restore all of the content from backups (actually loosing on the images embedded in the two most recent posts) and only had to deal with the loss of my theme.

Being the beginning of the year, a new start and the first year I am officially divorced, starting with Sara as my fiancé, I took the near destruction of my blog as a chance to relaunch and restart.

You’ll see that I’ve gone for a completely different style of theme this time around. For all of my ranting before about wanting to break out of the tech blogger mold, I never managed to break away from it in terms of the layout and theme of my blog. Now I have and there’s no looking back baby! Expect more of my callous sarcasm to grace your screen in the coming days, months and years (assuming I live that long!).

Now, far be it from me to sit on my arse and undertake the reworking of just my own site. Fans of Daily Shite will see that it was been completely overhauled, jammed to the gills with new features and given a swift kick in the pants for good measure.

We only reopened Daily Shite today and it wouldn’t have been possible without Sara’s help in editing a mountain of posts in order to fit the new design and future proof the content for any possible redesigns. Thanks babe!

Oh, and I almost forget to mention Daily Shite’s, ginger bastard child “Bit Slut“.  Go check it out!

So folks. New year, new life, new start! All I need now is a big old cranky stick!

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Post tags: back, Bit Slut, Chistmas, Daily Shite, New-Years, rebirth, Sara, start, Theme

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Get more from your cookies?

It’s not easy to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts and use them in a smooth, productive manner on a day to day basis.

I know that this may not be a problem for the vast majority of people, but for those of us who manage multiple websites, many of which have their own social media accounts, having to log out of each account and log back in as a different user can get very annoying very rapidly.

I know there are Twitter clients that allow you to be logged in to multiple accounts at the same time but I would rather not have Seesmic or Tweetdeck constantly checking all of my accounts when I only need to be in them for a few minutes at a time. Also, desktop clients are singular solutions for single websites.

What about Facebook, MySpace, Gmail and dozens of other sites that I use daily that I require multiple logins for? Yes there are extensions for Firefox such as Gmail Manager, but these are again individual solutions for individual sites.

As it stands, the best solution I’ve come across is to run multiple browsers, having each one logged into a range of accounts associated with a site I am managing. It is not uncommon to see me with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera and even Safari open at the same time.

As you can imagine this can become both cumbersome and confusing. As far as elegant solutions go this is an epileptic seizure while walking a tight rope.

What is needed is to either give browsers native support for managing multiple logins to a site or to rethink the information typically stored within a  cookie.

As cookies are nothing more than a simple text file that stores bits of information such as user preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites, there is very little reason why websites that use them can’t handle multiple account support on the server side. In fact, there is none.

Take Facebook for example. Lets say I had two or three Facebook accounts. Why not just allow me to log in with a single set of credentials but then provide me with a drop down menu so that I can choose which persona I am performing actions with? We already do this in desktop clients like Seesmic when determining which account we are responding to a tweet from.

Allowing multiple logins wouldn’t even affect discovery of your account for those of you worried about your social networking presence. At the moment sites like Facebook allow you to search for users by email address. A simple options page where you could associate email addresses with your various personas would still allow for the same level of discovery but also allow for the convenience those of us with multiple accounts are looking for.

The only reason I can see for server side non-adoption of logins and personas is that the user numbers for sites will drop as multiple personas will now belong to a single account or login. Yet even this drop in numbers would be negligible when you consider some of the  benefits such as making it easier to identify spammers and block them as multiple personas will be associated with a single login.

There could also be side benefits in terms of targeted advertising as sites could build up a more complete profile of my activity instead of having multiple glimpses of my partial activity.

Even though the server side may be the easiest and most sensible place to introduce support for multiple logins to a individual services I believe that it will ultimately be in the browser that we see this functionality natively.

The vast majority of people don’t have multiple accounts on a single service (with the exception of email) and the service providers prefer if individual users have multiple accounts as it artificially inflates their numbers.

It may yet fall to the browser developers to allow us do everywhere, what Yahoo allowed us to do up until at least 2006.

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Post tags: accounts, browsers, cookies, extensions, login, multiple, persona

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And the answer is...

You’ll never guess what happened last night! Okay, maybe you will, considering it was all over Twitter and Facebook within minutes.

Last night, surrounded by friends, Sara and I took one more step on the road of being together that we have been traveling for so long now.

We still have a long way to go. Visa’s need to be applied for and moves have to be made, but with both of our divorces over the time was right to move one step closer to being together permanently. To take a step that we have both been waiting so long to make a reality.

Surrounded by friends armed with cellphones, last night I stuttered and stumbled my way through and asked Sara to marry me.

You can watch the video below (captured by Alli)  to see Sara’s reaction and her answer

Picture taken by Ke4mur.

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Post tags: Alli Flowers, friends, proposal, relationship, Sara, twitter

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Creamy Goodness?

I never had a Twinkie before last night. Seriously.

As far as I was concerned they were some weird American item of confectionery that only made it’s presence felt in my universe when they appeared on TV or in such  awesomeness as Zombieland.

Needless to say when everybody found out that I’d never had one, Twinkies were purchased and my first bite of that preservative filled chemical cake was captured by Alli Flowers for posterity.

Was I impressed or not? Guess you’ll have to watch the video below to find out!

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Post tags: Alli Flowers, Cake, mobile, tweetup, Twinkie

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An open letter to Peter Mandelson regarding the newly announced Digital Economy Bill.

If you disapprove of the Bill, sign the petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dont…

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An Operating System. Supposedly.

As most of you are aware I am a huge Google fan but…

If Google’s Chrome browser went to the office Christmas party and had a one night stand with Linux behind the bar, then Chromium OS would be the resultant bastard child.

Unfortunately for this particular bastard child it would share none of the looks, speed or intelligence which makes either of its parents great.  In the chromosomal world of this coupling all of the good genes have been invited to a party and headed off to get pissed and enjoy themselves, leaving only the crud of the genetic pool to great baby Chromium.

Normally I take a great deal of geeky pleasure in testing a new operating system so today I enthusiastically followed Jorge Sierras quick post about how to run Google Chrome OS from a USB drive, edited my bios settings to allow booting from USB and in next to no time was looking a a big blue login screen. That was where the fun and excitement stopped.

Chromium (or Chrome OS) is supposed to be an operating system for connected folk. In fact about all you can do with the operating system is be online. Want to do something offline? Forget it, better go back to your Windows or Mac laptop, Chrome OS is not for you baby!

So being the connected chappy that I am I was surprised when asked to log in with my Google account but wasn’t presented with a place to enter the network password for my Wi-Fi.

I had to log in with the default username (chronos – no password) and then go about finding out where the network settings were. After clicking enable wi-fi a few times it still wouldn’t connect and never asked my for my password even though my wi-fi light was glowing happily away at the front of my laptop.

In the end I was forced to whip out an ethernet cable and connect that way (irony or what?).

Windows 95?

Inside the operating system wasn’t much of a better experience. The UI felt slow and very underdeveloped (although the browser itself was fast but that’s to be expected, it’s Chrome after all) and moving through the options menu felt like I was back in Windows 95 or NT.

To be fair, part of the slowness I felt could have been attributable to the fact that I was running the Chromium from a USB key but I have run other linux distros (and that’s what Chromium is under the hood) from USB keys before, as well as tested a lot of portable apps and none of them felt quite this slow.

It wasn’t terribly slow, just slow. Hard to quantify although as I said earlier the browser felt snappy enough actually surfing.

Chromium comes with a few “preinstalled” applications which are actually all shortcuts to web based apps such as Gmail, Pandora etc. There is actually nothing installed in the operating system. I suppose if living exclusively online is your thing then this won’t bother you but my love/hate affair with the cloud is well known and I don’t really want an operating system that is practically useless if  you don’t have access to web.

Everything about Chromium feels unfinished and even not particularly well thought out. It’s as if the guys at Google had a collective brain fart, decided to prototype an operating system, gave up a fifth of the way through the prototype to go for beers and decided to release it when they came back a full six sheets to wind.

Just won't open!

Take saving an image you find on the web as an example.

I visited the gallery on this blog and attempted to save an image. In order to find my saved image I had to go to the downloads section of Chrome where I could see that it was downloaded. Clicking on the link to display the file or open the folder didn’t work.

It didn’t matter how many times I clicked that link, it wouldn’t open and to top it off, the preview image didn’t display either.

Now, for someone like me that is not the end all of trying to access the file. The more tech savvy of you are aware that in most (all?) browsers you can get to the file system of the computer.

Browsing files

In Chromium this can be achieved by typing “file://” and hitting enter in the address bar. This results in a listing of directories and files much the same as you get when you visit an open directory on the web in your browser.

If you are familiar with Linux it’s easy to find the file image you’ve saved, once you’re prepared to click on “mnt” and then find “chronos” all the way to the “downloads” folder. Easy simple. No seriously, everyone will be doing it soon so you might as well get used to it!

Chromium isn’t finished. Not by a long shot. It’s shitty even for a Linux distribution of the incredibly lame ‘made by a 1st time learner’ variety. It has no file explorer, the interface is crap, finding saved files is a nightmare and even simple things like logging on and off or even just properly shutting down your machine are lacking UI menus and buttons.

Chromium may have a place in internet cafes and libraries where a locked down environment without much functionality is required, but even there it may have problems. Printing is not supported at the moment and for those of you intending to use it at home you can forget about hooking up your portable hard drive or that nice mouse you’ve got.

If you have a laptop or even a netbook and you install Chromium then you are cutting the functionality and usefulness of that device by about 50% (90% for a decent laptop) and that’s a best case scenario. If you do eventually buy a device that is Chromium only then I’d consider getting your head examined because there are better things to spend money on, like a descent coffee machine while you save for a real laptop that can actually do things beyond just surf the web.

Back in the 90’s we had set top boxes for your TV that allowed you access the internet and had about as much functionality as Chromium. They were a gimmick. Cheap, cheerful and useless.

Do we really want to go back to that?

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Post tags: boot, browser, Chrome, Chromium, cloud, dissapointed, Google, Linux, operating-system, OS

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Pirated sports. Bringing in the viewers?

Last week the announcement was made that CNN Live was laying off its four CNN.com Live anchors as well as “several production staffers,” and was shifting it’s focus to on streaming major live events, producing video packages especially for CNN.com.

Mark ‘Rizzin’ Hopkins asked “Is live video streaming dead?” and in his attempt to figure out where CNN is going wrong noted the fact that Justin.tv and Ustream.tv each have between 1.2 and 1.6 million uniques a month.

Those numbers are pretty respectable but a quick mental count of who is actually live streaming revealed that I know about less regular live streamers than I have fingers on my left hand (which is of course a pretty standard left hand with 4 fingers and thumb, although Sara says my fingers are magic).

This got me thinking about those 1.6 million uniques and I quickly realized that the vast majority of viewers on Justin.tv and similar platforms are there to watch pirated TV and sports events.

Just this week I was on Justin.tv twice to watch Ireland get robbed by France in the World Cup Qualifiers. I can’t access RTEs (Irish national broadcaster) streaming service when I am away but can usually find the matches on Justin.tv or Ustream.

I took the above screenshot during the first Ireland Vs France game. As you can see, when I took the screenshot there were over 5,204 viewers to that one channel alone. At one point there was well over 6100 simultaneous viewers of the stream and that was just one stream.

There were multiple streams covering the Ireland match, all with large numbers of viewers, not to mention a plethora of other streams covering the other matches that were underway at the time or any of the other sports events and live TV coverage that was being shown.

Chances are that if a sporting event is being shown and you can’t access it, or if a pay per view event is happening and you don’t want to pay for it, you’ll find somebody streaming it on sites like these.

Finding these streams, which are quite obviously displaying illegal content as the people doing the streaming do not hold the rights to the content, is a relatively easy and trivial thing to do.

If I can find the game I want simply by clicking on the sports section and scrolling down, then you can be sure that an administrator could do the same thing and shut down streams.

Yet, they don’t do it!

Why not? The only reason I can think of is that the vast majority of their viewers come for the pirated content and if they were to eliminate that then their numbers (and advertising revenue) would fall away to nothing.

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Post tags: CNN, justin tv, piracy, RTE, streaming, UStream, video

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Which one?

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has been arguing the case for PC manufacturers to build their own operating systems.

The essential argument being that with everything that we use every day already existing in the cloud it shouldn’t matter what OS we are running.

Apple has separated themselves from the crowd by developing their own OS and hardware, other PC manufacturers should be doing the same thing or just give up and die.

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers?

If Apple and Palm can do it (and now Google) then why aren’t Dell, Sony, HP and the rest of the big gin PC manufacturers?

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.

Johns logic is sound as long as you are willing to make the assumption that the only reason personal computers are used today is to surf the web and be online.

The web is a great resource and has enriched or lives dramatically but is only of any value if you can actually connect to it. Admittedly, for most of the developed, world it is now easy to connect to the web even while on the move, but even when you do connect the service that you want is not always there.

Your email host may be down. Your web applications host may have server issues or simply shut up shop.

What about graphic designers or people doing audio and video editing? Photoshop on the web? Not likely! Not in a way that offers the power and options of CS4 running on my laptop.

As we’ve already seen most online applications are cut down versions, lacking the feature set and power of the their desktop “big brother”.

Can you imagine editing a high definition video and having to upload gigabytes of data to the cloud before you could begin editing your footage? Not to mention the bandwidth costs to the service providing the editing software.

What of the lowly PC gamer? Will Activision develop a version fo Call of Duty 2 for Sony OS, Google OS, HP OS, Windows, Mac and god knows how many other OS’s?

How about Photoshop, Firefox or iTunes for all these platforms as well?

I think not. It’s just not a practical solution. Most companies have a hard time getting versions of their software out for Windows, Mac and Linux at the moment.

The reason we have so much diversity in software at the moment and so much polished quality software that we rely on, is because the operating system arena is not saturated in the way that John wants is encouraging.

If it was, then talented developers would all be working on incredibly similar projects for a vast number operating systems, their talent and the programs they develop reaching incredibly limited audiences.

As it stands now we have vast armies of developers working for a limited number of platforms which allows them to develop and innovate without having to constantly reinvent the wheel. They can build upon and learn from the work and code of others.

Lets not even bring the issue of software patents into the mix!

Imagine if every time you wrote an application you had to do it for 16 different operating systems with their own file systems, quirks and API’s? A nightmare!

In fact it is that nightmare that would bring us very rapidly back to a situation where we had only a small number of OS’s as developers would develop for the platform which is the most developer friendly.

This is turn would lead to end users choosing that platform as it would have the greatest choice of software and support. That in turn brings more developers to the platform because the money is where the users are.

As John notes this already happened in the early days of personal computing when we had a massive amount of operating system choices and they all whittled away as developers and users moved to the platforms with the most choice and users.

See where I’m going with this? Even if every PC manufacturer released an OS tomorrow, after a while we would end up with the vast majority of people using only 2 or three of those operating systems.

Everything is not in the cloud, nor should it be. The cloud is unreliable. Connections to the cloud are unreliable and the cloud can’t match the convenience or power of software running locally on your home PC or laptop.

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Post tags: Apple, cloud, Daring-Fireball, Google, John Gruber, operating systems, OS, Sony

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They're like me!

Cross posted to Paul and Sara.

I just got the call. My divorce is finally over!

It’s been two long years, involved moving from one country to another, changing everything in my life and a lot of trials and tribulations but it is finally over.

It’s less than an hour since I got the call that it is all done and it’s hard to describe what I’m feeling right now.

I’m overwhelmed.

I feel regret that it took so long to get done and that things were so difficult.

There is a massive sense of relief. It’s done. It’s like the elephant that has been sitting on my shoulders for the past two years has finally gone it’s own way.

There is happiness. I’m happy that it is all over. That I am now free to move on. That my now legally ex-wife has moved on with her life and that I won’t have to deal with legalities or the leech on ones soul that is waiting.

Above all I am overjoyed. I can now legally move on and be with Sara. We can push forward with our plans without waiting on courts or papers on my side.

Yes, above all I am overjoyed that everything is finally finished. Now I can build towards my future with Sara without the stress or uncertainties of waiting and not knowing if the courts would had me a decision today, tomorrow, next week or next month.

It’s done. I am happy. We can be happy.

Thank you to everyone who has stood by and shown their support while this has gone on. Friends, family, Sara, thank you! I love you all.

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Post tags: divorce, done, dusted, ended, final

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Full Irish Breakfast

My mate Brian (@Azhrei) is a funny old sort.

I’ve know him forever, almost 20 years now, and he definitely falls into the category of “über geek” and damn good friend.

This morning we dodged the raindrops to meet in town for coffee’ although what started out as coffee became breakfast and while we were waiting to be seated Brian was telling me about cholesterol and we were talking about how a full Irish breakfast was bad for you.

Even though I was having the “full Irish” Brian decided that it wasn’t for him and that he would take the healthier option!

The picture below is what he chose to have instead of the nasty fry up.

When asked how he justified his “healthy” option, Brian replied with: “It’s got some fruit in it”!

Thanks mate, for always putting a smile on my face

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Post tags: Azhrei, breakfast, Brian, Cake, friends, fry, funny, Irish

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Irish Flash Mob

According to Wikipedia a flash mob is suppossed to be a sudden event.

is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails

Odd then that the “flash mob” that happened on Patrick Street in Cork City on Saturday was anything but.

I heard about it early on Friday while I was at a LAN with Brian and the lads who had known about it days in advance. In fact, it appears that everybody who was there heard about it way in advance as they turned out with cameras and camcorders at the ready to catch whatever might occur.

I wasn’t there myself, but the video captured by Corks Red FM (a local radio station) shows that people are obviously waiting around for this to happen and when it does happen it’s not some major event. It was appears to have little participation or participants, which the “mob” mostly just standing around waiting for somebody to do something.

If this flash mob was organized to get peoples attention it didn’t do a very good job. Based on the video if it was a firework then it had damp powder because when launched it never took off.

Flash mobs are a cool thing to bring interest and attention or even just for a laugh but sometimes I see a video of one like this and I just have to ask myself “why did they even bother”?

I applaud people for trying to organize these things but a bit more planning might have a gone a long way to making this a success.

According to the Facebook page “Let Mr. Blue Sky In” (C’mon blue skies in Cork? Are you kidding me?) was supposed to promoted the “arts in Cork”.

A Cork staple

Well, if this is the extent and ability that we have to  promote, or the extent of support the arts have in Cork, then we are a bunch of uncultured neanderthals that can at best be soothed momentarily by the music.

They might have been better off trying to gain financial support and awareness by waiting until the nightclubs closed on Saturday night and publicly raffled off a “Doner Kebab and curry chip” (fries with curry sauce for the non-Irish).

I’m sure more than a few drunk adolescents would have paid to win that and if you could have gotten them to dance (I use the term very loosely) to the music then I’m sure you’d have had endless hours of footage to post to YouTube and Facebook to build awareness.

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Post tags: Arts, Cork, flash mob, Ireland, Patricks Street, Red FM

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Have you ever stopped to think about how much inane crap we pump out everyday. Every little detail of some peoples lives are shared for the world to see without a jot of thought spared for decency, privacy or the simple considerations of T.M.I (too much information) or “who gives a crap?”.

Yet we continue to pump this digital diarrhea out into the ether in hopes making some sort of a connection in this, perhaps, over connected world.

Have you ever wondered how people from a time before the interent would react to concept of a service like Twitter? Wondered what they would think of us today as we tweet about our latest bowel movement instead of actually doing something productive.

I’m thinking about that tonight because of the picture below, which I unfortunately have no source to credit.

Have we lost our collective minds?

We spend all day online looking for a connection to others, or pimping ourselves and our “brand” while the people that we really need to be talking to, meeting and connecting with, are in our homes and passing by on the street right outside our front doors?

Is the popularity of social media an addiction or a massive cry for help?

Is it a long drawn out wail in the night at the despair and depression at the increasingly lonely and isolated lives people lead in this ever more digitally connected world? A world where we are pseudo friends with everyone but know nobody. A world where we talk to 100’s of people a day but connect with no one.

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Post tags: addiction, cry, help, image, reality, Social-media, society, twitter

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