First ever Barefoot race in IRELAND, both 5km and 10km – Ballinrobe, Mayo, March 11th
via Barefoot.ie.
Damn and blast, I won’t be able to make this. Would be nice to come last in a shorter race.
I emailed the three TDs in Cork South West (2 FG, 1 Lab) two days ago about #stopSOPAIreland. Noel Harrington’s office (FG) replied within a few hours by email in a pretty generic but still positive way.
This morning I got a letter in the post(!) from Jim Daly (FG) with a very detailed response giving the official line as expressed by Seán Sherlock. Kudos to whoever in his office wrote the letter, it had all of the pertinent information. Sidenote: If they replied by email the country would be less broke.
According to the letter (see below), consultations were had with these mythical fifty stakeholders that Seán Sherlock keeps referring to, last June/July.
Is the Minister of State able to identify even one “stakeholder” who represented the interests of webhosts like Blacknight, web infrastructure providers like Amazon, major Social Media companies like Facebook, Search/Video companies like Google/YouTube, online Gaming companies like PopCap, Enterprise Ireland, the IDA or the average internet user? We have already confirmed that he never talked to the Irish Internet Association.
I’ll still waiting on the Minister’s Labour colleague in Cork South West to reply.
UPDATE: Several people on Twitter have pointed out that I’m not reading this correctly. There were 50 submissions but we have no idea how many Stakeholders. It could be 2. Much more disturbing is Steve White’s comment below. His post highlights that the submissions were not specific to the Statutory Instrument at all.
Whatever it takes to stop the Heavy Gang 2.0 from taking over the Internet in Ireland.
Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life hacks meme to eyeroll-inducing sign of a certain type of tightly-wound techie, similar to emptying your email inbox. Several people have asked me if I’m still standing. The answer is yes. Here’s what I’ve learned from 365 days of being a professional stander.
via One Year at My Standing Desk | Smarterware.
Good post from Gina. I’ve been using the standing desk less and less recently and guess what? My neck, knee and shoulder pain is back.
So that’s it. Back to half-day standing from right NOW.
How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.
via Focus on the User.
A funny pointed site by some Facebook, MySpace and Twitter Engineers. Of course, if Facebook and Twitter just let Google index them instead, maybe Goog wouldn’t show a preference for its own site…….
I think I’ll use the bookmarklet anyway for kicks n giggles.
I saw a bunch of mentions of IFTTT a few months back but didn’t get a chance to try it out. It came up recently during a lovely lunch with @johnpeavoy in the ever-impressive Poacher’s Inn in Bandon. I suddenly realised it could do something I’d wanted for a year.
The idea of IFTTT is simple but brilliant. It’s has a hint of Yahoo Pipes stripped back to the core USP. It’s all built around tasks which do stuff when other stuff happens (if THIS happens, then do THAT).
There are a ton of “Trigger Channels” like Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Foursquare, Google Reader, YouTube etc. Within each channel there are then Triggers like “when I update my Status on Facebook” or (and this is where I’m using it) “when I favourite a Tweet”.
Then you choose an “Action Channel”, most of which are the same as the “Trigger Channel”. In my case I have two. The first is Delicious. So every time I favourite a Tweet, it get’s saved as a Bookmark in Delicious.
I was actually going to build that specific usecase as a standalone webapp for myself last year. Now it’s just one feature in IFTTT!
The other Action I use is to get the Tweet is emailed to me. This is ideal when I’m reading Twitter on my phone when out and about. I generally don’t read the links on the phone, so I favourite the Tweet and have it in my Inbox for later. You can also send them to ReadItLater or Instapaper.
The Task then runs every 15 minutes.
As I said, simple but brilliant. Go have a play , I guarantee you’ll think of a bunch of actions. There are also lots of ones other people have created too.
Thrilled to see that the code is now available for anyone to grab and modify. Once MIT is up and running well, they’ll start accepting contributions.
My challenge to all the developers out there – port all of AppInventor to iOS. This would be far far more important and valuable for a child’s education than some overpriced e-Books on a single vendor platform.
A few minutes ago, Google shut down Jaiku, just after I posted a #goodbye.
My last proper post there was 3 years and 5 months ago. For a short period in 2007, many thought it would overtake Twitter during the relentless fail-whale era, but it never got the traction.
I always said everything could have been different if Google had made it the Social Address Book in Android back in 2008. But siloed-thinking couldn’t join the dots.
My full archive is now over on Jaiku Archive.
It’s too late to run any of the other backup scripts.
We should probably be as angry about Google not archiving this properly, as we were with Yahoo and Geocities, but obviously the scale is minuscule by comparison. And some of us have that archive above.
But do remember, what happened to Geocities and Jaiku could happen to Twitter or Facebook in 2015. So please make sure to install ThinkUp somewhere so you can backup and own your own content.
