techno-culture

No, no connection between the Irish dotcom multimillionaire and the Silicon Valley VC multimillionaire (yet!?) outside the tenuous one of sharing some newsprint space today in the Irish TImes. I interviewed both for this Friday’s Business This Week section. You can read Ray Nolan on the inside story of the $340m sale last week of [...]

Tags: hostelworld, ray nolan, tim draper, VCs, WRI

It’s been a loooong time coming, but 50 nations reached agreement last week on basic draft guidelines for ensuring some degree of data protection and data privacy. The Spanish Data Protection Commissioner organised the conference which seems to have had significant buy-in — the US was there as was Google and Facebook (the latter being [...]

Observer columnist John Naughton has a superb blog post today on Cyberspace and its Discontents which nails exactly the Janus face of the internet: why the net is wonderful/the net is hideous. An adept picking apart of the Stephen Fry/Jan Moir/Trafigura twitter situations.
His quotes from Stephen Fry’s blog also leave me deeply impressed by [...]

Amazon UK stopped shipping electronics to Ireland three years ago in a dispute over the WEEE recycling charge — very annoying. Now (as of last week), they are sending items here again. That’s great news, as often their prices are excellent. I guess in this downturn, when every customer should count (well, that should always be the [...]

Tags: Amazon, ireland, WEEE

A recent paper indicates that social media tools can be more distracting than productive (I know, many will say, DOH!). At least in the case of adding tags — people had poorer comprehension of what they had read when they added them, compared to when they simply read the article. I have always had the [...]

Tags: Mike Butcher, social media, tags, Twitter, William Gibson

Jonathan Zittrain spoke last year at the Institute for European Affairs (which I guess is now the Institute for International and European Affairs…) — compelling speaker and thinker on the net and its future possibilities, positive and negative. Observer columnist and author/blogger/Open University academic John Naughton has posted the mp3 of a talk he just gave on [...]

Tags: Future of the Internet, John Naughton, Jonathan Zittrain

Dubliners purring over Google’s plans for bringing street view to the city (the Googlemobiles are driving around Dublin taking pictures at the moment) might think again after a burglar in London confessed he cased his targets by using Google Earth to look for lead roof tiles to steal. Granted, he only needed to use the aerial [...]

Tags: Dublin, Google

I first came across the incisive thinker Clay Shirky in 2001, when I attended O’Reilly’s excellent, and I believe it was the first, Emerging Tech conference in San Francisco. I was there for an HP event and conveniently that ended the morning of the O’Reilly event, so I had registered in advance and wandered [...]

Tags: Clay Shirky, newspapers

I was surprised but delighted to see that the Guardian website can now list the full archive of pieces it has for a given writer. Pleased, because in my case, that includes seven of the 10 years I wrote for them as a tech journalist — I foolishly kept few clippings from those years, especially not [...]

Tags: Guardian, journalism

I’ve just put the new podcast up, a recording of a talk and Q&A session with Joe Rospars, the man behind Barack Obama’s phenomenally successful use of Web 2.0 technologies in his presidential  campaign and in particular, on his campaign website, barackobama.com. Rospars was in Dublin on Wednesday for the launch of Fianna Fail’s new [...]

Tags: podcast

Wow. Very cool. Verrrrrrry fast. I like it. Like the “Top Sites” display and nice little zoom in feature — helpful to eyes that have a harder time reading very tiny print compared to days of yore. “Mail contents of this page” — love that. I use Firefox and Safari about equally, but this beta [...]

Tags: Safari 4

Believe it or not but Fianna Fail has President Obama’s new media director, Joe Rospars, and his Blue State Digital company focusing on a revamp of their party website. The new website launches later this evening, and I’m not clear on whether it will incorporate these new elements or if they are to come in [...]

Tags: Fianna Fail website, Joe Rospars