Archive for November, 2005

Site offline briefly - sorry

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/11/2005
in Personal and Podcast
. 7 Comments

Apologies if you were trying to access this site or its podcasts at around 1am GMT this morning - the site was briefly offline. The site was offline because I exceeded my hosting bandwidth allowance - due to the unprecedented success of my podcasts!

A victim of my own success!

Fortunately the nocturnal FrankP rang me to alert me (knowing that I was probably asleep but also knowing that I would be prefer to be woken to get this sorted asap) and even more fortunately, I have the mobile number of the MD of my hosting co. I rang him and he said he’d get it sorted - that’s good service, thanks Michele.

I’m at the IT@Cork conference today

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/11/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and IT@Cork
. 5 Comments

I’m going to be at the IT@Cork Conference today (Wed 30th) - Robert Scoble is Opening the conference with a talk on Business Blogging - I can’t wait.

I’ll be blogging the conference live on the IT@Cork blog and I’ll be recording interviews with delegates and speakers - I will upload those interviews on the IT@Cork blog too.

Later this evening I will be at the geek dinner with Robert Scoble in Proby’s Bistro, Proby’s Quay, Cork - see this Google Map if you are unsure where it is. The dinner is on at 8pm - all bloggers welcome - be sure to register on the wiki.

So, a busy day ahead - hope to see you there.

Riya frustrations

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/11/2005
in Malware and Technology
. 3 Comments

I received an Alpha invite to try out Riya the other day. I have posted about Riya previously and it does sound like it will be an exciting application - it is an online photo application (like Flickr) but it has facial recognition software built-in. This means that once you upload a photo and tell Riya who is in the photo, it will recognise them in any other photos you upload. This will help enormously when you want to search for pictures subsequently as currently there is no real way to search for images unless they have meta-information attached.

But when I went to Riya, I was unable to upload any pictures as the uploader is Windows XP only - this meant I was unable to test any of the applications features :-(

Riya Home page

However bad it is not having a Mac uploader, how difficult would it have been having a couple of test images in Alpha testers accounts so that if they couldn’t upload images they could, at least play with the test ones?

I need to improve the podcasts

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/11/2005
in Technology
. 18 Comments

Hey all,

I need to work on the quality of my podcasts - the content is great, I think. This not due to me in any way, it is simply due to my good fortune in attracting great interviewees.

I need to improve my audio quality though and I also need to ‘professionalise’ the podcasts - you know, have a catchy, unique, jingle for opening and closing the show.

On the audio front, I currently record the calls using a phone recorder accessory I bought in Maplins - I connect this to my Sanyo digital Dictaphone and record. Unfortunately there is an annoying background buzzing in all the recordings. The buzzing occurs with or without the dictaphone so it seems to come from the phone recorder accessory.

Any and all help/suggestions on this front would be greatly appreciated!

Michael Arrington Podcast

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/11/2005
in Blogging, Podcast and RSS
. 12 Comments

As I mentioned previously, I interviewed Michael Arrington of TechCrunch last week as part of my ongoing series of recorded and podcast phone interviews. Michael really impressed me in the interview with his humour, his obvious intelligence and his humility.

This is definitely one of the most stimulating interviews I have recorded yet - despite stiff competition from Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and TJ McIntyre.

These are the questions I asked Michael and the times in the interview they were asked:

  • Michael, for anyone who is not familiar with your name can you start off by telling the listeners who is Michael Arrington? What is it that you do? - 0:15
  • How long has TechCrunch been running now? - 3:58
  • I was interviewing Robert Scoble last week and he said he’d never heard of TechCrunch 6 months ago - now it is the first site he looks at every day - 4:09
  • Feedburner reports Techcrunch has 15020 subscribers - to what do you attribute the success of techcrunch - 4:46?
  • Since TechCrunch is a success you must be really busy, is it a full-time job? - 7:29
  • You don’t have ads on the site - how do you fund it? - 9:32
  • You have recently joined John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing - can you explain what that is and how do you see this changing TechCrunch? - 11:46
  • How is it different from Google’s AdWords? - 12:54
  • What’s the story with the BBQs? how did that tradition get started? - 13:13
  • TechCrunch is part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup - What is the web 2.0 workgroup? - 15:50
  • What is Web 2.0? Is it just another catchall buzzword like ‘interactive’ designed to grab the attention of vc’s? - 17:14
  • What web 2.0 app(s) could you not live without? 19:56
  • Ad supported sites seem to be becoming the norm - is everything headed that way? do you think we will one day see an online version of Office/Windows supported by ad revenue? - 21:27
  • Are you a Mac or PC user? - 23:27
  • What kind of world do you want your kids to grow up in? - 27:27

The full interview is 29 minutes and you can listen to the interview here (6.6mb mp3).

Feeds and comments - for and against…

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/11/2005
in Blogging and RSS
. 10 Comments

Robert Scoble has posted that he is trimming his blogroll - one of the qualifications he is using - if the site doesn’t provide full feeds, he unsubscribes. Robert has said this previously - I agreed with him then and I agree with him still. Partial feeds are a pain - they force you to click through to get the full story, whereas when you get there you may very well find the full story is not as interesting as you thought from snippet in the partial feed - waste of time.

John Roberts on the other hand has come out in favour of partial feeds. John says:

If I ever did anything offline, maybe I’d be crazy for full-text, but I think of those rare moments when I’m away from a computer as deliberate, so why not enjoy the connection and the focused reading experience available in a browser?

John, I enjoy the focused reading experience available in my RSS reader - I go to browser to leave comments. Speaking of comments - you don’t appear to have comments enabled on your site - are you aginst comments as well?

I find it impossible to take anyone seriously if they don’t have comments enabled on their site - it shows that while they are obviously fond of the sound of their own voice they not interested in hearing anyone else’s opinion.

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