Archive for June, 2006

Irish schools being blocked from accessing social networks

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/6/2006
in Technology
. 31 Comments

RTE is the Irish national broadcaster and Morning Ireland is RTE’s flagship news program.

Morning Ireland reported this morning that social networking sites MySpace and Bebo will be blocked from all Irish schools from September this year. The reason given for blocking the sites is that they are too time consuming. So far I can’t find any link to confirm this story.

Social networking through sites like MySpace or through blogs are how people and businesses will network in the future. Social networking is becoming an increasingly important skill to learn.

Blocking these sites is actually harming childrens chances of learning valuable skills in later life.

Looking at the site of the people responsible for blocking the access (the NCTE) in talking about their blocking policies they say:

At the moment there are two levels of filtering - Option B: a restrictive level which permits only educational websites as well as sites on a pre-determined ‘white list’; and Option A: a less restrictive system which allows only educational and related websites.

For years we have been trying to get schools to get Internet access and now that they have it, it is being blocked at the filters unless it is deemed educational. How assinine.

UPDATE: - many of the comments to this post have been focussing on the social networks being blocked by schools and while I think that is an important story, I think it is far more important that from September all schools will have a content filtering system in place which will block ALL sites unless they are specifically deemed to be educational.

UPDATE 2: - You can listen to this report on this morning’s Morning Ireland at 1:26:48, it comes from a story in today’s Irish Independent by education correspondent John Walsh.

Identity disorder

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/6/2006
in Technology
. 6 Comments

More and more sites these days ask you to create an account to access their functionality. Each time you create an account, that’s one more username/password combination to remember because in this age of identity theft, using the same username/password combination across sites is a serious no-no.

Then along comes the idea of open identity portocols. Open identity protocols promise single sign-on across multiple online sites. One identity to log in on them all, as it were.

Now, however, there seems to be a slew of identity protocol sites springing up to which you have to sign up and get logon details! There doesn’t appear to be a dominant player and the open identity sites don’t share information with each other. So we are back once more to having multiple identities (albeit hopefully fewer than before).

I already have signed up to myopenid, Verisign’s PIP and one or two others (whose names escape me already!).

Sigh, here we go again!

Do you search the future?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 29/6/2006
in Technology
. 15 Comments

I did a small bit of blog and social media consultancy for Roam4Free yesterday and it still never ceases to amaze me how few people are aware of prospective search.

Prospective searching is the ability to search the future. It is the ability to enter a search term in a search engine and say tell me whenever someone writes about x. The likes of Technorati watchlists make prospective searching really easy to do.

Yesterday, I helped the lads in Roam4Free set up prospective searches for the term Roam4Free (as well as a few other relevant terms) so today this post should have landed in their RSS reader automatically, simply because I mentioned their company name in the post. Hi guys!

If you want to keep on top of what is being said about you, your company, your products, your competitors, their products, and/or your market you should be searching the future.

PeopleAggregator goes live - anyone want in?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 27/6/2006
in Technology
. 20 Comments

Marc Canter’s Digital Lifestyle Aggregator (DLA), called PeopleAggregator, launched in Alpha mode overnight.

BroadbandMechanics says PeopleAggregator is:

a social network web service that will be used to inter-connect the world’s social networks – together.

We can only do that by opening up and giving away our APIs and techniques for doing so. So instead of a single social network with 10,000,000 people – we see 10M social networks – with 25-150 people in them. This vision of distributed, meshed universe of networks is what PeopleAggregator is all about.

Invitations were sent out to trial it and it is still looking a little rough around the edges (not unsurprisingly in an alpha product).

Initially I was unable to get the Flickr integration working but I put up a post asking if anyone had similar problems and I received an answer in under an hour telling me that you need to use the email address Flickr has for you as your Flickr ID! This wasn’t immediately obvious to me but when I tried that, it worked.

PeopleAggregator

The Del.icio.us integration just worked.

I joined the Irish Blogs group but I haven’t looked into the Networks side of PeopleAggregator yet.

Some of the functionality needs to be simplified. For instance, linking to other members isn’t straightforward. Also, there are reports that the sxip integration isn’t working just yet and there are no obvious RSS feeds.

You can invite people to join PeopleAggregator so if anyone wants an invite, leave your name in the comments (or send me an email) and I’ll send one on.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Marc takes this.

Microsoft Ireland’s error prone Tablet PC competition!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 26/6/2006
in Technology and Windows
. 6 Comments

According to Dave Northey, Microsoft Ireland are giving away a Tablet PC - all you have to do is answer a survey before June 30th to be in with a chance of winning.

The only catch is that when I tried to go to the survey page to answer the questions I received the following error:

Free Tablet from Microsoft Ireland (or not!)

Perhaps this is part of the competition - you have to figure out how to get past this error page to answer the survey! Or perhaps it is hosted on a Windows server (ouch!)!

UPDATE: Microsoft appear to have fixed the problem. I say appear because I logged into the page, answered the questions on the page and clicked the continue button, expecting to be brought to another page of questions. Instead I found myself on the Microsoft Ireland security page. There was no message telling me that my data had been received successfully, or that my session had timed out so now I’m in limbo. Do I try again and possibly get penalised for trying too many times or just hope it worked?

Dave et al, you need to work a bit on managing people’s expectations (i.e. page 1 of 1, and/or Finish/Submit instead of continue on the button) and provide feedback - data received, thank you (or similar).

My Mac crashed!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 22/6/2006
in Technology
. 16 Comments

My Mac crashed just now. Completely crashed, froze for a sec, then went into a re-start.

It re-started no problem, the only thing which was lost was the couple of minutes it took to re-start and re-open all my apps.

Why did it crash - I was trying to get into Audacity at the time and I’m running a beta version of Audacity on the Mac so I suspect that was the culprit. I had had Audacity running for over 24 hours - probably not a good idea for beta software.

Fortunately I have the Session Saver plugin for Firefox so all my Firefox windows and tabs opened up again exactly where I left them.

I have had applications freeze on me in the past on the Mac - I just force-quit them and move on but this is the first time in close on six years of working on OS X that I have had the machine crash!

I guess that just goes to show how stable an OS it really is.

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