Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
Pat Phelan is organising a blogger dinner/meetup to coincide with the visit to Cork of Shel Israel and Rick Segal in October.
The dinner is on in the Taste of Thailand restaurant, Bridge Street, Cork on October 17th at 8pm. Leave a comment on Pat’s site if you want to attend.
I know I’ll be there - I’m looking forward to having a chat with Shel again and I can’t wait to meet Rick - the author of the funniest post on the Web 2.0 controversy.
I drove to Dublin on Saturday. I had a couple of small jobs to do and I was going to the Blogger meetup in the Market Bar afterwards.
Now I don’t know Dublin well at all so I was mighty relieved when a friend offered me the loan of a Sony GPS unit for the trip. It was the Sony NV-U50 and I would have been literally lost without it!
The user interface could definitely stand some work (it took me a good while to figure out how to get it to plot a course to a destination) but once underway and following its instructions, it brought me to the door of my venues flawlessly. I didn’t even have to think about where I was going.
Who else makes these in-car units and which ones are best (i.e. easiest to use)?
I’d love to take one to Spain in a couple of weeks when we go there on holidays
Blogger is Google’s free hosted blogging platform. Blogger’s steady decline as a blogging platform has been well documented by Blogger users.
Via Marshal Kirkpatrick today comes news that Google have launched (in beta, of course!) a newer version of Blogger. This version has lots of shiny bits such as allowing change of colour of your blog using a WYSIWYG interface:
And it also allows drag and drop manipulation of various aspects of the blog:
The new version requires users to have a Google account which is a bit of a mixed blessing. It also allows for tagging of posts using the Labels field - in fact this is probably the most useful update to the entire application.
Given Google’s lacklustre commitment to Blogger over the last two years and the very little progress in this update I would say to anyone thinking of starting a blog now to stay from Blogger and use the likes of WordPress.com instead. If you are on Blogger - move to a real blog platform. You know you want to.
UPDATE: - for a more comprehensive review of the update see the Google Operating System blog. And Blogger’s official post about it is here
I was having a strange issue recently on this blog - occassionally a blog post would 404 when the PermaLink was clicked on - the post would appear fine in the blog’s main page but any attempt to view it individually would fail! Deleting the post and re-posting with a new title solved it, so some part of the title seemed to be causing the problem.
This happened twice in the last couple of weeks - both times with podcast interviews posts. This got me thinking - I checked the mp3 filename and in both cases the mp3 filename was the same as the post title (i.e. darren-barefoot-interview.mp3 in a post entitled Darren Barefoot interview). Again, another solution, if you come across this issue is to re-name the mp3 file - this should have less impact than deleting posts and re-posting under a new title.
Finally, being aware of this, come up with a procedure to ensure that your post titles and files don.t share a name and it should no longer be an issue.
I recorded an interview with Darren Barefoot at the end of last week but what with the Scoble’s visit and the IT@Cork conference, I haven’t had a chance to publish it until now.
Darren is an uber blogger, a web marketer, he is involved in Capulet Communications, Northern voice, darrenbarefoot.com, geek travellers blog - that I know of - a busy man! Darren was good enough to take some time out to discuss these and other interests with me.
Here are the questions I asked Darren and the times in the interview they were asked:
You can listen to the full interview here (5.9mb mp3).
Today’s podcast is an interview I did with TJ McIntyre - TJ is Chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, and is a lecturer in Law in UCD.
The interview was fascinating, and should be compulsory listening for any Irish blogger. TJ informed me that everything published on a blog is automatically considered defamatory in the eyes of the law, if reported as such (guilty until proven innocent anyone?), until the blogger can satisfactorily prove to a jury that it is indeed true!
TJ also spoke about how copying music from legally purchased CDs is against the law, the pointlessness of national ID cards in terms of national security, and the governments position on data retention.
See below a list of the questions I asked TJ and the times in the interview that I asked them:
You can download the full interview here 8.4mb mp3.
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