Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I have been asked to give a presentation, on Microsoft’s relevance in the Web 2.0 arena.
What do people think, are Microsoft a player in this sphere? They have Office Live, Windows Live Mail, MSN Spaces and they are a big supporter of RSS - it will be baked into the next versions of Internet Explorer (IE7), Office and Windows Vista.
Hell, Microsoft even have Atlas, a free framework for developing Ajaxy Web 2.0 applications!
I am developing and running a blog training course starting next September 25th for IT@Cork.
It will be a 5 week course, one hour a week (6pm Monday evenings) in the National Software Centre in Mahon. It will be open to non-members and members of IT@Cork alike. The course fees will be €50 for IT@Cork members and €100 for non-members.
The entire proceeds of this training will be going to IT@Cork.
A very rough outline of what I will be going through each night is as follows:
Week 1. Intro to blogging and RSS
How to set up a blog
Hosted vs non-hosted
Free vs. paid
Week 2. How to optimise your blog
FeedBurner
Spam prevention
SEO
Week 3. Your blog content
Links
images
RSS searches
Week 4. How to Promote your blog and posts
Week 5. How to Podcast
Hosting
Marketing
This outline is open to suggestion and change - please feel free to suggest any topics which you feel are missing and/or under-represented in the comments to this post.
I have created a Google Calendar for this training course - you can subscribe to the calendar and see any changes to the course outline as it becomes firmed up.
Here is an RSS link for the training calendar.
Here is an iCal link for the training calendar.
And here is a static HTML link to the training calendar.
Email admin@itcork.ie to book your place.
UPDATE - In response to valuable feedback from Keith and Paul in the comments I have added in RSS and images to weeks 1 and 3 of the course. The Google Calendar has also been updated
I have been saying for some time that Irish recruitment companies should be offering RSS feeds of searches on their sites (this would enable job seekers to do a search on the recruitment co.’s site and have constantly updating search results delivered to them via RSS until their ideal job pops up). IrishDev were the first to step up to the plate.
I first approached Bernard Tyers (sysadmin of Irishjobs.ie) about the possibility of Irishjobs.ie rolling out RSS feeds over a year ago and it has taken some time but today Irishjobs.ie unveiled their RSS enabled job search engine. I’m glad I was able to help with the initial idea and the formulation of the strategy behind this development.
A couple of comments about the final result - the link to the RSS feed (the orange RSS button on the top right) needs to be brought closer to the results (and labeled something other than RSS). Right now, it is not obvious that the RSS button is in any way linked to the search results and very few people know what RSS is yet.
Also, there needs to be an advanced search. I know there is a link to an advanced search but this leads me to essentially the same search as the basic one. How do I search for a job title “Chief Blogging Officer” based in Cork, paying over €70,000 p.a. (or chief bottle washer, based in Terminfeckin, paying over €180,000)? With an RSS enabled search I can perform unlikely but desirable job searches like this and site back and let the jobs come to me - even if it takes 12 or 18 months.
I have an account with Blueface - Blueface is a VOIP provider. For €19.99 per month I am supposed to get 1,000 minutes of calls to over 20 countries. All good, so far. The only issue is that for some bloody reason, at the end of every month my credit is deleted and I can no longer make outgoing calls.
Two problems here, in the first place, I should be able to carry the unused minutes I have paid for over into the next month and second, since I have signed a direct debit form, the money should go out of my account, pay for the next month and there should be no interruption to my service.
Come on guys, get with the program or lose a customer. Fast.
UPDATE:
I received the following email from Blueface support:
can you switch off the modem and ATA for 30 secs and then switch them back on and leave them for 5 mins.
if it still doesn’t work thrn let me know.
everything is connected fine and your ATA is registered on our server.
Of course that tells me nothing. I tried turning both the router and ATA off several times today and that didn’t fix it then - why was this time different?
Google Reader is one of the better online feed readers. It sports a nice ajaxy interface and runs reasonably speedily.
However, I have 239 feeds in my Google Reader account now and I wish to delete most of these. The only problem is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to delete more than one feed at a time - with 239 feeds registered, I could be a while doing this!
Does anyone know if there is a way to delete multiple feeds simultaneously in Google Reader?
The ability to search and be constantly fed updates on the search results as they are published is one of the most powerful (and probably most under-utilised) aspects of RSS. I have long held that there is a natural fit between this functionality and the likes of recruitment companies, auctioneers, travel agents, etc.
Imagine the scenario - you are thinking of looking for a new job but you want it to be near where you live now, you want it to be related to what you do now and you want it to pay at least what you earn now. With a decent job search engine, you plug in these details and hopefully find something. If not, you check back again the following week, or whenever you remember.
However, if that job site allows you to subscribe to the search results, you simply copy the feed to your RSS reader and sit back and await that perfect job to arrive!
IrishDev.com contacted me today to alert me to the fact that they have rolled out the ability to subscribe to searches in their job search engine. I took a look at their job search and although it is extremely basic in functionality it is IT focussed and it does allow you to subscribe to the results. I think this is a first for job search in Ireland.
The king of rss job search is Indeed.com - unfortunately they are US based. The main Irish job search engines are irishjobs.ie and recruitireland.com - neither of which offers the ability to subscribe to search results.
So, for now, the IrishDev.com job search has first mover advantage in the Irish IT job search field. What do they need to do now? Well, if they expand the search functionality and the jobs database they could quickly own IT job search in Ireland.
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