DISQUS

Looking forward to seeing wifimapper. We started a collaborative map on Google a few years ago and there's quite a lot of data there if you'd like to use it -

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0...
112855554048460880778.0004358aea20ba94cba25

I've got a netbook too - the Dell Mini 9 - and love it to bits. BUT, for my social project (bringing video calling to the elderly, disabled and other socially isolated groups) there is simply no comparison between a netbook and an AiGuru. I gaved a 7 year old and a 70 old two minutes instruction on making a video call on the AiGuru yesterday and then turned it off. Both of them were able to turn it on, navigate the menu and place calls without problem. Try training a 70-year old to do the same with a netbook of any kind. It's horses for courses :-)

Nocky, I've got a netbook too - the Dell Mini 9 - and love it to bits. BUT, for my social project (bringing video calling to the elderly, disabled and other socially isolated groups) there is simply no comparison between a netbook and an AiGuru. I gaved a 7 year old and a 70 old two minutes instruction on making a video call on the AiGuru yesterday and then turned it off. Both of them were able to turn it on, navigate the menu and place calls without problem. Try doing that with a netbook of any kind. It's horses for courses :-)

Hey Loic is the AiGuru working okay for you? I got one last week but it consistenly loses the Wifi connection after a few minutes, regardless of which router I connect to, and then I cannot reconnect no matter what I try. The only way to reconnect is to turn it off and leave it off for at least 10 minutes.... yes, weird!

BTW, I'm investigating the use of the AiGuru for a new social project I'm working on to bring video calling to the elderly, disabled and other socially isolate groups. It seems like an ideal device in terms of user friendliness, as soon as they've sorted all the bugs

Have the Gardai released the name of this man? I'm taking over the maintenance of RoadDeaths.ie

I was very late to the party as regards 24 - I never watched it while it was airing on TV here. But I bought the first season on DVD 2 years ago and, like you, couldn't stop watching it once I started. I very quickly went through the first 5 seasons. So 24 is still my all-time top TV program, heart-pounding stuff all the way.

I was nearly ready to give up on Lost myself after the first 4 episodes of last season. It was just getting dull. However, this season has brought great rewards for those who stuck with it - each episode has been excellent, almost reaching 24 level consistency of quality IMHO. What's really made it great this season is that they've dropped the flashbacks in favor of flashforwards which has give a totally new dimension to the mystery element.

I wasn't too impressed with the band from their appearances on You're a Star but wow, I really like this track. Nice one girls!

Spot on Paul. I can see 5 of the 18 turbine Tournafulla (Airtricity) windfarm from my house and actually took a Sunday drive to the hilltop last week. There were plenty other 'tourists' sightseeing there too. It's a spectacular sight on the main Limerick -> Tralee road.
http://www.airtricity.com/international/wind_fa...

Paul, if you can put a list together of IDs of those travelling for Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, QIK, etc, etc, I'll gladly build the widget. A small list will do to get started. A QIK channel is good but it's also nice to be able to follow individual contributions to the 'lifestream'. Having being involved to a degree in the organization of Paddy's Valley I'm very interested in following the experiences of all those travelling on the Web Mission.

Hey Paul, how many of the Web Mission people are on Twitter, Flickr, QIK, etc? Got a list of their IDs? What tag is being used? WebMission08? I'd like to build a widget to track all the action.

Thanks for pointing to Limerick OpenCoffee, a business networking event which has gone from strength to strength. We meet on the first Thursday of each month at the AbsoluteHotel.com from 11am onwards. It's free and open to all. More information on OpenCoffee.ie

Really nice post Paul. I've only ever been, er,.. confronted by a Big Issues seller a handful of times but each time I walked quickly past... not because I don't care but because I found each seller had an aggressive attitude (that's why I say 'confronted). Wish I'd met the likes of Carlos.

Sing it with me now Paul - "30 days has September, April, June and November... " ;-P


I'm heading up to the big smoke for the Blog Awards so a dinner sounds good. I actually met Pat Phelan in the flesh for the first time at TechLudd last night, after knowing him for what feels like years online. Next it's time to find out if you're for real or just a top-secret bot escaped from the Google lab ;)

Don't forget Alexia Golez and myself, both proud Shannon siders longlisted in the Tech Blog Category! :-)

Great commentary on the matter Paul. I've met Antoin at Limerick OpenCoffee a few times and know he's a great guy open to good advice.

One correction on your post though.... I'm no good to anyone as regards advice on this kind of stuff... I've organized feckall in that line! I'm all mouth no trousers mate ;-)

Happy Christmas! :)

I've long thought that Swatch are the iPod of watches Dave. Or, more correctly, since Swatch were huge long before the iPod was born, I've long thought of the iPod as the Swatch of music players :)

I'm part of the PaddysValley group and really looking forward to it Robert. And seeing as Irish Coffee was 'invented' only 15 miles away from me in Foynes, Co. Limerick I'll be happy to regale you with the true history. You might be interested in clicking through to the webpage for the http://www.flyingboatmuseum.com/ to learn a bit more -

"Foynes, Ireland, became the center of the aviation world from 1939 to 1945. On July 9th 1939, Pan Am's luxury Flying Boat, the "Yankee Clipper" landed at Foynes. This was the first commercial passenger flight on a direct route from the USA to Europe. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, this quiet little town on the Shannon became the focal point for air traffic on the North Atlantic...... Captain Charlie Blair, later to become the husband of the actress Maureen O'Hara, had made the first non-stop passenger flight from Foynes to New York in 25 hours, 40 minutes...."

I think you hit the nail on the head here Robert. I've largely migrated to Jaiku recently but still try to keep up with my Twitter friends. Unfortunately most days I only get time to skim through. The one Twitter feed I don't skim is your linkblog. I unsubscribed from Digg last year because there was about 2 hits for every 8 misses in terms of matching my interests. However I consistently find myself clicking through on 8 out of every 10 items in your linkblog.

On days when I'm extremely busy I only read the feeds from my friends, techmeme and your linkblog. I feel like I'm still connected while tracking those.

Welcome to the club. Arrington engaging in a witch hunt by reprinting private emails is what did it for me.

Great video, thanks for that. Really appreciate edited, breezy material that captures the essence of an event in a few minutes without waffling on for hours like some other online video shows.

Well said Paul. While I remain an active user of Twitter and Jaiku (social networking lite) I've lost all interest in Facebook (not that I ever used it much to begin with). The only sustainable Social Network longterm, IMHO, is the blogosphere (Call it blogopshere 2.0 if that doesn't make you puke ;-).

It's damn frustrating waiting for the microformats / OpenID / OAuth / whatever-else-is-needed ecosystem to bootstrap but it will eventually I think.

XDA? Er, thanks very much but no thanks very much ;-)

Remember you're talking to an almost- Nokia fanboy here so you don't have to do much evangelizing but please explain in what way "Nokia wins every time". In terms of usability? I know web surfing is only one aspect of the P1i but I find it very hard to imagine that I could have anything like as good an experience usability-wise on a Nokia as I'm having with the touchscreen and stylus.

I've no intention of getting an iPhone and had been dreaming of an N95 for many months before Bernie Goldbach, kind gentleman that he is, insisted I take a loan of his Sony Ericsson P1i for a while. Now I generally have no loyalty towards any gadget manufacturer but have probably come closers to being a fanboy of Nokia than any other brand. Having owned a 3650 and 6630 (before I lost it) I was very happy with the S60 interface and inclined to imagine I'd have no time for UIQ nor any need for a touchscreen.

But I admit one month later that I'm a convert to both touchscreen and stylus. That's not to say I'd consider an iPhone, I still wouldn't, but it is to say I'd definitely feel now that I was missing something by going back to S60. The only reason I *would* have considered an iPhone is for the browsing capability but I've got to say I'm so thrilled with the experience of Opera Mini 4 on the P1i that I can't now imagine any advantage in mobile Safari. Opera Mini 4 kicks ass! And I can zoom in and out and navigate around with ease using the stylus or even my finger. It really feels like the (full) web on a mobile.

The QWERTY keyboard on the P1i did take me some time to get used to though. I used to be under the impression that it would be an immediate boon to my text entry speed but what I learned was interesting. Even though I'm a touch typist I came to realize that skill is based on instinct rather than thought. Pretty much like riding a bike. Which mean that I couldn't actually get my thumbs to find the right keys without looking at them. However, a few weeks later and I seem to have retrained my brain to locate the right keys with my thumbs too. Meaning that I can now compose text messages with greater speed and accuracy than ever I could with my Nokia. By the way the predictive text is also much better than T9. Not only does the P1i predict words but also sentence fragments.

Bernie has extended the loan but when he eventually recalls the P1i I've a feeling I'm going to be left with a very tough decision. Go back to Nokia or get another touchscreen SE.

Paul, that link to Embracing Chaos doesn't appear to work. I'm eager to read it since it sounds a lot like the philosophy we have at Grazr in that the system helps provide access to groups of feed on an on-demand basis. Feed Grazing is about access to and glancing at feeds without subscribing.

Robert, I've said it before and I'll say it again, don't you dare give up on your link blog! Pleeease! It's one of the most important data-streams in my life and save me loads of time every week by filtering out the noise and bringing me the important stuff.

Don't mind Riley, he's way behind the times on this. I can't understand how he didn't see the writing on the wall. Last January I started writing about “Google ReWriter” -

“…. blog posting, commenting and social bookmarking are various forms of the same thing - annotation…. we must shake off the page-centric mindset. The ‘Wide Web was about reading pages, the Live Web is about annotating microchunks (e.g. permalinks). While we tend to categorize our annotation according to the point of submission, each form is essentially the same. Whether to your own blog, someone else’s blog or a third party note-taking site it’s the same mechanism. Different context but same mechanism.What sense does it make that I have to open my Performancing plug-in to blog, visit a blogger’s web page to comment and invoke a del.icio.us pop-up to take a note? None! I should be able to perform each annotation from within my aggregator - a single unified interface to the Live Web. And I’m betting that’s exactly what Google ReWriter will become.”

I followed up in February -

“…. how will we publish these microformatted comments? With our Google ReWriters (or other 2nd generation aggregator/annotators). We can already use Google Reader to annotate (tag) posts, just press ‘T’. A new version will allow us to comment, just press ‘C’. These comments will be microformatted and tossed back into our uniFeeds, there to be scanned and recombined back into the discussion flow by any microformat aware aggregator.”

Not meaning to blow my own trumpet but it’s been very obvious to many that this was on the cards.