Well it looks like Tumblr has died for the moment. They did a big upgrade on November 1st but for some reason either completely failed to test it or there were some nasty bugs hiding in the long grass. Whichever it is the RSS import feature was broken, then sort of fixed, then sort of broken while all the time different pages were available/unavailable due to maintenance¹. Now it’s down completely and looks like it has been down all day.

It’s a pity because I really like the service, especially the way I could almost treat it as an aggregator for my del.icio.us links and snippets of my blog entries. I didn’t like the way it pulled in all my tweets from Twitter² so I’d created a simple but nifty pipe on Yahoo! Pipes! to filter out replies to other people and remove the leading “fintanp:” and imported that as a regular RSS feed. I hadn’t started pulling in photos from Flickr yet³ but did post the occasional one taken with my phone. I hope they fix it soon or I’ll have to move to a competitor like these guys.

The last couple of days have made me realise just how reliant I am on hosted services like wordpress.com for this blog. I’m going to have to organise my own soon.

– Fintan

Picture by adarshr Some rights reserved.

The Irish blogosphere¹ has been abuzz for the last couple of days with the latest example of how potentially powerful bloggers have become in Ireland, how careful – and informed – companies have to be to avoid running into serious PR trouble and how they should really learn to react in a positive way when they get into trouble.

It all pretty much kicked off with this post by Michele Neylon about the response he got from Monster when he complained about being spammed by them. Things got worse when some character called “Pedro” started slinging muck about on the comments to the post only to be found out as coming in from a Monster.com IP address. Not as bizarrely funny as the whole Sky Handling Partners incident but on the same track.

Things get more fun as Tom Raftery blogs about it and then gets threatened with legal action unless he finds a patsy. Damien Mulley joins in and then submits the story to Digg. Now the whole thing is going to be hitting the press tomorrow apparently².

Unfortunately this appears to be a case of someone with a poor understanding of technology, or at least how to use it. In my experience sales and marketing staff and recruiters³ are usually the least technically savvy people I’ve ever come across in the tech industry. It seems that when you put these two together and have a marketing person in a recruitment firm you end up with a recipe for disaster.

The sad fact is that this person is bearing the brunt of it personally. Hell hath no fury like a bunch of angry bloggers and if at least some of those bloggers happen to be professional journalists you are heading for some seriously bad PR. Having said that it looks like this individual brought all upon himself by first assuming that he could use IT@Cork’s membership list⁴ to mass-mail people and then trying to cover up with bluster and threats.

First rule when you’re in a hole is to stop digging. Attempting to “recall” the email won’t work – you’re just trying to pull a Homer⁵ – and threatening legal action is a bit like poking a wasps nest with a stick⁶.

In future, try a mea culpa and apologise. You’ll find it’ll defuse the situation very quickly.

– Fintan

Picture by bondidwhat Some rights reserved.

I’ve finally caught the Twitter meme¹ (you can follow me here). I was skeptical about it for a long time but I suddenly realised that my problem with it had always been with the way that the guys at Twitter were trying to pitch it – as a great tool for stalkers to keep tabs on you. The reality is that like most new technologies people will find uses for it that were unintended or unexpected². The people I follow, and who follow me, are mostly just doing what I do; throwing out short braindumps and observations and commenting on each other in turn.

My initial enthusiasm though has given way over the last few days to disappointment at just how flakey Twitter actually is. It’s regularly up and down and tweets³ seem to go missing all the time. They’re probably a victim of their own popularity but there are question marks over Twitter’s ability to support such a large userbase⁴. There now seems to be a bit of herding in the direction of Jaiku and I’ve set myself up on that one although I’m not using it yet.

Seeing as I was starting accounts left-right-and-center I figured I might as well start a tumbelog too. Over I popped to Tumblr.com and started this one here. I’d thought about it before but given that I couldn’t even keep posting to this blog I thought that I’d just be wasting my time adding another outlet for my scribbles. But then, like Twitter, I realised that I was coming at it from the wrong angle and that my tweets, my tumblelog and my blog all had a place in the bigger picture of what I’m trying to do. My blog will be home to long-form articles and braindumps. Twitter⁵ will be for my moment-to-moment thoughts while my tumblelog will tie them all together, importing from my blog, Twitter and del.icio.us accounts using RSS feeds and allowing me to capture all the random things that I frequently want to share but which don’t quite fit into my blog or 140 characters.

Hopefully I have the time and energy to keep posting to them all and I hope that you, my small but appreciated audience, will continue to follow me. Do you have a blog, twitter account or tumblelog? Let me know where you are and I’ll follow you too.

– Fintan

I guess I haven’t been stressing WordPress until now but yesterday’s post didn’t quite work out as planned. I’m probably trying to be a bit too fancy with the layout but because I’m using WordPress’ free hosting¹ and don’t have as much control over the layout as I’d like I had to hack it a bit. I’ll be tidying it up a bit shortly but I’ll probably also need to move to my own hosted version as well to give me more control.

A funnier² problem emerged while I was working on editing the post though. For some reason when I edited it after it had been published it was marked as private without my knowledge. A quick Google turned up these posts here and here, along with this thread, about how this is a bug, apparently occurring when editing published posts using Firefox. It didn’t seem to happen to me when I was using Safari³ so this is probably the case. However I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t so much a bug as an undocumented feature⁴.

Essentially what happens is that when you edit an already published post and then hit “Save and Continue Editing” it is suddenly marked as Private. This actually kind of makes sense. If you want to save an already published post but want to continue editing it then you may not want it visible while you’re still making changes. When you’re done you manually reset it back to public and hit save. Perhaps I need to RTFM but I didn’t realise that it was supposed to work like this. I’ll also need to play around with this to confirm it but if it’s consistent behaviour then why does it only seem to “work” on Firefox? Perhaps the real bug is that it doesn’t seem to happen on any other browser.

Follow-up 24/4/07: No. It’s a bug. :-) Tried reproducing the problem while editing yesterday’s post but couldn’t get it to happen.

– Fintan

Picture by dokmarius Some rights reserved.

Olvier Ansaldi beat me to the punch¹ on a small piece that appeared in this morning’s edition of the free Dublin newspaper Metro²:

Four in every five blogs on popular websites contain potentially offensive content, such as pornography, new research claims. Computer software firm ScanSafe, which commissioned the report [...]

You know, I’m really getting fed up of hearing about the latest impeding threat to our health/morality/gadget when it comes from someone who is trying to sell a solution to the threat to our health/morality/gadget especially when it’s based on research that they commissioned. A similar thing happened a few weeks ago in connection with a virus for the iPod. I mean, are people that stupid that they’d actually not realise that they’re being hoodwinked?³

I’m also fed up with the rag press who are more interested in selling sensationalism and their own agenda than selling facts. Mind you, this is nothing new. I’ve been reading Niall Ferguson’s excellent book on World War One, “The Pity of War” which has a section on the media’s behaviour in the build-up to 1914 and during the war itself. Lord Northcliffe, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, went so far as to declare in 1918 that:

I do not propose to use my newspapers and personal influence to support a new Government … unless I know definitely and in writing, and can consciously approve, the personal constitution of the Government.

Fox News how are ya?

One of the truly great things about the current wave in the tech industry⁴ is, as Darren Barefoot said at BarCamp yesterday, that the consumers are becoming the producers. Whether it’s editorial (blogs), radio (podcasts) or TV (videocasts), the tools that are available are lowering the barriers to entry to all sorts of media. Sure this is raising the noise part of the SNR but it also means that anyone with a message other than Buy My Product/Politician/Policy can also be heard.

Viva La Revolucion!

Oh and apparently 4 out of 5 blogs have offensive content so here’s some pron⁵:

Picture by Jagvar

Fwoahr!

– Fintan

BarCamp Dublin took place yesterday. It was my first BarCamp but certainly won’t be my last. It was a lot of fun and there was a great turnout. The venue in the Digital Exchange building, part of the Digital Hub in Dublin, was a good one but there were persistent internet connectivity problems throughout the day. The upside of that though was that there didn’t seem to be too many people spending all their time on Twitter¹ :-).

I had thought about writing an overview of each of the sessions I went to but there was just so much good stuff talked about that this post would have been far too long. Suffice to say that among the highlights was Conor Halpin’s talk about pricing models for SaaS, illustrated by his use of a straightjacket. He recommended a mixed model of subscription and per-usage charges. Darren Barefoot from Capulet had a session on social media marketing with some great tips on how to increase the audience for blogs and how to use bloggers for marketing products. Eoghan McCabe’s talk on web usability generated a great deal of audience discussion, surprisingly around a specific case: the way online banking sites ask for a customer’s PIN. Later Paul Campbell (pictured left), a member of the Ruby Ireland user group and along with Eoghan part of the new Patchwork team, gave a typically enthusiastic introduction to Rails, pulling off his first ever presentation really well.

After lunch there was a panel discussion on some general Web 2.0 issues with Tom Raftery, Sean O’Sullivan from Rococosoft who had earlier talked about Voice 2.0, Darren Barefoot and tech journalist Karlin Lillington. Among the questions the panel covered were how to make money from web 2.0 (advertising and a premium rate model like Flickr) and getting more readers for your blog (quality is more important than frequency; sincerity and originality is vital). There was also an interesting discussion on the recent death threats made to Kathy Sierra and the subsequent O’Reilly code of conduct kerfuffle. Darren Barefoot made an interesting observation about how the barrier of entry to fame has been lowered. The long tail effect is probably coming into play – it’s possible to become famous among a smaller niche group. Notoriety in any form tends to bring undesirable attention and that’s something that bloggers need to be aware of.

The final session I went to was a bit rushed unfortunately because previous sessions had overrun. There were also very few people at it which was a pity because Krishna De had some interesting things to say about using blogging to build buzz about your business. I look forward to being able to hear her speak again under better circumstances.

Afterwards it was down to the Lord Edward in Christchurch for a few free pints courtesy of Diageo. Overall the event was excellently organised, well supported by the various sponsors and attended by a group of interesting, passionate individuals. Hopefully next time internet connectivity will be sorted out.

– Fintan

I had an interesting chat with a friend and colleague today about our respective blogs. I jokingly made my first post on this blog about getting more people looking at my blog that his. It had been a running joke amongst the development team in our office from the moment he outed himself as a blogger that his hit-count was creeping up past the 2 hits a day mark.

In our discussion Olivier made a point that the best way to generate a massive hit count on your blog was by just espousing some controversial opinion. Now while I believe if you write a blog you have to be opinionated – and in the IT industry there are a lot of opinionated people, it’s practically a requirement – I feel that what’s more important for me is not being opinionated for the sake of it but developing an ability to write interesting and thought-provoking pieces. Incidentally, he agreed with me and I would say that the signal-to-noise ratio on his blog is pretty damn good.

For a while I’ve been running a parallel blog over on blogger.com and my first post there¹ was about the poor signal-to-noise ratio that I fear blogs, now that they’re becoming more and more mainstream, will develop. Right now there are a handful of high quality and interesting blogs that I read. However, like the home pages of 1996, as blogging becomes mainstream the new generation of blogs will probably be full of useful information like where you’ve been on holiday² and how you wired the cables behind your desk³. With pictures. This may be egalitarian freedom of expression but the reality is that if blogs are to survive and become a new publishing medium then the quality has to remain high.

Blogging can be amateur journalism or just plain amateur and, as any aspiring writer will tell you, the key to writing is practice, practice, practice. I’m going to speak my mind and express my sometimes half-formed opinions but I’ll never do it for the sake of generating a temporary audience. I hope, if you’re reading this, that you’ll stay with me while I try to learn my craft.

– Fintan [listening to Jack L]

At the moment I’m running a blog on both wordpress and blogger. I started the Blogger one last year and didn’t do anything with it until recently. I only discovered WordPress¹ last week when a colleague told me about the blog he’d started. Right now I’m trying to figure out which one I prefer.

Blogger has more themes, is more configurable and allows you to have multiple distinct blogs. You have to do a lot of stuff manually and I feel you really need to understand CSS and HTML to get the most out of.

WordPress, on the other hand, seems to be fairly limited in terms of themes but is much easier to use without having to dive in to the HTML (e.g. setting up links on your page). In fact, I’m not even sure yet if you can get at the CSS or HTML (of the template). One feature I do like are the tags you assign to blog entries. These work in the same way as labels in GMail and allow you to filter groups of entries.

I suspect that what I want is a bit of a halfway house. A blog that allows me to do most of what I want through simple menus and forms but still gives me direct access to the CSS so that I can change fonts and colour schemes. No doubt over time I’ll figure out which one I prefer and stick with that or else find the elusive third way.

– Fintan [listening to The Cardigans - Erase and Rewind]

A while ago I started a blog over on blogger.com. Why? Because it was there! And true to my initial now long-deleted posting I promptly forgot about it. The link stayed on my browser though, making me feel guilty about not doing anything with it. That was until last week when a friend and colleague came out of the closet with his blog.

Now I have something approaching blog-envy while he, very eloquently for a non-native English speaker, puts forward his interesting and intelligent opinions on software, agile development and other stuff. Stupid smart people…

So, while I don’t claim to be as interesting or as intelligent as Olivier when it comes to matters technical I’m going to at least try to compete with him on the hit count. I know lots of people….

– Fintan [listening to Foo Fighters]