Now here’s somebody who understands viral marketing …
Think of Libraries as an early version of the internet, with books instead of pdf’s and web pages. You would think that as places of study , they would encourage student’s to use modern technology as part of revising for their Leaving Cert. Wrong.
Our local library in Drogheda has banned people from using laptops in the library. The excuse is that they can’t find a practical way of charging for the electricity they use. And don’t even think of asking for free wireless access. And all the student was asking for was a quick charge of his MacBook so he could do a final study session before his exam.
Forget about Web 2. If we don’t get the basics right we’re doomed.
Update
The Drogheda Independent has just picked up on this story (almost word for word). More to follow.
Update 2.
O’Reilly Radar have a very interesting related story (If Libraries had shareholders) with detailed graphs showing how people are using libraries less and less for the books, and more and more for the internet
If you’re reading this , you’ve missed the Dublin Java Users Group (previously known as the Dublin Java Meetup). Jakub will have his blog of the event up soon, including his mad take over the world plans.
Update:
I’ve been tagged by Ken to carry on Gavin’s blogging for charity idea. I’ve twisted the idea a little as rather than repeat an ever expanding list, I’ll add two of my own and highlight two on Ken’s List:
To continue the flow , I tag the following people:
Regular readers know that there are three parts to this site:
- The blog (the part you are now reading) - aimed at business people with a passing interest in technology.
- A wiki (more later) - undiluted techiness, and a scratchpad for various projects in progress.
- The ‘corporate‘ site - the usual ‘happy people in front of PC site’, with standard ‘about us’ , ‘contact us’ and ‘what we do sections’. This is the part that thankfully, Eoghan is working to update.
If you don’t know already, a wiki is an easy to update website that almost anybody can edit. The most famous is Wikipedia, we use the same software , Mediawiki, on our site. It’s good / free /open software, and if you’re able to setup a blog , you should be able to get this working with little of no problems.
Looking at the stats for the last 18 months , I’ve noticed the following:
- At the moment , traphic to these is split roughly 60-30-10 (should keep all you MBA types out there happy). 60% goes to the blog, 30% to the wiki and 10% to the corporate site.
- Visitors to each section are looking for very different things - people tend to hit the blog via cross posting and general search terms (e.g. Java Dublin). People come to the wiki looking for very specific terms (e.g. Apache Lucene Exception). People come to the ‘corporate’ site, either after personal contact, or reading my CV from other channels.
- The writing styles in each are very different. The wiki gets updated most , but is often a series of technical notes in various stages of completion. The blog is updated (on average) 2-3 times a week , with more composed items. The corporate site get’s updated roughly every 3-6 months and has a much ‘dryer’ official style.
All of which brings us back to why a wiki is even better than a blog for getting people to your site.
- The current wiki has only been working 7 months (since our last web hosts big crash) and already (without any serious promotion) is getting half as many hits as the (heavily promoted) blog. This is before we get into implementing Richard’s Search Engine Optimisation tips. From previous experierence, I would expect to get 4 times as many hits without too much effort.
- Wiki’s are updated even more often then blogs. Google loves frequent updates. Therefore wiki’s are even better than blogs for SEO.
I’ve been lucky enough on my travels to work with many different people of many different nationalities. Coming back to Dublin, it’s been good learning from the best of other countries, instead of Irish people having to take their talents elsewhere.
That’s the good bit. Here’s the bad bit.
Mackozer (Ireland from a Polish Perspective) reminded me of something that I’d forgotten : until now, Ireland and the UK were the only EU -15 states to have no work permit restrictions for new talent. That ends today when the Netherlands opens up , with other countries (including Germany) will be ready and waiting to take the people that we’ve been having an easy time attracting / keeping over the last couple of years.
Bad enough not being able to find good people. Worse still is the vicious circle of people leaving the country , leading to lower rental demand for property, leading to lower demand for people , more leave the country (as listed in RTE’s future shock, property crash). Or am I being too melodramatic?
If you’re in IT, you’ve probably dealt a lot with Recruitment consultants. You know , the ones that would feed their Granny to a shark. Fracat has a useful reminder that recruitment consultants are people too.
I’ve just picked up the Barcamp T-Shirts. They’re white , with the Barcamp Logo across the Chest. And they look pretty good.
If you want one, you better get yourself down to the Digital Exchange tomorrow.
Thanks to Ed Byrne of Hosting365 for the sponsorship.
Jakub Korab (him that organises the Dublin Java Meetup) is back blogging.
In another major development, Gavin is open sourcing DotNetKicks. This means that if ever you wanted a Digg / Netscape like platform, Gavin will let you download it and use it on your site.
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but am I alone in thinking that the Irish Times has a very schizophrenic attitude to blogging?
On one hand, it’s one of the key players ushering blogging into the mainstream, with writers such as John Collins bringing the read-write web to the attention of a wider audience (not to mention their coverage of the blog awards). I presume John is freelance , a distinction that will become important in the next paragraph.
On the other hand, some time back I asked for a link from their ‘blogs‘ page. I expected more of a ‘who do you think you are, we have 100,000+ daily readers, and you have exactly how many?’
Instead I got this strange reply…
You can place a link from your website to ours, but we request that you
include a credit to ireland.com/The Irish Times and a link to our home
page at: http://www.ireland.com/
Further information on copyright is available at
http://www.ireland.com/about/copyright/
We do not currently provide a page from which we link to other sites.
Thank you for your interest in ireland.com
Fair enough about not linking to me. But telling me exactly how I should link to you is a bit 90’s.
Which is a pity as if they took the same approach as another publisher (O’Reilly books) they could get some great user generated content, and be a real hub for the masses of Irish non-bloggers.
Update: John Collins has just let out the news that Ireland.com now has several bloggers on it. They even let you post comments.
Slightly off topic, but this is for all the bloggers who post pictures of kids on their websites. They may be cute now, but give them a couple of years and this is what you’ll be doing to them. I’d like to add that this is not a picture of any of my offspring!
The original title for this picture was ‘when the naughty corner fails’. Parents will know what I mean.
Get yourself over to Eoghans Blog NOW to have a chance of winning 2000 Euro worth of design work.
People we met at the pre-blog meetup
- Eddie from McGarr Solictors; Keep up the good work - yes at least one non-legal reader can follow your blog, and I suspect that there are many more.
- EllyBabes. I’ve volunteered to help organize Barcamp Dublin. I don’t even have the excuse of being drunk. And now I’ve gone and put it in writing , so I’ll really have to help.
- Tom and Damien, and ended up stuffing things into paper bags (I’m sure that wasn’t on the original invitation).
- Antoin from Eire.com , busy handing out fon.com cards (and he has me almost sold on the concept).
- GrannyMar. She’s a lovely lady, and was very graceful about my confusing her with Grandad’s wife.
- Eoin O’Dell - cearta.ie, who wasn’t able to stay for the rest of the evening
At the Awards themselves (mainly beside the bar, take from that what you will)
- Bernie Goldbach. Ungrateful sod that he is , gave away the award that we sponsored. I couldn’t have done it better myself, given that I originally wanted to nominate Damien for the category.
- Keith Bohanna, who looks exactly like his photo on his blog (don’t know if that is good or bad - see next point).
- Krishna De, who told me I should lose the tie in the photo (top right) , and she’s probably right.
- Ann from Allagi, also nominated for ‘Best business blog’ , but lost out to the Ice Cream guys (below).
- Conor from LouderVoice - as funny in the person as he is on his (award winning) blog posts.
- Thomas Holmes (YClickit) and Eoghan McCabe , fellow
conspirators competitors in the pint competition. Thomas is living my ideal lifesytle (working remotely , living in Montpellier France. It might also be worthwhile (hint) subscribing to Eogans blog today.
- Richard Hearne, Red Cardinal. Target number 2 for lifestyle Jealously with 6 months a year in Thailand.
- Joe Drumgoole , yet I still don’t understand what ‘ace king - check it out’ means (see the top of is blog page). Maybe if I help organise barcamp dublin he’ll let me in on the secret.
- Roger Galligan , from irishblogs.ie. Yes I do know the difference between you and boards.ie
- Conn Ó Muíneacháin. Giving the (Irish Language) awards away this year, instead of winning them
and pings for the people that we didn’t meet …
- Brian Honan couldn’t make it (he was nominated for best business blog), but lost out in the end to the Ice Cream guys.
- Ken McGuire, who I still owe a pint (unless he can come up with a ‘double or quits’ scheme).
- Kieran from Ice Cream Ireland. He must have been surrounded by frozen food groupies
- Lar from IQ Content - almost got talking a couple of times, but generally one or other of us got sidetracked.
Read this first to understand what is going on.
Leave a Comment with (1) your name , (2) email (will be hidden) and (3) the blog that sent you here.
Only comments that include all three items are in with a chance of winning. Winner will be drawn from the people who leave comments on Tuesday 27th Feb.
Notes from this Post on the Serverside
I recently wrote an O’Reilly article on one of the related JBoss projects the Drools / JBoss rules engine.
Just to get the difference between jBPM and Drools / JBoss Rules straight in my head:
- Workflow tends to be ‘wide’ where Rule Engines tend to be ‘deep’.
- Workflow is wide as the flow is spread over different people / actors and over time.
- Rule Engines are ‘deep’ as they apply simple rules to solve complex problems, but in general the rules are applied ‘all at once’.
Some of the confusion (in my head at least) comes from the fact:
- It is possible to implement workflow using a rules engine, much as it is possible to write your own workflow using Java. Of course , you don’t get the graphical designer that JBpm has.
- Both JBoss Rules (Drools) and JBoss Workflow (jBPM) see to
‘externalize’ part of the solution outside of Java. By stepping outside
of Java to use an XML / Graphical based approach, it makes the solution
easier to configure and understand.
First week of masters course in software engineering.
This weeks training was on refactoring - Notes to follow , but broadly using fowlers book on refactoring (http://www.martinfowler.com). Fairly industry standard stuff , but might give you pause for thought before diving in and copying/pasting left right and centre.
On a practical side , the course uses a lot of Java / J2EE , Eclipse and Tomcat, with quite a high level expected in these (e.g. the refactoring group assignment expected these to be built on a bare machine before the refactoring proper could begin - easy enough if you’ve done it before , but not really the object of the course!!)
The course itself is on UCD’s Belfield campus , and is run for 3 weeks a year (part time) with exams in June.