If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Click here to find out what an RSS feed is. Thanks for visiting, Phil!
The king of Internet ideas, Ze Frank, has started a Colorwar.
I’ve taken my throw.
ROCK!
Go noTeam!
When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was so totally ridiculous. Sending and receiving txt messages is not new. It’s distinctly old technology. So I signed up.
After receiving some useless messages from some people I had added - the sort of messages that said, “Just got the kids to bed, now gonna have lots of hot sex with the wife” or “Monday mornings suck, I hate my job”, or “I hate technology and computers. What’s a blog?”
As well as the usual mutterings of new technology ideas, crazy entrepreneurs telling us their new money-making scheme, conferences in Cork, Seminars in Limerick, photo meets in Dublin and sheep giving birth to deformed creatures from hell with a Tinyurl linking to a picture.
So 11 months after getting bored and switching off, I have switched it back on.
Today there was talk of a random piss-up in Dublin, delicious biscuit meetup group, querying the cost of twitter txting among other things.
I now understand its usefulness, as well as its potential. I have some ideas of my own.
I’m feelin’ a little weird doing this. It was hilariously funny. They sussed it out and sent a nice little apology.
Why am I doing this. Well just to follow up on the story. Maybe I should have just left it at that. But what the heck.
from Clint Word <cword@godtube.com>
to
date Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:36 PM
subject GodTube Customer Care
Dear Members,
At GodTube, we take the responsibility of monitoring site content 24 hours a day very seriously. We are the Christian site where you can feel assured you will find clean images and dialog.
We’ve been made aware that on March 4, you may have received an email that appeared to be from our Customer Care department. If you did receive the email, we offer our apologies. The subject line and content of the email was not GodTube sanctioned messaging nor does it fit within our standards. We have taken appropriate measures to lesson future occurrences.
Your support is vital to our continued success and we always welcome your feedback. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our Customer Care department.
The GodTube Team
Why am I am member? I really don’t know. But for this I’m glad I am.
Here is an email I received 30mins ago.
I’m not genius at tracing mail but it seems like it is coming from Godtube. This was in the original/detailed message:
Received: from FE4.exchange.rackspace.com ([10.244.5.57]) by FE4.exchange.rackspace.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Tue, 4 Mar 2008 18:49:48 -0600 Received: from admin.godtube.com ([67.192.33.245]) by FE4.exchange.rackspace.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
There had been rumours that this year would be better than the previous two, and with the addition of intros, music and a few words from George Bush it was. Once again, but very deservedly, Twenty Major won the award for best blog, coinciding with the recent release of his book the two prizes go hand in hand. Maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance next year.
Highlights of the night include Robin Blandford’s mum collecting his prize on his behalf, Kieran Murphy of Ice Cream Ireland’s dress sense, Nialler9 winning once again, Grannymar and Grandad sharing the same stage.
The award for best photoblog this year went to Claire of Gingerpixel and with her blog being filled with so many brilliant photographs, especially her great portraits of people she has stopped in the street she definitely deserved this prize.
He tried, he failed, he left. But he won a prize finally. Jett Loe was honoured with a special prize this year for being “shafted” in previous years, and truly shafted once more being 3899 miles away in Nashville, Tennessee. However I retrieved his prize and have brought it back to Belfast - not before taking it on a journey around Dublin first.
Jett, I’d be happy to bring it to you…
For me the award ceremony was better than previous years, especially with the super-enjoyable photo meet beforehand, and meeting more people than before. Unfortunately I regret meeting less people than I would have liked, and for leaving too early due to Andy telling me that he had gone to another bar, but in the end turning out to have changed the plan and ending up going back to the hostel, while everyone else was still drinking back at the Alexander.
Before leaving I did get plenty of photographs of random people hanging around - many of whom I don’t know. If you know their names, add tags on flickr
However, as usual the whole weekend was one big motivator to organise my blog better, to figure out a real agenda and better acquaint myself with more bloggers.
I also hope to get down to Dublin, and maybe other cities in the South of Ireland before the next Bloggies.
Finally, congrats again to all the great bloggers who won, to everyone who was there and made the weekend so good, and of course to Damien and everyone who helped put together another great awards ceremony.
For more photos of Jett’s ‘Shafted’ award click here
For more photos of the Irish Blog Awards 2008 click here
I am always in search of gig guides, and to know where my favourite bands are without having to launch their Myspace page. The answer came to me a couple of weeks ago. Sceptical at first, assuming it was just another web 2.0 hopeful, I turned out to be quite wrong once I delved into the recently launched Showclix.com.
Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, this could be the key to accessing information about live music anywhere in the world, by bringing the social aspects of the web to the forefront. Showclix is a search engine for gigs and concerts, as well as a ticket provider - a definite competitor to Ticketmaster.
Simply key the name of a city in the search box to find artists stopping by on their tour. There is a profile page for each concert date which draws in related information on the artist such as a short bio, links to the band’s website and Flickr photos. From here you can select the ‘remind me later’ button to be reminded by email days or weeks before the gig date, invite others to check out the listing, or select that you are going so everyone will know.
The next step is to add your city to your RSS reader and track new concert announcements as they happen.
Though my favourite feature has to be the tour tracker. Once logged in, the tour tracker will notify the user when their favourite bands are playing in their area as soon as it is added to the site.
This is a great tool for bands, promoters and gig-goers alike. With the ability for anyone to add dates, it can be used as a free promotional tool and with its super user-friendly environment makes it easily accessible to anyone wishing to find or track concerts of their favourite bands.
Speaking to Lynsie Camuso, site founder, I am told that a new ticketing system is due to be implemented for the States in a few weeks, and this side the pond soon after. Here’s a brief list of what it offers ticket sellers:
- Sell tickets online 24 hours a day
- Provide mobile & e-ticketing delivery options
- Process point-of-sale transactions
- View & manage ticket inventory real-time
- Access & edit your event settings instantly
- View customer details & order history
- Create presale & promo/coupon codes
- Manage comp & media tickets
- Create & send email newsletters
- Export customer, sales and traffic data into excel
- Generate real-time sales reports
- Create customer & demographic reports
- View daily traffic reports & conversion rates
Showclix certainly has the right idea, picking up on the need for a way to easily track artists in this era of the ever-popular live music event. I have a feeling I will actually use this site.
Check out the blog (Shlog) for site updates, as well as music and concert news.
So the long list of nominees has been officially released, just behind those “leaks” that spread across the web in the last couple of days. This year I find myself nominated for: Best Designed Blog, Best Photography Blog and Best Blog. I am very pleased about this, though I doubt I will win due to the great competition I am up against in each category, but to be standing alongside these great bloggers I feel honoured.
Not surprisingly, the number of blogs has increased significantly since last year let alone how much of an increase there has been from two years ago, with just far too many to count (at the minute at least).
I have my work cut out for me for the next month, the little free time that I will have will be spent catching up on the blogs I know and all those that I don’t.
The date is January 4th 2006, nominations have just opened for the very first Irish Blog awards to be held in Dublin on March 11th at the Alexander Hotel.
I was very excited, I had lots of visitors to my photoblog at the time. I was in with a chance. I didn’t expect to win, but I knew I had a chance.
The day before the ‘ceremony’, Friday 10th March 2006, my camera arrived in the post. My first digital SLR. After ripping the box open, I headed to Dublin City, having barely any idea what I was doing with the camera, sticking to ‘auto’ much of the time, I snapped away through the busy streets.
The next day I met Gavin and we both snapped all around us, he having received an SLR for Christmas a few months prior. Some of these photographs I still like today.
We arrived at the Alexander Hotel, a little unsure what to expect. I was nominated and short Listed the title of ‘best photoblog’. The prize went to Donncha O Caoimh for his In Photos blog - well deserved. I was quite relieved, anyway as I didn’t want to have to say anything in front of all those people.
The following year, however, I did. Gavin Mullan won the ‘best photoblog’ for Headphoneland. There was no way I could win it this year as I hadn’t updated mine in over 6 months. Unfortunately, Gavin was ill and couldn’t make it, so I accepted the trophy on his behalf.
Having very much enjoyed the last two Blog awards and met many great people, I will definitely be going to again this year. Unfortunately the photoblog is still no longer active (still on the to-do list), I do have this blog of course. So if you feel that this blog fits into any of the categories, have a go at nominating me.
Some would say this isn’t a photoblog, I don’t even consider it a ‘proper’ photoblog, though there are lots of photos. It could also go under the category of ‘personal’ blog, ‘arts and culture’ blog or ‘music’ blog, your choice. There is ‘best overall blog’ too! Each blog can only be nominated for Best Blog and one other category.
Nominations close at 9pm on Friday January the 18th. Click here for the nominations page
The blog awards this year are being held this year on Saturday, March 1st, 7.30pm at the Alexander Hotel. Time to book the hostel I think.
Thanks to the help of my good friend, Andy, I have a nice new website for you to marvel at, with an updated portfolio.
Check it out at www.philokanephotography.com
Stay tuned for more updates over the next few weeks.
Having all of last week away from the horrid office workplace environment, I had to go back. I remember back in both primary and secondary school wishing that time would go so much faster. Now that there is no more school there just aren’t enough hours in the day for all the things I want to do.
I spent much of my week attempting to ‘get my life on track’ and be like those extremely organised people - by organising my bookmarks, firefox extensions, feed subscriptions and reading a few productivity websites such as the incredible Lifehacker, Lifehack. These sites always gets me motivated to start organising my normally very disorganised computer/hard drive/file system.
This problem stems from the fact that I have a few too many interests. Of course, having lots of interests isn’t a bad thing, it’s just finding the time to pursue each one that causes the problem. Photography, music, science, psychology, business, travel, chichés, programming, books, movies, travel, the internet, journalism, philosophy, procrastination, media, finance, environment, google, podcasts, technology, health, scrubs, greys anatomy, house, weeds, heroes etc etc.
Prioritise you say? That I try. It appears as though the only thing I truly desire right now is time itself, and so I have made it my goal, to manage better that which I have been given.
