Web 2 Tuesday

Reminder mails being sent out this morning so its a good time to highlight IrishDev.com’s first joint venture with the IIA in the Morgan in Temple Bar. The lecture will “feature an introduction to Web2.0 Technologies, Business & Marketing implications and code based demonstrations, teaching you to build Web2.0 asynchronous software on .Net and Enterprise Java platforms.”

The plan of action for the night is as follows…

• Registration and refreshments
• Welcome to IIA/IDN and intro to their strategic partnership by Fergal O’Byrne (IIA) and John Brennan (IDN)
• Introduction to Web 2.0, Definition, Business, Marketing, Software Design, by Fergal Breen and Paul Browne
• Configure and create an Ajax web application using .Net (Fergal)
• Configure and create an Ajax web application with Enterprise Java (Paul)
• How to develop your Web 2.0 Software and sites using Agile techniques
• Wine reception

…and booking details, reservations etc. can be made by visiting the event site here.

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Get a free phone! Wow!!

Whats all this? I take a day off and find people clambering for votes (vote Ken) in the Irish Blog Awards (where you can vote for me) and find that Damien Mulley has managed to get some O2 goodies which you can win (by voting for Ken) if you get yourself over to the voting website (where you can vote for me in the best technology blog category) and cast some votes (for me) before the initial round of voting (which includes casting a vote for Ken) closes today, Friday February 17th.

Jokes aside, its an honour to be named amongst your peers for anything at all so even seeing my own name (Ken McGuire, ) up on that list is good for me.

But, if you were to vote for Ken McGuire in the Best Technology Blog category then you could nab yourself.

Did I mention that you can vote for me in…… yeah yeah…..

Blogging For Beginners

I set up kenmc.com as a blog based site back in October last year and in fairness, didn’t really do a whole lot with it. Since shortly before Christmas and moreso since the new year I’ve definitely taken my blogging more serious and continue to blog across 3-4 different sites on a daily/bi-daily basis - all the while, I still consider myself a beginner, and I think its nice to do so. Always learning, always adapting, always beginning.

So, while I’m in that frame of mind, I might point out that Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net has started a Blogging For Beginners series of posts, rehashing some of his older material and exploring new areas. If you’ve never ventured into blogging and you’re considering it, it’s worth a look.

New blog features

Got a little time out this evening to make some additions to kenmc.com, whether you’ll notice them or not! I’ve added a nice Social Bookmarking plugin which covers the likes of Del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo and a few other spots which comes courtesy of Max Power based of Paul Stamatiou’s work who handcoded the original version. Should help out with keeping track of posts, and it adds a nice splash of colour to the blog

I’ve also shifted around the comments to integrate the comment count into the post title (you’ll see the current comment count for each article in brackets) which takes away the link of italic text beneath each post that I never really liked. Nothing like a bit of cleaning on a rainy night….

Irish Bloggers In Demand

Michele Neylon is calling for Irish bloggers who blog business, either for themselves or their company, ahead of the IIA blogging seminar in March. If you’ve got any experiences good or bad go give him a shout here.

US In A Cyber Storm

Cyber security is critical to protecting our nation’s infrastructure, in 5,000 words or less. I can see it coming up on the leaving cert papers in the future, never mind the fact that it’s already being tackled in colleges and ITs across the country. The US government, however, belive it and set about proving it as the Department of Homeland Security in the US have just completed ‘Cyber Storm’, a week-long excercise carried out in the basement of the Secret Service in DC.

“Cyber Storm reportedly not only tested against attacks by hackers, but also by bloggers - who deliberately spread misinformation in the exercise.” Interesting note about the bloggers. The news comes via BBC, but you’d wonder if the Irish government would ever think along the same lines? Considering that I think the future of terrorism lies beyond bombs - you wipe out the Internet and we’re all done for!

Dark Day For Jeeves

Well, its a dark day for Jeeves - he’s getting the sack. The man (can you call him that) has graced the screens and domain of AskJeeves.com for around a decade, he calls the shots over at BlogLines (they were acquired for an undisclosed price last Autumn) an he’s become an absolute icon and catch phrase among internet users.

And now, his P45 is in the post. Anyone in need of a famous internet valet for their homepage?

Update : After writing this post, I came across Save Jeeves via AllEver, as written by a “fan and former employee” speaking in “defense of The Butler”.

Proud of second place

“We’re not number one, but we’re getting there”.

Can anyone remember what company used that as a motto? Can’t for the life of me remember, but now it’s applying to Sandisk who are proud to state that they are in fact number two, but the company are making the most of being number two behind Apple in the digital audio player market in the US. With a marketing budget nothing like Apple’s, the hype alone could be their best marketing in itself.

They do make exceedingly good memory cards, Mr. Kipling.

Songbird : First Look

So I got to try Songbird last night, and while it looked great on the outside I’ll admit that I was disappointed at first use. Robbie’s been having problems with his installation and had to source additional dll files he didn’t have which didn’t come with the package at the time (the source code has since been published).

But the crashing hit my machine as well, not with the editing of track names mind you - I didn’t get that far. I’ve got a sizeable music collection at home. I’ve converted my whole CD collection and have stocked up over 10K tracks on my machine and Songbird must have been looking at me saying “eh….. go way outta that, I’m not counting those”, when scanning my music folder for tracks. 4 seperate occasions it simply breaks down…

The site, which was down most of yesterday has now resurfaced and is packed with all the details on it. First look for me wasn’t fantastic by any means but with the software still version 0.1, there’s a long way to go yet so I’ll be patient.

Songbird goes public

I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while and delighted that Techcrunch could tell me that Songbird has launched - how did that one slip by me? The site is down at the moment but you can download Songbird by clicking here.

What is it? At the core, its a media player built on the Firefox engine with an interface not unlike iTunes and is being released for Windows, Mac and Linux - the above version is for Windows, the rest will follow soon enough.

Songbird plays the Web. Songbird may view Web pages as playlists of MP3s. Soon, Web page authors may publish playlists and transfer MP3s into Songbird in support of digital music stores like eMusic, music subscription services like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, virtual jamming services like Ninjam, playlist sharing services like WebJay and more

Being based on the Mozilla/Firefox engine, its going to be open to user extensions so we might see this evolve as much as Firefox has. Off to try it this evening - yet another new web toy for Ken to play with….

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