40 Euro Flight Costs 322 Euro - Some sale!

So Aer Lingus are having a sale, cheap seats if you book before June 1st to fly between October and December. I figure it would be a nice time to get a four day break away so I chalk in the first Sunday in October and the seat is a fiver. I need a return date so go for the Thursday, low and behold the seat is a fiver - sorted.

The fare is one way, so you pay a fiver out and a fiver back. Four of us went in April, so I figure four seats would be grand - 4 * (5*2) = 40.

Total cost of the flight? €322. To the penny. Taxes and charges per person are 64.59 making your flight €74.59 before you leave the airport. Then you’ve got a “handling fee”, presumably the way Ticketmaster have handling fee - PER TICKET - of six bucks, so now you’re on €80.59 before you add bags. If each person brings a bag out and back we’re nearing the 400 quid mark.

Not exactly a fiver now is it? Didn’t get around to clicking that ‘confirm’ button in the end.

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Jan Blanchard Podleaders Video Interview

Hey Tom - it works on the video iPod. Currently watching the second video podcast from Podleaders.com featuring Jan Blanchard chatting with Tom Raftery about TouristR.com, currently in private beta for another two days or so before being launched at the end of the week at Reboot 9.0.

While Tom mentions that the video has been optimised for the iPod, you’ll have to convert the download yourself in order to get it into iTunes (download available as .FLV). I used iSquint for my conversion which dumps the FLV out to MP4 and automatically inserts it into your iTunes video library. A quick sync and you’re set to go.

I will say that its a great improvement on the first video podcast, the interview appears much more natural with the ‘over the shoulder’ look; the camera has been locked down for the demo; the branding works well on the screen and isn’t overly intrusive and it is much more enjoyable to watch as a whole.

One thing I might watch out for (and I’m particular about my own podcasts) is the sound quality - some clip mics, or a boom mic or a cheap wireless kit could do well at capturing sound rather than relying on the camera’s internal mic.

Other than that I say kudos on the second video podcast.

StatCounter Boost Their Freebie Log Size

Looks like StatCounter (tracking all my blogs and other web projects alongside Google Analytics) have boosted the size of their logs on all free accounts from 100 entries up to 500 entries which should make the drilldown a little more interesting on busier blogs - in my case here, KilkennyMusic.com & LiverpoolAccess.com

I’ve been hoping for a while that they’d roll out some of those additional services that have been grayed out for as long as I can remember but the addition of bigger logs is a welcome one.

Via the StatCounter blog (edit: and now subsequent email as I arrive in the office).

We’re very pleased to let you know today that every StatCounter project now comes with a log size of 500 - you guessed it - FREE!

This means that you can now drill down into the detail of the last 500 pageloads on your site. And, of course, you still have LIFETIME summary stats on ALL your visitors. We took the old free log size of 100 and multiplied it by 5 to give you even more info on your visitors. Please note that this increase applies to ALL StatCounter members, and to ALL projects!

You’ll have to go in and do the log updates yourself but the blog post and email have details on how to do it within a few clicks.

The Final Countdown - Keep Up With IrishElection.com

I’m up this morning catching the coverage of the general election with RTE’s exit poll this morning showing Fianna Fail (41.6%) ahead of Fine Gael (26.3%), Labour having slipped to 9.9% with the PDs under 3%. Paddy Power have been on Ireland AM (TV3) and with Bertie Ahern at 1/4 as the next Taoiseach they’re already paying out to everyone who had Bertie on the betting slip earlier in the year.

Once I hit the office I’ll be keeping an eye on IrishElection.com who’s “blogger warroom” opens at Pearse Street in Dublin this morning. There’s SMS updates, Twitter updates, you can phone in your opinions (you’ve got a 2-minute cut off point) through MySay.com.

Check out IrishElection.com here or subscribe to the atom feed.

Fired For Blogging? UK Bloggers At Risk, Are You?

Checking in with the Beeb it looks like a third of bloggers in the UK are at risk of getting fired from their workplace. In a recent survey of 2,000 bloggers it was revealed that 39% of people made “harmful comments” that could be grounds for gross misconduct. That’s a fairly high percentage wouldn’t you think? This gives rise to a post I’ve been keeping in the drafts…

In the Irish blog o’sphere there is a good element of transparency and a great sense of community. We’re not afraid of saying who we work for, who we represent, what our interests are commercially or personally - nice transparency. What I’ve yet to come across - and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong - are people stepping out and bad mouthing who they work for online. Sure enough, you might hate your boss or management and you might talk around the water cooler about it or yap in the pub about it but you don’t go blogging about it!

I worked with AOL for some time a few years back, before I had any interest in blogging (but not too long before) so email was the big thing. So was professional misconduct and the two went hand in hand - you don’t bitch about staff or insider details in email, you don’t (or try not to) make personal mails from your company account, forward emails from your company account, anything that has the potential to bring the name of the organisation into disrepute.

Whether its an organisation you’re working for employing hundreds of people, a small company with fifteen of you there or a small startup (my situation in 2005), it pays to have a little professional courtesy and a little common sense.

From the report -

If there is a negative impact on the organisation’s corporate image which is so serious that it breaches the implied term of mutual trust and confidence, the employee could be dismissed for gross misconduct

And I think thats what it is, common sense. You bite at the hand that feeds you enough and it will eventually bite you back. But blogging isn’t a “new thing” any more and neither is getting fired for it. The term ‘Dooced‘ was pretty much coined by Heather Armstrong who was fired for references made about her employers on her blog back in 2002, just a year after running the blog; ‘Queen Of The Sky’ Ellen Simonetti was fired from her job at Delta Airlines because of events on her blog ‘Diary of a Flight Attendant‘; staff at Wells Fargo and Friendster have been fired in the past for blogging
. More recently there was the case with Sam Sethi getting the flick from Techcrunch UK before Christmas.

The three of us in the office including myself, Aidan and John blog on several different fronts and as a business trying to develop itself and its clients the last thing we need to do is go pissing people off. It might be different in our case as we wouldn’t be blogging about hating our own business, but you’d still not see us naming and shaming clients, buyers or suppliers. However, if it was me in a position over 20 other people and one disgruntled employee decides to take things to the web and bad mouth the business or but the business in a bad light thanks to his remarks online I don’t think I’d have any hesitation in taking action - its just something you don’t do. Even if you’re freelance, why would you want to go bad mouthing or showing up a previous source of work if you’re actively looking for others. Things that get published to the web have a tendency on sticking around….

Late night rant aside, CNN.com published an article while I was finishing up in college just over two years ago and its final points as as important now as they were two years ago.

1. Know where your employer stands on blogging
2. Blog on your own time
3. Practice safe blogging (like not giving away business secrets)
4. Don’t hide your blog from your boss - be open
5. Use good judgement - don’t use your blog to talk about things you’d never say in real life
6. Others will disagree with you - be aware

I’ve had people approach me this year asking “should I tell the manager if I end up telling a funny story from work” (or something along those lines) - I say you better. Be honest and upfront about it. Take from it what you will but for those people getting into blogging, open your eyes when your blogging. People are reading, people are visiting, search engines are keeping track of your posts and you can be held accountable at the end of the day.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a code-of-conduct type thing, its just common sense in relation to your employer and your own job security. If you value your job, don’t put yourself in the firing line.

FeedBurner Will Sell To Google In 2/3 Weeks

This is one sale that I’m happy to see anyway, the two providers a perfect marriage in integrating FeedBurner’s statistics and feed management with the likes of Google Adwords, Google AdSense and Google’s Analytics. I had mentioned earlier in the week that the sale was rumoured to be going ahead, as first mentioned by Sam Sethi at Vecosys.

Spotted the news breaking this morning though on TechCrunch that the deal has been agreed and looks to be in the region of US$100m which represents a great result for a company going into their fourth year who’ve taken US$10m in capital funding over two rounds two years ago.

FeedBurner really is a quality service and my first port of call when setting up a blog, happy to say I’ve got it managing 26 of feeds from across my own blogs and blogs that I’m managing for one or two other people. I like the stats, like the control over my feeds, republish-ability, friendliness to podcasts - the whole lot. Couple that with the statistics provided by Analytics plus the likelihood of additional revenue generation through your RSS feeds and the whole package looks to be onto a winner from the get go.

Tip of the hat to FeedBurner, hopefully it brings about an improvement in everything as opposed to dropping any parts of the service but I guess we’ll have two weeks or so to wait and see what happens.

Mobile Roaming On Mount Everest

Do you think the new EU roaming agreement would extend to the Nepalese border? Or maybe a Roam4Free sim, get a good price before you go mountain climbing? Looks like there’s no problem making a phone call from the summit of Mount Everest anyway. Good to know in case you ever get stuck there!

Big Brother For Irish Startups

Here’s an idea (stemming from my day-long thoughts about video podcasting)…. something like Big Brother for Irish startup companies? Take a co-working style environment, film the whole thing, run it for about ten weeks, at the end of each day you get a video blog post from each of the representatives of the startup. Coupled with that you also have daily video podcasts nicely edited together with interviews from the startups, business advisers and consultants, along with footage from the day throughout the centre. Massive online presence, healthy capital reward at the end of the run for investment in your business….

Would put a massive focus on the startups in question, shed some good media spotlight on the businesses prior to launch and make for some interesting TV. Throw in a few chickens and cocktails (read comments on previous post) and some fun ways to unwind after a 16-hour work day…. you never know!

If anything it would make for some interesting TV don’t you think?

Irish Video Podcasting - I’d Like To See More

I’ve downloaded and watched Tom Raftery’s video interview with Conor O’Neill at PodLeaders.com (direct download link) this morning and I think its a great debut attempt for a video podcast, hopefully there’ll be more of it from Tom in the future.

I’m hoping that by the end of 2007 that KilkennyMusic.com will have ventured into video podcasting. We’ve managed to take the Sound System Podcast weekly and seen as we’ll be on a weekly gig basis for a large portion of the summer, a video addition would (I think) make a great boost to the podcast.

Shopping around on Komplett this morning for video cameras (Komplett, not an affiliate link) it seems now more than ever that digital video cameras, whether shooting to hard drive or dvd or mini-dv are becoming more affordable. Throw the video up on YouTube, or Google or Blip.tv and you’re set.

Personally, I’d love to see more Irish video podcasts (I’m not currently subscribed to any). While it might not suit everyone, are the Irish podcasts you’d like to see make the leap to video? Or would you even bother with it? After all, it is something that you almost ‘have’ to watch while a lot of the time with other podcasts I can bang on the iPod or leave iTunes playing behind me while I work on something else.

Irish Company Buys MindLeaders.com for US$18m

RTE are reporting that MindLeaders.com, a US-based e-learning company has been snapped up by Thirdforce, based in Blackrock, Dublin (with locations in the UK, Australia and New Zealand as well).

The deal is worth US$9m in cash with a further US$9m in shares as the story goes.

In a statement to the Irish Stock Exchange this morning, Thirdforce said the consideration comprises of $9 million in cash and $9 million by the issue of new ordinary shares in the merged company. The company also intends to raise up to €13m through a share placing at a price per share of €0.19, with the proceeds of this placing used to fund the acquisition.

What or who are MindLeaders.com?

MindLeaders is an employee and individual performance-improvement company with nearly 25 years of experience in the technology-based, self-paced training field. We provide personalized learning that supports organizational success. Our e-learning tools cover topics ranging from networking in an enterprise environment to personal use of the pc and from healthcare privacy issues to business skills.

They also provide over 2,000 online training courses online. Overall it looks like a good buy for company who have had some ups and downs in the past year or so.

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