/me is tired 
Went to see Wallace and Gromit last night - I thought Ralph Fiennes did a wonderful Rigsby / Leonard Rossiter (sp.) impression as Wallace’s rival.
Archive for October, 2005
I know it is old news now, but comparing the headlines of the Sunday Independent (”Lawlor killed in red-light district with teenage girl“) and the Sunday Times (”Lawlor dies in Moscow car crash“) from the weekend, you’d wonder why does the Sunday Indo have to sink to such lows to sell papers. They are self-admittedly the number one selling Sunday newspaper - do they really need to or think that they will get extra sales from this behaviour?
They have since apologised, but of course it is too late. BTW I personally don’t have any great love for Liam Lawlor - there’s little doubt that he was a liar and a cheat - but I don’t think that he or his family deserved this.
For the same reason that Damien Mulley outlined on his blog entry about the IIA Net Visionary awards (namely boards.ie’s Tom Murphy won last year), and mainly because there are more deserving nominees, I don’t expect to win an award for “Social Contribution” in November…
However, if by some chance I am selected and there’s an opportunity for a short speech, I will make it a point to ask the awards attendees to support a much more worthy cause in some manner - i.e. fellow nominee Concern - even if it is only by donating a few euros a month. I’ll see if I can bully Damien into doing the same… 
(BTW my affiliation on the Net Visionary page isn’t strictly correct since I actually work for DERI, NUI Galway, but I guess I should have corrected this before now…)
Anyway, here’s a press release from DERI telling you all (once more) how great I am! If it can help drum up some interest in Wiki Ireland, that would be a big plus…
DERI PRESS - Galway resident nominated for top internet award
John Breslin, a researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, has just been nominated by the Irish Internet Association (IIA) for a prestigious national “Net Visionary Award” in the area of “Social Contribution”. The award recognises outstanding achievements in applying Internet technology for the betterment of all segments of Irish society.
John is a native of Co Clare but has been working at NUI Galway for 5 years. John works at the high tech Digital Enterprise Research Institute which is developing the next generation of smart internet technology – the Semantic Web.
He recently set up “Wiki Ireland” (www.wiki.ie) which is an open community website intended to help preserve Irish culture and heritage. At Wiki Ireland anyone can log on and add content about Irish Folklore, history and culture. According to John;
“There is so much cultural knowledge, history, and stories out there, but most of it actually resides in people’s heads. There is a real danger that with the passing of older generations, this knowledge will be lost forever. Wiki Ireland will allow anyone at all to log on to the site and write up their particular story. It’s a simple easy and very democratic way of publishing and preserving our unique cultural heritage.”
John is the founder of Boards.ie one of the most popular internet discussion forums in Ireland. His particular area of research concerns how this next generation of internet technology can be applied for socially inclusive and community related activities. The IIA Awards will take place on 17th November in Clontarf Castle, Dublin.
Funny the things you think about when you lie awake at night… I was wondering about using a wiki for IRC / IM-type chats… You know when you’re talking in a chat room or in an IM conversation and you make a mistake, or you want to clarify something you’ve just said.
What if you could go back and edit what you’ve said, but still have a record of what was changed so that you could see in two dimensions (by time the messages were added and by time the record was edited) the chat room session or the instant message conversation.
Maybe it wouldn’t work, but maybe it would be useful…
We moved offices to Dangan today, so far, so good. Here’s a map and directions to DERI Galway.
(This was written for a press release, not sure if we are issuing it now as there’s lots going on / out of here at the moment, but anyway it should be of interest to the Irish blog-reading community… If anyone wants to help out, post a comment below!)
Wikis are the latest technology lighting up the World Wide Web.
A wiki (from the Haiwaiian word for “quick”) is a collaborative website whose content can be edited by anyone who has access to it.
“Wiki Ireland” (www.wiki.ie) was set up as a non-profit project to create a valuable local knowledge store for Ireland’s culture and heritage. The founder of the project is Dr. John Breslin, a researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). With the slogan “our past is our present to the future”, Wiki Ireland will act as a focus for collecting local knowledge and articles that may or may not be deemed noteworthy for a general encyclopedia.
The projects aims to use Wiki Ireland as a central site for collecting Irish knowledge such as folklore, history or geographical information from participants. The site welcomes contributors willing to devote any time to creating or maintaining articles on the knowledge store, be they teachers, students, librarians or knowledge enthusiasts! Articles can include local songs, poems or recitations; historical descriptions of towns, buildings or people; recommended walks for visitors to a particular region; fairy or folk tales; etc.
Wiki Ireland has goals in common with a number of Irish regional heritage plans. For example, the Galway Heritage Plan 2004-2008 lists as actions to “develop an oral heritage and folklore archive” and “implement an archive outreach programme” amongst others. The image of the Red Squirrel, a disappearing character from the Irish landscape, has been chosen as the logo for the site.
“I have a personal interest in putting an archive of recitations online”, said Breslin. “My grandfather, Jack Casey, has been transcribing recitations from memory and elsewhere that he has been interested in since he was in school. My aunt typed up his _first_ volume of handwritten pages, amounting to over 500 songs and poems, and I have just started to input these into the Wiki Ireland site.”
For more information, visit www.wiki.ie.
Notes for Editors:
Wiki:
Wikis enable documents to be written collectively (co-authoring) using a web browser. Wikis are often open to the general public without the need to register any user account. Many wikis operate with a “free documentation license”, so that their content can be freely used and distributed by others.
The most famous online wiki is the Wikipedia, the world’s largest general knowledge encyclopedia with over 675,000 articles.
As well as the English Wikipedia, there are smaller sized encyclopedias available in over 170 other languages including Irish.
The first wiki-focussed conference was held in Frankfurt in August, at which Dr. Breslin talked with the creator of the first wiki, Ward Cunningham. He also met Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, where they discussed the open inclusion process of Wikipedia as opposed to the more traditional printed encyclopedias.
“I’d just created my first Wikipedia article, about a 1970s music group with the wonderful name ‘Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’. Jimmy Wales said you’d _never_ get that in one of the other encyclopedias.”
DERI:
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) was established in 2003 at the National University of Ireland, Galway through funding from Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Government’s National Development Plan. DERI carries out research in the area of the “Semantic Web”: the next generation of web technologies that will allow people and machines to make better use of the resources available via the Internet.
Damien Mulley has been true to his word in getting the Irish Blog Awards off the ground, at the snazzy address of awards.ie!
So TechCamp went really well, and thanks to Ed and Piaras for a smooth operation, as well as Gavin and Jack for the super venue, and Dan et al. at H365 for the food
My presentation got a good response; there were some people looking for my slides and the animated GIF I used to present the idea of the Semantic Desktop, so here you go.
I’m at TechCamp Ireland where we’re now talking about blog strategies. A lot of interesting people here from different backgrounds (PR, IT, community groups) so it’s going to be a good day I think.
I should pay more attention to /. as I just found out that Upcoming.org are now a part of Yahoo! Like Flickr, it probably means that we will have to logon with our Yahoo! IDs. Hopefully that will be the only change.
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