Archive for March, 2006

DOT ie by Alex French

Published
by
Cloud
on 16/3/2006
in Boards and Literature
. 2 Comments Tags: .

I bought DOT ie by Alex French, Mercer Press last week. Was happy of course to see a page about boards.ie with a nice screenshot from the main page of the site :) (Frozen in time at the top of the latest posts list in the screenshot is rymus on the “Boards Beers Cork 4″ thread in the “Cork City” forum.)

It’s a good little book, with chapters on “Getting Online”, “The Basics of Web Browsing and Email”, “Advanced Topics”, and “Protecting Yourself Online”. The part I found most useful was chapter 5, the “Web Directory”, which has sites of interest to newbies or experienced users of the Web in Ireland. Some of these I already knew, and some I now want to check out…

Bebo Blocked from NUI Galway Network

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/3/2006
in Social Networks
. 358 Comments Tags: , , .

Schools and colleges online social networking site Bebo has been blocked from student use on the NUI Galway campus network. The virally addictive site, which has over 2,500 registered users in the NUI Galway group alone, was blocked due to overusage by students resulting in computers being unavailable for academic purposes.

Director of Computer Services at NUI Galway, Kieran Loftus, released this bulletin:

Access to Bebo.com
Tuesday, 14th of March, 2006

Bebo.com is a website which facilitates the exchange of personal information between teenagers and other young persons. Access to Bebo.com from University computers was restricted last Friday afternoon Friday March 10th 2006 in response to an substantial number of requests to Computer Services from students. Since we took this action we have received positive feedback on it from students.

The substance of these complaints was that students were becoming unable to access computers in the suites to do academic work because of widespread use of bebo.com, particularly its whiteboard drawing facility. The complaints extend to the use of the shared resources provided by the University’s network including its wireless network.

Continue reading ‘Bebo Blocked from NUI Galway Network’

SIOC Plugin for DotClear

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/3/2006
in Blogs and Semantic Web
. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Alexandre Passant has released a SIOC plugin for the DotClear blogging platform… Excellent!

Plugin SIOC pour Dotclear - Alexandre Passant

Blogs and Podcasting Talk to MA Students in Journalism

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/3/2006
in Blogs
. 0 Comments

Also gave a blogs and podcasting talk to the MA in Journalism class here in NUI Galway this morning.

Looking forward to lots of interesting blogs from them in the near future, like this one which was created during the class.

Masterchef Goes Large

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/3/2006
in Television
. 0 Comments

Dean for the win! Anybody else watching this? It’s the last week, and the final show is on Friday (BBC2 at 6:30 PM).

Digital Spy Forums - Masterchef Goes Large: guilty pleasure (merged)

Irish Blog Awards 2006 Aftermath

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/3/2006
in Blogs
. 2 Comments

Had a great night on Saturday at the inaugural Irish Blog Awards - and well done Damien for organising such a great event while making it all appear so effortless.

Met a bunch of people, some familiar, some not: Treasa (Winds and Breezes), Ryan (rymus), Lindsey, Gavin (Gavin’s Blog), Dick O’Brien and Deanna, John Ihle (who wrote the piece in the Irish Times about the awards), John and Jess (Fústar), Colm, Padraig and Paul (Infactah), Tim (Twenty Major’s “representative on Earth”), Rick O’Shea (who compered the night), Sinead Gleeson (sigla, winner of the Wiki Ireland “Best Culture Blog” award), dangerman et al. (TCAL, winners of the boards.ie “Best Group Blog” award), Conn Ó Muíneacháin (An tImeall, old classmate and another winner) and Margaret, Ed Byrne, Piaras Kelly, Roger Galligan (IrishBlogs.ie), Elana (Ireland Offline), John (the wonderful North Atlantic Skyline AKA Monasette, one of my favourite photo bloggers), Ina (Semantic Bits), Ann, Brian Greene (bhg), Gavin (monkeyfudge), Bernie Goldbach (Irish Eyes), Tom Raftery (IT Views, and host of the great PodLeaders series of podcasts - I listened to the Vint Cerf one yesterday), Aengus, Caitriona (caitriona.net), Annette (Thinking Out Loud), Michele (Blacknight), Antoin (eire.com), James Corbett (Eirepreneur), and many more.

Photo courtesy of the Irish Times. More photos available from Flickr’s irishblogawards tag.

Edit: The picture may be a bit misleading - I didn’t win the award I was nominated for, but as a sponsor I was entitled to hold one for a while :)

Invited Talk in DCU Last Night

Published
by
Cloud
on 14/3/2006
in Blogs and Boards
. 3 Comments

Enjoyed my talk to the E-Marketing class of marketing postgraduates at DCU last night; the topics were blogs and podcasting in relation to my work at DERI and also the past, present and future of boards.ie.

The presentation is available here in PDF format.

Irish Blog Awards 2006 Tonight

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/3/2006
in Blogs and Wikis
. 4 Comments

I’m heading up to Dublin this afternoon to attend the Irish Blog Awards in my triple role as nominee / judge / sponsor (no, I can’t judge my own category!).

It should be a fun event; looking forward to putting yet more faces to names!

Sorry that mbf won’t be able to go; he deserves equal credit for his work on Planet Of The Blogs… So fingers crossed for us both.

Now to clear some wiki spam; but see you all later on tonight!

The Journals Rebrand

Published
by
Cloud
on 9/3/2006
in Blogs and Boards
. 3 Comments Tags: .

I’ve been organising a rebrand of Planet of the Blogs and other blogging sites I run for the past month or two.

The plan is to rebrand POTB / IrishBlogs.org under the “Journals” brand. This would connect to similarly branded sites for other countries (e.g. the New Zealand version of POTB is Generation Blog).

So in the short term, journals.ie and journals.co/net/org.nz will appear; later journals.jp and journals.org.uk will probably be set up. journals.es may appear in parallel with boards.es (eventually!).

journals.ie will incorporate the POTB Irish blogs aggregator (probably as planet.journals.ie), the IrishBlogs.org Drupal-based blog hosting service, and the GalwayCity.com WPMU-based blog hosting site. The plan is to allow people to choose what domain they want to use in their blog URL, e.g. trucks.galwaycity.com or vans.journals.ie or cars.irishpodcasts.net, from a list of about 10 to 20 Ireland-related domain names.

Here’s an initial stab at a logo, I want something that will reduce in size well… But I’d appreciate some feedback.

More Milestones for boards.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 3/3/2006
in Boards
. 3 Comments

Last month we passed the 4 million posts mark at boards.ie; it almost coincided with the 8th anniversary of our first post on 12th February 1998, so that averages at 1370 posts a day over the eight years (this month we’ve been averaging at over 6k posts per day).

Some statistics are always good… aren’t they?! :) Detailed statistics for our vBulletin installation began in August 2004, so the following are over an 18-month period.

  • Our monthly registrations have more than doubled from about 1.2k per month in August 2004 to 2.7k in January 2006.
  • Also, in terms of user activity, the number of users who check in every day has tripled from around 1.5k during August 2004 to around 4.5k this January. So comparing this with the number of registrations, it seems that more users are ’sticking’ with the site.
  • Threads created per month have jumped from 6.6k in August 2004 to 15k in January 2006.
  • Posts per month have similarly increased from 76k in August 2004 to 185k in January 2006.

Finally, here are some of the busiest forums in terms of total thread views (since whenever our statistics on thread views began):

mysql> select sum(views) as totalviews, forum.title from thread, forum where thread.forumid = forum.forumid group by thread.forumid order by totalviews desc;

Continue reading ‘More Milestones for boards.ie’