Monthly Archive for June, 2008

GalwayFirst.ie: Lost in Galway / Stars at Galway Film Fleadh

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/6/2008
in Galway, Movies, NUI Galway and Television
. 1 Comment

From Galway First:

Star Trek fans are called Trekkies, but watch out for the Lost-ies. Fans of the inexplicable and never-ending TV series are planning to come to Galway this week to honour the conferring of the star of several episodes of the series, who is receiving an honorary degree at NUI, Galway.

Fionnula Flanagan is an Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Irish actress. She trained in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and has appeared in numerous films, including The Others with Nicole Kidman, Transamerica and Waking Ned Devine, as well as television series and stage productions. She came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Teilifís Éireann production of the Irish Language play, An Triail. Ms Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce in the 1967 film version of Ulysses.

But as far as fans of Lost are concerned, she will forever be that mysterious white-haired woman Ms Hawking who appeared in the “Flashes Before Your Eyes” of Lost. Message boards online pertaining to the series have revealed that dozens of Irish Lost fans are to come to Galway to congratulate her on her conferring.

So, if you see any black smoke, polar bears or see Mutton Island being moved mysteriously this Friday, don’t panic. It’s just all in a day’s happenings on Lost.

The honorary conferrings are on tomorrow here in NUI Galway. Funnily enough, I think the first thing I saw Fionnula Flanagan in was actually Star Trek (The Next Generation). But I loved her best in Paddywhackery on TG4 in her role as Peig Sayers!

In other news, it was announced yesterday that the 2008 Galway Film Fleadh will play host to some international stars including Peter O’Toole, Jessica Lange, (President!) Bill Pullman, and Alex Gibney, the 2008 Oscar winner for Best International Documentary.

Press release: “NUI Galway and Tourist Republic to Make Travelling Tailor-made”

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in DERI, NUI Galway and TripPlanr
. 0 Comments

http://www.nuigalway.ie/news/main_press.php?p_id=760


TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels

NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to develop a new intelligent trip planner in collaboration with Irish start-up Tourist Republic Ltd. The internet tool, TripPlanr, will allow travellers to plan more complex trips than existing technology allows, such as combining multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline. The cost of this initiative is €200,000 and has received support funding under Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation Partnership programme.

TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels. The technology will combine Touristr.com’s traveller recommendations with information from airlines and accommodation providers, suggesting the most perfectly-attuned trip possible.

Jan Blanchard is CEO of Tourist Republic and sees huge benefits in the partnership: “We knew that to build the intelligent trip planner which we have in mind, we needed a team to rival the in-house expertise at Google or Yahoo! Through Enterprise Ireland we have this opportunity to bring our vision to reality with DERI, which is the largest Semantic Web research institute in the world”.

DERI’s specialised expertise in Information Mining, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 applications will allow TripPlanr to filter data and make recommendations based on the preferences of the traveller and their social network. Building on Touristr.com’s existing destination review site, the new solution is expected to increase the probability of the traveller booking the targeted option suggested.

According to Dr. John Breslin, Project Leader with DERI at NUI Galway, and founder of the popular online forum boards.ie, “The pre-internet problem of information deficit has been replaced with the problem of information overload. We are faced with an overwhelming surfeit of similarly sounding destination descriptions and offers. We hope to make online trip planning much more personalised by enabling networked knowledge using the latest technologies developed here at DERI.”

The TripPlanr project has a skilled team in place to research and develop the application, and the project is currently recruiting for web developers to join this exciting work. TripPlanr is expected to be in beta testing by the end of the year.

-ends-

Google Trends for Websites: boards.ie, ireland.com, independent.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in Boards, Internet and Ireland
. 0 Comments

Via Damien, I tried out Google Trends for boards.ie in comparison to the two main Irish newspaper sites.

Here are the stats for Ireland only from Google Trends (blue = boards.ie; red = ireland.com; yellow = independent.ie):

Here are the stats for all regions from Google Trends:

Here is the worldwide graph from Compete:

And finally, here is the worldwide graph from Alexa:

There are a lot of variations! Although ComScore also do rankings, I am not sure is the service publicly available, and Quantcast’s analysis seems more US-focussed. While some people are not so sure about the figures (1, 2), it is an indicator of sorts - even if it’s just to see if you are in the same league…

Intruders.TV interview with Salim Ismail at BlogTalk 2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 17/6/2008
in BlogTalk and Social Media
. 0 Comments

Conn has published his video interview with Salim Ismail (formerly of Yahoo! Brickhouse) on Intruders.TV Ireland. This was recorded at the BlogTalk 2008 conference in March, where Salim was one of our keynote speakers. Thanks to Conn and Salim!

boards.ie passes by the 1 million unique visitors per month mark…

Published
by
Cloud
on 12/6/2008
in Boards
. 1 Comment

From Vexorg: “1,006,314 unique visitors for the month to yesterday”. Yay!

“You’re banned!”, but we can’t tell anyone about it…

Published
by
Cloud
on 9/6/2008
in Boards
. 14 Comments

We got this letter from the Data Protection Commission a few days ago; apart from us not having a privacy statement visible (it’s now here), there is this silly issue of us not being able to tag users publicly as being banned. Still, it’s the first time in 10 years that we’ve had such a complaint…

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Try boards.ie on your mobile / portable device at m.boards.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 7/6/2008
in Boards and Mobiles
. 1 Comment

Following our boards.ie upgrade to vBulletin 3.7 on Thursday, CuLT has set up a mobile view for boards.ie at m.boards.ie… Excellent!

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You can discuss it on this thread.

Bits and pieces: SMOB 2nd Prize in SFSW / Drupal Ireland on Saturday / Wikipedia on OLPC

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/6/2008
in DERI, Galway, Internet, Ireland, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 2 Comments

Semantic Microblogging wins 2nd prize in the Scripting for the Semantic Web challenge!

Alex tweeted from the SFSW workshop at the European Semantic Web Conference that our SMOB (distributed microblogging with semantics) prototype has won 2nd prize in the SFSW challenge. Congratulations and thanks to Alex, Tuukka and Uldis for all their hard work… Well done to Alex on also winning the best paper award at the SemWiki workshop - wow, what a great day for you!

Drupal Ireland Meetup 2008 on this Saturday in DERI

Stephane is organising the second Drupal Ireland Meetup for this Saturday in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (map). There will be presentations on the CCK, Views and ImageCache modules, Joomla2Drupal, theming, security, your first “Hello, World!” Drupal module, easy RDFS vocabulary publishing using Neologism, and maybe vBDrupal if I can manage it! You can sign up and find more details here.

Wikipedia iPhone app being ported to OLPC

Patrick Collison reports that the Wikipedia iPhone application he wrote for offline browsing of the Wikipedia is being ported to the One Laptop Per Child project… Excellent news!