20 October 2002

I Want Broadband for Christmas KILKENNY, Ireland -- I want an always-on Internet connection for Christmas. I wish Santa would come to my doorstep and promise me DSL. I know I'm different from a lot of other local residents because when researchers asked Irish whether they wanted broadband, only 14% said they would be "very likely" to sign up for the service. A full 25% of the Irish population said they were "not at all" likely to become broadband customers. That means more bandwidth for me!

Textism Refer Tools TEXTISM -- Dean Allen will release Refer 1.0 pretty soon. His Refer Tools is a module of the Textism CMS. They offer up-to-the-minute tracking of incoming referrers to a web site.

Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services Kevin Werbach -- Web services continue spreading. Service Grids: The Missing Link in Web Services is one of a series of working papers by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. Hagel and Brown point out the need for management and monitoring infrastructure to make Web services function in real enterprise environments. Where a year ago all the Web services companies were building development tools and basic SOAP wrappers, now the emphasis has shifted to ensuring performance, reliability, security, and cross-organizational integration. This is nuts-and-bolts stuff, as it will create the software architecture of the next 20 years. Kevin Werbach thinks it will be distributed infrastructure and he describes it for the panel at Supernova! The good ideas emerging around P2P, grid computing, and the semantic Web will all play a role.

Squeezing More Music and Playing It to Suit You REAL -- Although the music industry flatly refuses to admit as much, MP3 tracks recorded by people like me have prompted sales of CDs more than any of the industry's own stuttering marketing schemes. I started buying CDs for my collection after downloading tasters of new tracks. Thanks to my personal MP3 player, I carry around more than twice the music that my car's CD can play. With my Real burner, I can go up to 128k and rip surround sound. It's simply stunning. I need to shift how and when I play my music. I cannot be tied down to dedicated music players at home. That's one big reason why I will never buy a copy-protected CD. Why limit yourself to one format?

Xi Creative for Corporate VIdeo XI CREATIVE -- An underdeveloped market for corporate video exists in Ireland. Corporate videos are much more powerful for conveying info that long,written documents. If a medium-sized business needs to develop a video -- for a produc tlaunch, corporate profile, trade show or taining -- Xi Creative should be the first port of call.

Skillnets Training Sets 25 Nov 02 Deadline SKILLNETS -- The second 3-year programme is open to employers in Ireland, with submissions due by 25 Nov. Companies can recover between 50% and 75% of their training costs by applying through the programme. Skillnets showed dozens of companies how to access national certification and third level education services.

Battleground Inside Your Mobile Phone BBC -- A tachnology battle rages inside your mobile phone.

Taxonomy Primer LEXONOMY -- Amy Warner's "Taxonomy Primer" would help those building thesauri or a Table of Synonyms needed to populate meta data on a Web site.

Practical Taxonomies: Stop Searching - Start Finding IA SLASH org -- Good advice on using practical taxonomies to actually find information. You can download "Creating and implementing an effective taxonomy" information from the ARK's conference page.

Ireland Votes for the United States Federal Model ALL OVER IRELAND -- The citizens voted for the Treaty of Nice. An analysis of the voting patterns could suggest that Irish want a European government model similar to that of the United States, where a Senate of sorts sits with two votes from every member nation, regardless of the size of the nations sitting. Karlin Lillington offers a wide-ranging and accurate view of the core issues.

Amazon Associates Tools by Alexa ALEXA -- Useful Website Enhancement Tools offered by Alexa.

MS Kills Another Clip-Art Rave Fan REGISTER -- "Microsoft has yanked another of its fraudulent user testimonials, in this case a fictitious twelve-year-old boy raving about a fictional homework assignment and the indispensable insights he received from MS Encarta Reference Library in preparing it."