Ken McGuire

Author: Ken McGuire

  • Web design in 2006

    What have tagging, aggregation, filters & ranking, syndication and mashups got in common? They’re ZDNets popular elements for websites in 2006… if you don’t have them, you’re not in!

    The article does mention that a lot of the featured that were “web 2.0” are now commonplace among websites and that some of these features have gone way beyond the web 2.0 label. So does that mean we’re looking at web 2.01? 2.5? 3? Or is it all a load of cod anyway? Just a fancy label for things that people have been able to do for ages anyway….

    [On another note, I’ve just passed 100 posts on the blog 😀 ]

  • Free Stock Photos

    In the line of work that I’m in, its essential to get good stock photography when you can’t get out and take your own. I’ll keep this brief because the site can speak for itself.

    If you’re looking for free stock photography, pay a visit to the Stock eXChange over at this address (sxc.hu). I’ve an account with BigStockPhoto and its not too bad, some nice photos but you can be quite limited. That said, sxc.hu has a huge amount of photos from some very talented stock photographers and if you’re looking for ideas for a shoot, photos for web or print content then I suggest looking no further than here. Its quickly become my favourite haunt for stock photography…seen as its free and all 😉

  • At last… old music online!

    I’m not too picky about the music that I listen to. But I hate most modern pop crap that fills our airwaves and would much rather pick up some of my older bands, early 90s stuff, late 80s stuff – the hard to find gems that you used to get in the back of the Book Centre or downstairs in Sherwoods or your other now non-existant music store.

    So wasn’t I pleased to read this morning that Universal are digitising their back catalog of out of print albums, many of which had only been available on vinyl or just out of print for years. For the next 3 years or so, Universal are going to start reissuing around 10,000 out of print albums and they”ll likely partner with iTunes and the rest of the online music stores for distribution.

    Why? Because you don’t need shelves to stack CDs on the Internet! Bring it on….

  • YouTube next on the list

    TechCrunch is reporting that online video sharing site, YouTube, has signed a deal to be acquired, putting another notch in the web 2.0 acquisitions belt. Its funny to think how the whole industry has turned on its head, at least thats what it looks like. I know they say that everything comes full circle but this is mad. There isn’t a day going by that some Silicon Valley startup isn’t being acquired by a higher cause. There’s no names around yet as to who exactly is going to snap it up but seen as Google already launched Google video, can we say that Yahoo are going to step up to the plate? Maybe AOL? YouTube itself isn’t even 12 months old yet!

  • Google On The Radio?

    Flick on 2FM and you’ll hear a bunch of Google adword adverts. Actually, you won’t. But I could be telling you that in a few months time, given Googles hugh presence in Dublin. CNET reports that Google have just purchased a radio advertising company and are looking to integrate the technology which helps “sell, schedule, deliver and report radio ads” with their existing AdWords service for advertisers.

    I’ve already seen evidence of Google filling newspaper slots with AdWords snippets (Chicago-Sun Times was one such paper, bless them for their American sports coverage, even with Chicago out of the playoffs). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this would start Google FM or something along those lines as well. They may as well since they’re doing everything anyway!

  • Irish VOIP Statistics

    I was reading a post yesterday, the link escapes me, stating that there’s approximately 450K households in the Netherlands that are VOIP active, roughly accounting for 6% of the population.

    Has anyone any idea of a place to get accurate statistics on VOIP usage in Ireland?

  • 10 Reasons Why Nobody Reads Your Blog

    I think I’ve read this before, but its still funny all the same. I used to work for AOL myself in a past life and if nobody reads my blog then its because I haven’t recently sold them my company for $25 million. Of course, when I do that, people might start posting here 😉

    Thats one of the reasons given as to why nobody reads your blog and if you’re ever worried about your blog traffic then give it a quick onceover, even if its just to brighten up your Tuesday evening.

  • Geotagging Kenmc.com

    For those of you interested, here’s a good web tutorial on Geotagging, particularly handy when it comes to your blog as you can indentify the content of your blog to a specific country, or region, including your RSS feeds. It’s been around a small age already on the web and I have it active on DeviantART to check nearby Deviants, so now I can check nearby bloggers I suppose!

    The site I was using was FeedMap (because blogs + maps = feedmap, isn’t it obvious?), still in beta as is most web 2.0 stuff floating around the web. Its a handy too to see who’s floating around your area.

    If you’re interested, and using WordPress, you can insert the following code into your header.php which will geotag your website…

    meta name="ICBM" content="52.6442, -7.2395"
    meta name="geo.position" content="52.6442;-7.2395"

    Then to tag my RSS feeds, I simply added the following lines between the before the last line of wp-rdf.php


    geo:Point
    geo:lat 52.6442 /geo:lat
    geo:long>-7.2395 /geo:long
    /geo:Point

    (Don’t forget that you have to open and close your tags…. the icbm tags are coupled with the longitude and latitude namespaces)

    Those locations will most likely stick you on the Dublin Road, just about at my office, only a stonesthrow from home anyway…

    If that doesn’t make any sense to you at all the I suggest reading this tutorial on making your site and RSS feed locatable!

    —–
    Followup…. if you’re feeling lazy… sign up to feedburner and you can geotag your RSS feed straight from there!

  • PageRank Followup

    Having been speaking about Google PageRank last week, I came across this paper which should be of interest to those of you worried about how your site or blog is performing. It is a quite detailed breakdown of how the PageRank algorithm works and what it does. The paper was written by Ian Rogers and is certainly worth reading for anyone with an interest in the workings of that elaborate ranking scheme.

  • New blog of interest

    Speaking from a designer’s point of view, its nice to hear people’s thoughts on a product from the other side of the fence, the side that matters most to be honest. What I’m talking about is usability, and Keith Bohanna has just set up a new blog focussing on matters of usability or “what makes the internet easy or difficult to use for end users of all levels”, all the while concentrating on Irish websites.

    Looking forward to some new and interesting posts on the matter.

  • Home telephony

    I reckon that I’ll be a homeowner within the next year to 18 months or so thanks to the fact that my parents are leaving the family home to move to Sligo, what with both my parents establishing new businesses up the country. So I got to thinking… whats the first thing I’d change about the house?

    (more…)

  • VOIP Weddings eh?

    Boy meets girl. But he doesn’t actually meet her.
    Boy exhanges photos with girl.
    Boy calls girl on Skype.
    Boy spends $21 on a phone call.
    Boy and girl married by the end of the call.

    Or so it goes, something a little like that anyway according to one of my favourite haunts over the past 2 years. The boy and girl of course were Indonesians in their 50s and exchanged wedding vows this week without ever meeting by using the Internet to make up for the oceans that separate them. Wiriadi Sutrisno works as a physiotherapist in California, and Rita Sri Mutiara Dewi is from the Indonesian city of Bandung. They met through the Internet. Sutrisno proposed that way, and they finally exchanged wedding vows in a ceremony using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. A Muslim religious official supervised their exchange of vows, the Jakarta Post reported Friday. “We’ve exchanged photos, chat almost daily and often call each other, but we’ve never met,” Dewi was quoted as saying.

    Married eh? The internet just never ceases to amaze….

  • Cleere’s Tonight : Update

    Nice to be on the slightly more relaxed side of the music tonight as we take to the stage in Cleere’s in Kilkenny without KilkennyMusic.com running the show. Gig kicks off in about 3 hours time so its high time to get dressed and set for tonight. I’ll leave some feedback on it tomorrow I guess….

    Update:

    What a gig, nice to see everyone there, packed house in Cleere’s and people already singing the words back up to us on stage. Cheers to Ilya K for the performance and having us in on the night as well, great show all round!

  • Another feckin’ blog

    Thats how the tagline goes anyway. Friend and colleague (great being able to call the two!), John Butler, has this week launched his new blog John Butler Live and covers a great post on holophonics.

    For those of you unaware of the term I would suggest a read of this post armed with a set of working headphones for the sheer experience of surreal 3D sound. Not only does it move left to right, it goes up your right arm, down your left side, around your feet…. I was quite literally blown away by it to be honest. Well worth checking out!

  • Ranking Google

    Been looking into a lot of the workings of Google and their advertising wing this morning, so I thought sharing some of that information might be useful…

    The software behind Google’s search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRankâ„¢ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

    PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.

    PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google’s technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.

    Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyses the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

    Fun reading, eh?

  • DeviantART Mobile

    I’m a subscriber to DeviantART and this year will mark my second year (in April) as a subscribed member. Us subscribers are allowed into the ‘beta’ program, which allows us beta test a load of new features in DA and one of those is Deviant Mobile. At least to an extent. When uploading new photos and ‘deviations’ we can choose whether or not to allow our works appear on the mobile edition of DA, which has gone live according to Mobile Crunch.

    Users, mainly in the US, can then log on to Deviant Mobile, scan through thousands of submissions, pick up new works for your phone, leave comments and all the rest. Of course, if you have a have decent phone or PDA you could browse DA regularly as well. Mobile Crunch warns users about data charges, and I’ve got to second that. The size of deviations on DA from people not used to publishing images to the web can be ridiculous, expect downloads of up to 1mb in size and beyond for full view.

    That and the fact that your own work is available on mobile medium leads to doubts I have about the distribution of works of art via mobile, especially since I recently had one of my own photos ripped off on DA. No doubt there will be tons of feedback on this over the coming weeks but can’t say that I have use for the service.

  • Nikon out of the film game

    I’m a Nikon user, have been for years, both film and digital. In the last 18 months however its been strictly digital, man how I love my D70. Nikon has just broken the news that it is to concentrate its efforts on the digital market.

    “Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories,” it said in a statement on its British website.

    It will keep on a few of the higher end professional film cameras such as the F6. Nikon are currently the second largest producer of dSLR cameras (behind Canon) but my devotion remains with them. 95% of their sales last year was in the digital market (where cameras are concerned anyway) and I can understand why. Built to last, drive them into the ground, superb picture quality and processing. Sign of the times when one of the biggest camera manufacturers turns its back on film. Beginning of the ultimate end of film cameras?

  • Thunderbird 1.5 hits the net

    Mozilla’s Thunderbird has hit the net today with version 1.5 of its popular free email client. I used Thunderbird for about six months as my mail client and was pretty pleased with it to be honest, though in saying that, I still haven’t used it in six months given my use of Microsoft Outlook in work. Might just be tempted to give it a test drive.

    From CNET…

    “Thunderbird enhances the overall e-mail experience, adding antiphishing capabilities to help keep people safer, while also integrating and simplifying access to new technologies, such as RSS,” Christopher Beard, Mozilla’s vice president of products, said in a statement.

    Thunderbird 1.5 also aims to bolster its RSS support by letting people receive feed updates as e-mail messages. People can now access podcasts through a dialog box, which is tied to an application such as a Web browser or audio player.

  • Computer fun for Ken

    It’s here 😉

    Kid with a new toy, I think so. I’ll let you know how it goes anyway. What am I on about? Click for my previous post.

  • Live in Cleere’s

    Last week it was the turn of Itchy Trigger Finger (which was a great gig) and this weekend its the turn of myself (The Happy Medium). We’re on, live, in Cleere’s on Parliament Street in Kilkenny with Ilya K from Waterford. Doors open at 9.30pm with tickets €5 on the door. Should be a great night, looking forward to it myself, as always!