Moving the blog! Welcome to danielsullivan.ie/blog

Image by juanpol via Flickr

So after a good old while here (3/4 years I think) and a year and a half since I got the domain I have finally got around to installing Wordpress and moved over the old content. And all just in time to miss the local/euro/by elections which you might have expected I would be blogging loads on but it wasn't to be. Real life intervenes when you least expect it.

Nanyway, you can get more up to date content over here, once I start to post again with some frequency. Which should be some time over the summer.

If you had been so good as to link to me then if you can update to the new address I'd very much appreciate it.

http://www.danielsullivan.ie/blog/

Otherwise I'd like to say a big thank you to blogspot. It has served me well down the years and like I say chose the tool that does the job in front of you when starting out. Latah!

Political blogs - guess who is not coming to dinner

I’m only going to talk about the political blogs that are nominated as they are the ones I'm most familiar with. A good representation from our friends in the north. And a decent number from local election candidates too. Nice to see the political journalists joining the fun. And the entries from the journalists new and not so new are very strong too, quality writing, consistent posting and a key aspect for me - good engagement and discussion with their readers. I would take the personal view that it is very hard for the solo blog efforts to compete with the group efforts, and let's face it the likes of Slugger and CedarLounge are simply fantastic reads and resources. Still that which does not destroy us makes us strong, eh!

Yet looking at the list I can’t help feeling there are a good few missing that you would really expect to have seen at least one or two of: the likes of Damien Blake, Dominic Hannigan, Ciaran Cuffe and Richard Delevan spring to mind. Does this mean they will now be banned from the top table for blog events in future? Have they been shunned by the politiarati who long only for the delights of the new and shiny, or did people just reckon they would be nominated anyway and people instead sought out those who might not be so popular. That would be a real pity if they were lost for good from the scene but if the awards are genuinely meant to be a reflection of the current state of play for blogging then the logic of doing exactly that would appear hard to avoid. Of course, by saying "banned from the top table" I am being more than a little facetious.

I've said it already but if there was a live nomination process so you could see who was already nominated then this sort of situation would be avoided. After all, this is just the nomination stage and it would be good for the categories to be as inclusive as possible. There again they could have been lost or mislaid, my own nominations for example don’t appear to have made it through even though I did get a confirmation mail. But adding those mentioned above in now would have all the appearance of favouritism so I guess they'll be missing for this year.

spam, SPAM, spAM, and Damien

There has been considerable talk about spam in the last week on foot of a mail from the Green Party about a competition they are running or trying to run. What is surprising is the rather superior attitude of some of those commenting, especially Damien Mulley when you consider that he did the same thing himself when it suited him. While much of the comment was quite considered, though some was perhaps a little less so, the commentary of Mr Tubbs stands out as it verges on the hysterical, swerves into the lunatic before careening back up the road into plain rudeness. Indeed such is the virtual rending of hair, that one almost expects talk of personal violation. Below is a self admitted bulk mail I got from Damien. It reads

"Howdy,
As you may or may not know I'm organising a training day in UCC
next Saturday (March 24th). The training will cover the basics for an
IT company or IT person that's just setting out in business. Details
are available here: http://url.ie/388

If you are interested in coming along, please do come along or if you
think someone you know in the Cork/Munster area would benefit from the
training, send the details on to them. All training is provided free.
After Cork it is hoped there'll be on in Dublin around April 28th.
Yes. this has been a mass email but I'm sure you'll forgive me.

Damien
-- blog: www.mulxxx.net
Mobile: +353 86 xxx xxxx
Projects: www.IrelandOffline.org www.awards.ie
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dxxxx "

At the time (a bit under 2 years back) the only contact I'd had with Damien was via the blog awards for which I had been nominated shortly before receiving the above mail. So harvesting email addresses from the blog awards and then bulk emailing people to advise them of a training event he was running was par for the course for Damien back in the day. Since it would seem that training courses are now a significant earner for Damien it would be reasonable to think of this now as an email was for an event that provided him with a grounding in what is a commercial activity. I can't really say I was especially put out by getting it but it would seem if I was to follow the lead that Damien sets for those who send mai lto him, I should have contacted the Data Protection Commissioner and scweamed and scweamed the blogophere blue with how someone had contacted me about something I wasn't interested in using an address they had garnered purportedly for other purposes.

The rather dull fact is that there is spam and there is SPAM, and if you can't tell the difference then I'm not sure what I can say to help you see it. To top all this for all the talk of the need for the personal there is the notion put forward that you can bulk email people but if you make sure to use the bcc field so that it appears to be just to them as individuals and then use some automated process to include their first name at the top then that's all fine and dandy. That this might signify to anyone with half a brain that the intent was somehow significantly less impersonal than doing the same but without their name shows that for at least some of the offended it's all about the perception not the reality. It's still a bulk email, but you put their name on it - oh - that's so much better. On a scale of one to SPAM this was probably a two.

Are Irish blog awards really like the WWE?

Are changes really afoot in the Irish Blog awards? In 2007 the nominations were voted on for the short list and the award winners were judged. In 2008 the long list, the shorter list and the final short lists were all judged. Why the change? No one really knows. And the sad truth is people are made wary of asking because if you fall foul of the main man, you'll find yourself blamed for making him ill by such occult means as applying to attend the event. For the record, I think that by in large the right people have won over the first few years of the awards but that doesn't mean they won for the right reasons. The vast majority of people who are blogging have no idea what criteria were used, who chose them, and how any inconsistency in judging was resolved.

I posted some simplistic analysis a while back on some of the problems that can arise from having annual awards with nominations only at the end of the year with the intent of simply highlighting that the individual posts nominated might not have been the best examples of each person's work. Instead of someone thinking, hhmm that could be something of a difficulty, maybe we're not seeing the best posts being nominated, how can we solve this problem. I was castigated and it was incorrectly stated I had contacted blog nominees informing them that they were ineligible.

We were all told that there was a crying need for judges but I'm aware of people who had been blogging longer than the awards have been going who never even got an acknowledgment to their offer to judge. A case of knowing the wrong people rather than the right people? People were apparently sent blogs 'as Gaeilge' to judge despite a self admitted lack of even the basics in the language.

An all powerful committee presiding over events isn't necessary by any means but some quite basic, and clearly transparent rules are at this stage. Best posts to take one example should be those from one date to another say 01/01/0X to 31/12/0X encompassing the preceding 12 months and not some make it up as you go along effort temporally dribbling back and forth into previous and future years. Set some minimum requirement for how a nomination is to be accepted, tell the public what the criteria are going to be for each category. And do all this well in advance. Anything done in secret is going to lead to suspicions no matter who is doing it.

As for the end of year Best Post problem, my suggestion still stands that a dead letter email address for Best Post that all Irish bloggers could have embedded it in their layout would be one really simple means to overcome the end for year bias in the current system. The inbox wouldn't need to be looked at until the year but we might just get better spread of nominees. Or at the very least have a degree more confidence that nothing really good from the early part of the year doesn't get missed out.

As regards the suggestion that previous winners should be barred I would think that a bad solution to what may be a temporary problem (remember Real Madrid won the European Cup 5 times in a row and the Kerry Ladies footballers won the initial 9 All-Ireland titles). I have mentioned it to a few people that those who make the short list each year should perhaps form the basis for an "Academy" type scenario, so that those passing judgment are peers of those they are judging. One could also give different weighting to each college within the Academy 30% to a public vote, 30% to the Academy and 30% to selected judges and 10% awards a la the Eurovision based on traffic.

28 days later

29...30! Most people in the Irish blogosphere will be aware of Damien's cry for help/tirade against Fine Gael last month. Well, here is what they don't know, it wasn't true. I chose not to engage directly at the time in order not to leave myself open to accusations of seeking to deflect attention from the Irish Blog Awards which are primarily Damien's creation and for which he deserves considerable credit and which I can well imagine generates a good degree of stress in the organising.

Put as simply as possible his bald assertion that he was being harassed and stalked on and off line is completely erroneous. Some few people may be aware that I had what could be charitably described as a set-do with Damien back at the turn of the year over his use of a particular piece of terminology and his less than elegant reaction to my making my opinion about it known to him. The back and forth on the whole thing lasted a few days, and since then I've had no direct contact with him. Well after I got to make one comment which he proceeded to modify I reckoned there wasn't much point in bothering.

As regards his even more peculiar reference to being harassed and stalked off line all I can say is that to the best of my knowledge the last time I was even in the same city as Damien Mulley was for the blog awards last year. In fact in the week prior to his post about all this Damien travelled to Limerick twice and on one of those occasions was or so I heard inquiring as to my whereabouts. As it happens I was in Dublin on both occasions. Frankly, if that is stalking it sounds much more like Damien is the one doing it. Or if I really am supposed to be doing it I should think about buying a manual. I would very interested in seeing Damien produce the merest sliver of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim.

As regard his involvement of Fine Gael in all this, I'm further perplexed. In his communications with a number of people and organisations regarding his claims he has mentioned my name and that of Fine Gael. Why? The truth is that it would appear Damien is prone to the odd bout of histrionics going from cheerleading for Eamon Ryan to being his self appointment nemesis in the blink of a political eye. Since this was a disagreement between two individuals over the use of language one would wonder why Damien took issue with my membership of Fine Gael at all, rather than say my being an engineer or a Kerryman. Honestly, I would suggest that his repeated harping on about Fine Gael says more about his own indulgence of his biases when approaching any topic than anything else.

I comment on lots of blogs and I suppose one might say we end up playing in the same sand pits from time to time. Let's face it the Irish blogging township isn't quite that large and I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be banished from interacting with people simply because I had fallen foul of Damien Mulley. So I'm sure there have been a couple of occasions when I've commented on the same post as Damien but what reasonable person could characterise that as harassment or even stalking?

Further to this we had his quite excitable jumping up and down about people making threats of legal action. People who were paying close attention from his first post would have noticed that it was Damien Mulley who first spoke of contacting An Garda Síochána and of seeking recourse to legal advice. To date I've heard nothing, nada, faic from anyone to do with his claims and frankly I strongly expect to never hear anything. Any more than I expect to be contacted about the whereabouts of Shergar or the Irish Crown Jewels. Since there was no harassment or stalking there aren't going to be any legal actions forthcoming from Damien. Simply saying something again and again doesn't make it true.

The one quite serious implication from his remarks in his post was that I, acting with others, was in some way seeking to deliberately impact on his health. This is, just like the rest of his post, completely rubbish. As the state of his health wasn't known to me, how was I supposed to be doing this? Voodoo? Incantations? If he is suffering from some form of paranoia and it is somehow impacting his health then I would really suggest that he seek help for it. Strange to think that a simple thing like a relative nobody in blogging not being cowed by Damien's vitriol three months ago would be an scab he would chose to return to on the eve of the blog awards. Retaining a positive mental outlook is vitally important when a person is dealing with a disease like MS.

As for making threats to radio shows and contacting blog nominees about their eligibility for nomination that did not happen either. Who was contacted and exactly what kind of threats would I be in a position to make to radio shows? Withhold my license? Write to Arthur Murphy on Mailbag?

If people like Damien want to say something about people they should be prepared to be upfront about it. Damien made big play of taking his twitter account private though I suspect the real reason behind that was so he could continue to make snide, sly, underhand comments which are his real modus operandi. It's the web 2.0 version of whispering in class with your hand over your mouth. I'm sure those who do have access to his twitter will know if this is the case. Did he name names? Drop hints? Is he still going on about it?

The really disappointing aspect for me was that so few people looked for any justification for the accusation. Most were simply prepared to take him at his word and instead of calling for habeas corpus, the call went out for a head, any head in fact. I acknowledge that Damien has done tremendous work promoting blogging in Ireland but to suggest that such efforts somehow gives him carte blanche to make accusations about people and then never front up is totally unjustified. I will continue to blog, but as for the Irish Blogging Community I have to wonder who would wish to be a member of a community that reaches so readily for pitch forks at the whim of its leader.

It is worth remembering that a benevolent dictator isn't benevolent to everyone all the time and at the end of the day they really are a just dictator, one more petty tyrant.

The coming blog deluge

Was chatting to someone over lunch a while back about a side project on blogging and conversation and I mentioned my aside over on Kathy Foley "What happens if the Beboers decide to move on?" At least a few may decide that they have more to write than Bebo allows for. If even 1% of the purported 1 million Beboers in Ireland were to start blogging over the next year it would truly represent exponential growth in blogging in Ireland in a very, very short period of time. We were thinking about what that might mean to blogging in particular in the Irish context with all the talk of a 'community' and also the nature of comment, discussion and conversation around and within blogs. I suspect it may well feed in our thinking and planning on the side project, which is sadly lacking a code name at present.

A project without a codename isn't worthy of a back of beermat business plan.

Blog talking at UL

So the auld blog talk to the baby journos at UL went well enough, along with myself present to speak were Alan English- Editor of the Limerick Leader representing the print media and Mike Knightson - from Newstalk 106 on behave of broadcasting I guess. Dr, Eoin Devereux- bailed at the last minute apparently. I'm guessing he is still reeling from my response all those years ago at his introduction to Anthropology lecture of "what is wrong with that?" to his comment that all Kerry people answer a question with a question.

I won't rehash but I said but one question that did come up was in reference to libel and yep you can get sued for what you write or what someone else writes...just cos it's on the internet doesn't let you off. I am available by appointment to help cure insomnia.

Best blog posts of 2007 - my eye

I was thinking about some of the posts that have been nominated for best post for the Irish blog awards and it struck me that they might suffer from that old Oscar problem of forgetting about anything decent that came out before the summer block busters. So I did some rudimentary analysis and what do you know? Bingo.

Out of 72 posts nominated we have the following run down.

Dec 17
Nov 12
Oct 8
September 4
August 6
July 5
June 2
May 3
April 3
March 4
Feb 0
Jan 0

Plus Jan of 2008 has 7 nominations! I accept that there was no announcement of a specific cut off date but I'm sure some thought the end of 2007 was a natural enough one, while others didn't. Some clarity wouldn't have gone amiss there. So the lesson is to save your good posts for the end of the year and not be writing worthwhile post throughout. As the awards evolve I can see the following coming out from the PR set "Well the comedy stuff sells but never wins awards so Twenty has the real funny stuff penciled in for the early part of the year but he's got much more pointed material ready to go for the end of year nomination season."

More peculiar are the two posts that are from 2006. Or least they appear to be to me, see for yourself. 23 September 2006 and August 18th 2006 I could be wrong. Let me know if I am. They're good post, don't get me wrong but if we can't nominate Twenty's election preview from Jan of last year (which was up for the long list but didn't make the short list) then why would 2 posts for 2006 be deemed for eligible for 2008 awards?

Sadly, I would say based on this that there is a more than fair chance that many of the posts nominated are not even the best posts the individual bloggers have done this year not to mind the best posts of the whole year overall. It was talked about last year at the awards ceremony that for Best Post the idea might be to have a rolling nomination process for each month so that any posts folks thought were quite good at the time might be flagged. Even a dead mail drop box type of effort wouldn't have been that hard to set up, but I guess it fell on deaf ears or worse yet it never fell on any ears at all because people were scared off from making the suggestion directly to the powers that be in case they were banished.

Of course the instinctive response from some will be to say that there is a lot of work involved and he does his best. Yet if someone chooses to bring a load of work upon themselves simply because they don't want to let anyone else to play a part isn't that just indulging someone's martyrdom complex? There were 2000 nominations last year with somewhat closer to 700/800 this year or so we're told. Does this mean blogging in Ireland is better, smaller, more of a clique than it was, or just a passing fad? Who knows. I wish all those involved and nominated the best but of all the categories Best Post is probably the most valueless this year which is a real shame.

Update: I've attempted to point out the 2006 posts but any comments from me are just modded out from the awards.ie site.