antoin@eire.com

This is a great video about why youtube and the whole Internet makes a big difference to the way we live.

Bernie reviews my book, and says very kind things. You can buy it on Amazon.

My book just arrived in the post. I am very happy to see it. Finally, the Internet is a safer place for small businesses.

The winners of the VoteTube contest have been announced. VoteTube, set up by Simon McGarr and I (although Simon did most of the work) brought together videos from all political hues for the Irish general election. Congratulations to everyone who sent in an entry.

Really what we want to do now though, is to get people at the ‘grass roots’ to make videos about stuff that matters to them. Any ideas on how to do this would be great.

Listening Post reports that Apple are watermarking tracks with the purchaser’s email address. Not really surprising that, at least to me. I’ve been doing some thinking about this area for the last while

What I find a bit objectionable is that Apple apparently didn’t bother to tell its customers that it was doing this. I can’t see why they wouldn’t.

I think it’s a good idea though. It makes tracks usable and sharable but puts some sort of limit on the extent to which they will be shared.

You could still scrub the watermark off the tracks without too much hassle, but why would the average consumer bother?

Read Eoin’s blog post and sign the petition to get state broadcaster RTE to release the complete footage of the debate between Irish political party leaders to the Irish people on the Internet. (After all, they’re our politicians, and it’s our TV station, right.)

Someone recently asked me how the music industry can deal with piracy and make money out of online downloads. I had a few ideas about it (mainly centred around the idea that you just can’t lock down music copying completely). Revenues are falling in the industry, from around $38 bn to less than $30 billion in  a few years and that’s without taking inflation into account. But I thought I’d throw it out there -

• what concrete steps can the music industry take to stop, or at least slow down piracy?
• how can the music industry make money from peer-to-peer and music downloads?
• how could they trial this?

I am doing some research about the use of stories, fables and myths in large companies as part of a proposal I am preparing. I came across this fantastic six-part series of articles about the topic:

Part 1

Part 2 

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Fast Forward Ireland is a film festival with a difference, and it’s on in Dublin this weekend. The participants group together into teams, and they go and make a film in 24 hours. They have as many teams as they can handle, but maybe they could put the odd person into a short-handed team?

I hope some of the films can go into Votetube.

Check out The Century Of The Self - Part 1. It covers Edward Bernays and how he basically founded the modern practice of public relations and laid the foundations of the consumerist economy we know and love today, based on some of the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. (Was recommended to me by a person connected with a government party.)