Archive for June, 2009
Dublin bike rental scheme map
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Awaycity has a handy Google map of all known locations for the much anticipated Dublin bike rental scheme.
The big question is how will the bikes survive? Turbulene Ahead has written that the experience in Paris is one of bikes being stolen and vandalised at an alarming rate.
The city council there has to replace bikes at a cost of €1.6 million a year. In these “challenging times”, there is zero chance of Dublin City Council funding replacements.
It’s really a great idea and hopefully the Paris experience won’t be repeated here.
(h/t walmc on Twitter via Clodagh Kelly)
Granny says “bite your sisters” to baby Ray
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Recently discovered the Bureau of Communication. Handy site to create fun messages to send to friends and enemies alike.
There’s a few samples of the type of messages people have created previously. Liked the one above. A lovely grandmother encouraging baby Ray to bite his sisters while teething 
The “What is a browser?” question
Posted by: | CommentsA Google employee goes out into Times Square in New York armed with video camera and microphone to ask people the question “What is a Browser?”
On first viewing I thought to myself that the video only highlighted the ‘wrong’ answers to make it more entertaining. Surely most people would give the correct answer? As it turns out, only 8% said something along the lines of : “A browser is a computer program for viewing websites” – which is what could be termed the ‘right’ answer.
Mashable has a blog post about the video too. The title of post is “Google asks common man ‘What is a browser?’ Common man has no clue.” The post author says :
“Judging from the video, average users don’t know the difference between IE, Firefox (Firefox), Chrome, AOL, or even “the Yahoo.” Hence, Google’s only path to serious adoption in the near-term might require a move from Microsoft’s playbook: getting Chrome bundled with other software packages.”
Of course average users don’t know the difference between the various web browsers, and why should they? People use software to accomplish a task. How they do it is pretty much incidental. People in this experiment weren’t ask what the difference was between various browsers though. Consider the scenario. They had a camera and a microphone in their face and asked a very open question – ‘What is a browser’. Outside of the tech community, this question is totally redundant. There’s no point in using tech terms when talking to “common man”. A couple of the comments on the Mashable article have said something similar.
The framing of the question is all important. Had these people been asked the question “What computer program do you use to browse the internet” may have evoked a very different response.
As it stands, this video is just something for the technical community to share and have a giggle about and feel a little bit superior to “common man”.
Would be very interesting to produce a couple of videos on the streets of Dublin – one asking the “What is a browser?” question and the other asking something a little more suitable to a non tech audience. The result might be more enlightening and valuable.
This week’s header image on le craic
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One of life’s simple pleasures? Walking along a beach and doing a spot of beachcombing. Totally free and there’s always the possibility of finding a message in a bottle.
Image owned by sethertonb (CC License)
Sean Smokey Smullen and the YouTube effect
Posted by: | CommentsA couple of weeks before the local elections, I noticed one of the candidates had a YouTube logo on their poster.
It was the first time I’d seen anything like that and it prompted me to search for the video on YouTube. I wrote about it briefly on my Posterous and it was also covered on Irish Election.
I had never heard of Sean Smokey Smullen before, so I was interested in how he would get on as a first time independent candidate. As it turns out, he did get elected on the last count without reaching the quota. His election resulted in a sitting Labour councillor with 25 years service losing his seat.
He took 215 first preference votes which is not bad going for an independent considering some more established figures locally took 50 or 60 additional first preferences.
What definitely set him apart was his video. None of the other candidates had one. It’s impossible to say for definite that YouTube got him over the line, but I think it did. Just before polling day, it had received over 2,000 views (it’s 2,489 now). A parody video of the original had over 1,000 views. When you consider that 3,997 people voted in the Wicklow Town Council, those video numbers are significant.
Based on the promises in his video, the man has a lot to deliver on and his chances of doing so are pretty slim – but it’s good to see new faces on the Town Council. Lets hope he CAN effect some change and shake things up a bit.
The parody video is hilarous by the way.
Here’s the original :
And here’s the Parody (turn up the sound! the fuckin’ state of it)
