Via Nextround.net

Just for pig iron. Big version here (4.something MB JPG).

Despite being aware of Bookcrossing for a long time, I’ve never actually left a book out in the wild for someone to pick up and read. I’ve often thought about it, and then I start to think it will never be found or it will just be dumped in a bin. I rather give a book to someone directly or leave one on the shelf in the recycling centre.

The thought struck me while waiting for a bus in Busaras during the week that a book cabinet in the station would be a nice idea. Looking for a graphic to illustrate this post, I stumbled on the one above. It’s of an outdoor book cabinet in Germany. A comment on the photograph led me to this page, which gives some more information of the outdoor books initiative in Bonn.

What a wonderful idea. Wouldn’t it be great to see the same thing happening in cities in Ireland? I would definitely leave a book in an outdoor cabinet in St. Stephen’s Green and the same if they were installed in a bus/train station. I need to start the wheels in motion and make some contacts next week to see how far I can get. Stay tuned.

Photo of outdoor book case by uitdragerij [cc]

News this morning that the Irish Times will shortly be launching an iPhone app. Surprised it has taken so long to be honest. It will see the newspaper catch up with their main rival, The Irish Independent, which has an app available for some time now. As the article points out, with Vodafone offering the iPhone in the Irish market from next week there’s going to be a lot more eyeballs to catch.

The first line in the article in the paper says :

As more newspapers launch apps, they are trying to avoid eating into their core business

The big challenge the Irish Times and other newspapers face is that when you offer an app for a few euro that has all the articles from the print edition, there is no need to visit the newsagent. This ability is already available of course. All a person needs to do is add the Irish Times RSS feeds to their news reader and bobs your uncle.

That’s not the whole story though. When I consume news on a mobile device (in my case the iPhone), I skim through articles and find the ones that interest me. Same way with the printed newspaper. There’s a lot in there I’m not interested in but I have to buy the whole newspaper anyway. I don’t want an app that dumps every page of the print edition into my hand. I’d like a more intelligent app. One that knows what I’d like to read. Something with the intelligence of my6sense.

my6sense is an iPhone app that I’ve been use for quite a while now. Over time, it learns what type of articles and news I like and presents those relevant articles to me. I can still see all the news items from my feeds if I wish, but the app does such a good job I don’t feel as if I’m missing anything. This description from another my6sense user says it all:

“… I have been using a tool to filter hundreds of feeds, thousands of posts! The results are so tailored and specific to my needs, they are as if handpicked by a mighty army of mind reading Oompa Loompas bent on making me the most informed man on earth.”

What I’d like to see the Irish Times do with their app is make it intelligent by offering a premium version. A premium version with a monthly sub that would offer the following:

• Newstand account on the Irish Times website along the lines of Shelfari. It would allow me to flag articles of interest and store them on a “shelf”. When I get home in the evening, I can read the articles full screen at my leisure.
• Like Shelfari, the Irish Times could offer a community feature on the site where I can see who else is reading the same articles as me and allow me to connect and discuss issues if I so wished.
• Daily/Weekly/Monthly digests. I would love a properly formatted version of the articles I’ve found interesting compiled into a downloadable file that I can view on my ebook reader, iPhone or iPad (when it arrives).
• Print on demand. If I want a printed version, I should be able to go into my local newsagent and get a personalised copy of the Irish Times printed while I wait.

Bottom line is that newspapers should think beyond dumping everything from the print edition into another format. They ought to be offering a way to shape the news and tailor it to fit the individual. Maybe then they can start to make some money from their online efforts. Until then, I’ll stick with my6sense and an instapaper account. It allows me to create a truly personal newspaper that I can read on multiple devices.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the price of the Sony Reader Touch and see that D.I.D. Electrical are offering it for €249.95 in store this weekend. Oddly, if you buy it direct on the website it will set you back €278.95.

The Power City price has been pegged at  €249.95 for a couple of months now. Today I noticed that it’s now selling for €232.45, presumably in reaction to the D.I.D. offer.

If you’ve been thinking about investing in an electronic reader I don’t think you can go wrong with the Sony offering. At this price, I think I may upgrade my old PRS-505.

If you’re looking to buy any books this week, Kennys.ie have a special promotion running at the moment.

On orders over €25, you can select from a list of free books. One that caught my eye was this one – ‘In Praise of Male Chauvinism’. It is described by Kennys as follows :

“Paperback ~ 64pp. 8vo. An amusing volume, not to be taken too seriously”

I really don’t understand why praise for this subject is not to be taken seriously though.

Some other titles available in the promotion are :

‘The Bus and Coach Industry: Its Economics and Organization’. This 1975 publication is the one still in use at Dublin Bus and Bus Eireann, so get it while it’s hot. Don’t worry girls, there is a book on sewing for you as well entitled ‘Sew News Timesaving Tips’.

Kennys have free shipping on books too, so there’s never been a better time to give an Irish bookseller some of your business.

RTE released a really nice iPhone App on January 18^th for keeping up to date with all the latest news from the rte.ie website. A lot of people will already get their RTE news delivered via RSS feed or browsing the mobile version of the RTE website so it may seem pointless to have a dedicated app for the task. Having installed just yesterday I think it’s a more pleasant viewing experience. The addition of the live news video stream makes it a must have.

One slight oversight is the omission of Twitter as a share option when viewing articles. Email, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and Stumbleupon are all included. Maybe it was a deliberate decision to exclude Twitter as there are already so many accounts on Twitter with feeds of RTE News articles already. There is a way to Tweet news articles within the app in a slightly roundabout way.

If you have an account Delicious and want to Tweet a link from within the app, just tag the article in Delicious with something like Tweeting or Tweet. Fill in whatever other tags you want to use to bookmark the news item.

You can then use Twitterfeed to send the Tweet for you (you will, of course, need to set up an account there).

Simply create a new feed and enter the details of the RSS feed of your delicious account followed by the Tag you are using on Delicious to Tweet bookmarks.

In my case, I’m using tweeting as the tag to indicate those links I’d like to Tweet. The RSS feed for those tags is:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/lecraic/tweeting

Your feed will look very similar, apart from lecraic and tweeting. Replace lecraic with your username and tweeting with the tag you are using to tag news items to be tweeted.

Here is the Twitterfeed configuration screen for reference.

Once all of this has been done, you are set to go. Next time you see an article on the RTE News Now App on your iPhone, just click on Delicious to share the item, and then enter the tweeting tag and save the bookmark. Twitterfeed will pick up the new entry from your Delicious feed and Tweet the link for you.

No doubt there are other ways to accomplish the same task, but as I already use Delicious I found this to be the handiest way for me.

Updated versions of the App may include the Twitter in which case none of this will be necessary. So if you are reading this after January 24^th 2010, there may be an update available which has Twitter sharing integrated. If this is the case, none of the above is necessary.

I bought Buzan’s iMindMap software about 3 months ago and only got around to installing it today. What better way to put it to use than create a mind map of New Year’s Resolutions?

These are a mixture of some of the suggestions on the New Years’ Resolution generator and some of my own. The idea is to pick one of the suggestions from each of the main branches on the mind map as resolutions and see how it goes for 2010.

Click on over to my posterous account where you can download the full size version of the map.

Good luck and Happy New Year.

Posted via email from lecraic’s posterous

This is just lovely. Family found a chick that had fallen from its nest and nurse it back to health. This few minute slideshow is as good as any feelgood film I’ve watched this year. Beautiful.