Maman Poulet

Stephen Fry is blogging - blessays are what he calls his blog essays. The first one was on mobile phones and it was wonderful in it’s very indepth knowledge of phones, interfaces and operating systems (if a very long read). The lastest blessay is on fame – and not a legwarmer in sight! I’m rather fond of Stephen (having just submitted the gf to watching hours of Stephen Fry night on BBC2), and tonight I learnt that his guilty pleasures include Wagner and Farley’s Rusks. Lots of comments to his first two posts and I hope he keeps it up!

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An interesting move for an Irish NGO – or indeed a large umbrella body of NGO’s. The Children’s Right’s Alliance have launched a series of podcasts. The first podcast marks the 15th Anniversary of Ireland’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – a convention the state constantly fail on. It’s a year since the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued their report on Irish children’s rights and the states many failings.

Some of the founders of the alliance speak on the podcast about the campaigns for children’s rights and how they developed following the adoption of the convention and that Ireland had to report on how it was meeting it’s obligations and the state’s report needed to be shadowed – and so the alliance was formed.

All of this is a very interesting build up before the proposed referendum on children’s rights proposed for next year. More information on the issues here, a photo of the Minister for Children getting his copy of the podcast here (on a CD-Rom no less!), and the rss feed for the podcast is here.

For those of us with disabilities it is interesting to learn about Irish action regarding UN documentation and machinery – given Ireland’s recent adoption of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The use of podcasts for communicating and analysing messages by Irish NGO’s is new and very welcome. Information is needed though for the many on what a podcast is and the fact one does not need an ipod to listen and that you should be able to just click and listen – a link to the mp3 file would have been useful for example.

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Note – please see this post for the latest on this matter.
I won’t comment on the case as someone is now facing charges but as for the coverage – well some of the Irish print media spent the last few days libeling the dead. I do hope that a lot of time is spent making sure that more people are aware about the absolute rubbish that has been spread about a dead mother. The lack of interest initially until there was scurrilous rubbish to spread was also very telling.

Maybe I can come back to it when the case is done. I hope I don’t have to and that others are able to take action.

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So she tells the Advocate when they ask her. Something is a bit strange about this – whilst the rumours about Hilary have been pedalled by her oponents for years why does it take a gay magazine which is very much against outing – (even the homophobes in Washington) – to ask her this question?

The same interview by the way explains that Hilary is against gay marriage – and keeping to her pro civil unions only policy – far more important stuff to be thinking about as she continues to waffle her way around the subject.

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Sky News reports that Mourinho has left Stamford Bridge.

BBC News 24 report that senior players received text messages this evening confirming Jose Mourinho’s departure

So no more special one on Today FM? What will Mario Rosenstock do? I predict a No. 1 Record with a new version of ‘I think I better leave right now!

Update 1
Chelsea Fanzine Editor reports seeing Mourinho at a screening of the soccumentary ‘The Blue Revolution’ earlier this evening and all seemed well.

BBC 5 Live cannot confirm if he was pushed or he left voluntarily. An emergency meeting of the Chelsea Board was held this evening and senior players received texts from Jose himself.

Update 2

Some Gift Grub Youtube Links – Shaddup your Face

Jose and his Technicolour Overcoat

Update 3

1.09am – Sky News now say Mourinho was ’sacked’. BBC News 24 say that he resigned and there is nothing official yet blah blah blah. And I’m off to my bed, unusual fodder for Maman Poulet, normal blogging will return when the inspiration hits!

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Conor Pope writes about consumer blogging and online activism in today’s Irish Times (something I’m not adverse to myself you might have noticed…I’d be interested in any reactions to the piece. I regularly check into Iwillnothold.com and ValueIreland – where you’ll see questions asked that are never asked in the mainstream media – particularly on the denial of Aldi and Lidl as a factor in Irish shopping, their market share and value for money.

Many other bloggers write about poor service and other consumer issues – indeed the women at Beaut.ie provide an excellent place for readers to comment on their experiences of many products and treatments (Happy Birthday Beaut women – well done!!!) I’m not sure how much Irish PR companies and company lawyers worry about the net and bad press – but I think I would be worried given how much my personal purchasing choices are influenced by other blogger/online comments and reviews.

I’ve included the full article here due to the paywall issues. I can think of many issues that have been effected in Ireland due to a bit of consumer blogging – care to start the list?

Change is in your hands

Conor Pope

What’s the deal with online campaigns? The marketing people at Cadbury must have thought all their Christmases and Easters had come at once when this summer’s web-inspired campaign to bring back the Wispa gathered steam.

Nearly 14,000 users of Facebook, the social networking service, started the ball rolling, then fans of the bar stormed the stage of Iggy Pop’s Glastonbury gig waving Wispa banners, online petitions were set up and Wispa ads from the 1980s started appearing on YouTube.

The company was quick (but not so quick as to allow the campaign to peter out too early) to announce that it had succumbed to the will of the people and said the Wispa was on its way back; it should be available in Ireland from October 8th.

“This is the first time that the power of the internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand,” the company said.

The bar was dropped four years ago because of poor sales, so Cadbury is taking a gamble that the clamour for its return was fuelled by a genuine love of the chocolate and not some silly summer-season joke that got out of hand. If the gamble doesn’t pay off, the company could well be figuring out what to do with 23 million uneaten Wispa bars by the new year.

Cadbury is not the only company taking direction from the web-savvy consumer. Businesses all over the world have been frantically monitoring, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, blogs and thousands of discussions boards in recent years for feedback on their brands. While they sometimes get lucky – as Cadbury seems to have – more often than not, the stories generated by bloggers are less than kind.

In August, Wal-Mart set up a Facebook group with a view to marketing dorm furnishings to US students. It didn’t work out and within days, several hundred virulently negative comments about the store’s labour practices appeared on the site, forcing the company into a quick rethink.

And a month earlier, a former Dell employee submitted a post to a blog on the US website Consumerist.com. The innocuous piece on an innocuous site offered consumers tips on how to get the best deals on Dell computers, and while it certainly made for interesting reading if you were in the market for a computer, it was not the kind of post to stir the world’s bloggers into action. At least it wasn’t until Dell’s legal people did something rather foolish. They contacted the site demanding that the post be removed because it was “confidential and proprietary to Dell”.

Unsurprisingly, Consumerist declined to pull the post and instead published Dell’s request. Traffic to the site went through the roof as more than 300,000 people logged on in just a few days to read the post Dell didn’t want them to see. Eventually, Dell issued a statement accepting that it had been wrong to try and have the post removed and should have instead concentrated on rebutting any of the material in the original post it believed to be false.

Darren Baarefoot is a Canadian writer, technologist and blogger who has, for years, been using the internet to fight for his consumer rights. He sums up how many people feel about consumer blogging when he says: “I’ve got to confess, I really dig the power of this site. I do my best to be responsible in criticising companies, but I really dig how blogs can make your complaints public and (relatively) permanent. There’s a profound difference between sending off a fiery snailmail letter to some customer-service manager and publishing that letter on your website.”

Barefoot told Pricewatch that blogs and Facebook profiles work because they take advantage of two powerful online phenomenon: “They’re networked and persistent. Other people read my blog, and some of those folks are bloggers. They may link to my post. The result is an amplification of my voice beyond that of the average consumer.”

Closer to home a number of Irish bloggers have taken to the net to highlight bargains and complain about rip-offs. There’s the Frugal Tiger, ValueIreland and journalist and blogger Damien Mulley’s latest incarnation, IWillNotHold.com.

IWillNotHold.com “has both horror stories of bad customer care, but also positive stories where a customer-care rep or a company goes above and beyond the call. You can’t just whack someone with a stick and ignore the good that is done. Good work needs just as much promotion, so much so, that it should then be expected or the industry norm,” Mulley says. He insists that “steps are taken” to ensure postings are accurate and “are not intended to be malicious but a way of getting an issue resolved as well as preventing it from happening again.” He says while reaction to IWillNotHold.com has been low-key thus far, he is optimistic that once the winter takes hold, it will find its feet.

“Ultimately, I hope such a site becomes redundant as the level of customer service in Ireland improves and I think that sites like this will be a way of doing it. Whether via the Jack-Russell-with-a-bone attitude or maybe one story being the straw the breaks the camel’s back, who knows, but at least it will allow some people to feel a little more empowered.”

Diarmuid McShane, who runs ValueIreland, is ambivalent about the web’s power. “It’s an effective way for airing consumer grievances. However, the internet is a pretty much useless way of challenging business. Most businesses pay no heed to items published about them on the internet . . . it seems that most companies aren’t all that bothered about negative commentary.”

Most, but not all, perhaps. McShane has received two letters from solicitors demanding that posts complaining about “unreasonably high prices” in named outlets be removed. “To be honest, we’d like more,” he says. “They’d be good for advertising and publicity.”

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Thanks to Frank @ Cedar Lounge for letting me know that I’ll be missing Fr. John Harvey’s visit to the RDS Dublin tomorrow to speak at the Human Life International Conference. The talk I’ll be missing whilst doing some very queer shopping checking out all the dykes in Liffey Valley is entitled Homosexuality: Helping the homosexual orientated person to be chaste

Fr. John is a founder of Courage which is based in the USA and ministers to the oriented – cos they only feel that way and can do something about it seemingly.

Ah sure Auds might be there and let me know what I missed Wonder will they be talking about Jesus and his thing for John the Baptist, (what do you think they were doing during that fasting thing?). as for John the Gospel if ever there was a love story and as for the other 12 lads he hung out with??

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(If any Irish music/arts/culture bloggers can promote this I’d be grateful!)

Press release which explains HD and the Guthrie Connection after the jump. Continue Reading »

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otherwise titled Demand is hardly THE issue…(no porn here – move along lads)

The reason many people will get irked when and if they hear one of the government’s excuses for poor broadband takeup (lack of demand by the public) being backed up by a prominent journalist is that many of us go down the pub, or go to work, or take the bus also.

In my case, lets’ talk about my ‘pub’. I talk to lesbians a lot. As owner of SapphicIreland I get to meet a few of them, and listen to a few more, it’s an internet site – the only one in Ireland actively focussed on providing discussion and support for lesbian and bisexual women. You need broadband to use it properly as dialup would send you to la la land given the amount of time the messageboard software would take to load.

So if you are Aine, 18 years old (or in a lot of SI members case coming out in your 30’s) and living beyond the pale and think you are the only lesbian in Ireland, having broadband to find another lesbian or at least read about Irish lesbians is fairly essential. However Aine and few other Aine’s can’t get broadband and it’s not that they don’t want it or won’t pay for it! Other Aine’s have broadband but its crap broadband.

The reason that many Aine’s can’t get broadband? They are many – lack of connections, lack of landlines, poor planning and infrastructure. The reasons for crap service – it’s Ireland we put up with it – NTL HELL, Digiweb not showing up, Eircom saying lines are ok and then saying they are not, BT not being able to do something cos Eircom won’t let them, billing problems and direct debit hell…

Now you might say that I have never met a lesbian who didn’t need or want broadband cos I run an internet site for lesbians. Actually I don’t know many people who don’t use the internet or don’t want to use the internet – I know many who won’t pay for satellite’s, dishes, landlines, outages, poor customer service and being ripped off. I even know some heterosexuals (shock horror!) who have similar ethics/dilemmas! I think that saying that those of us who think broadband supply is THE issue are talking only to ourselves are really missing the mark and being condescending to ‘ordinary’ users or potential users whomever they/we might be. Of course service providers say demand is a problem – they want our euros! It’s far too fecking easy for them to blame consumers than to increase competition and improve the bloody service we pay for!!!

I’m not a tech journalist, I’m not someone wanting to start a company here. (instantly see’s her opinions being trivialised now in all the hot air!) I don’t need an OECD report to tell me about the problems in the management/monitoring and provision of broadband in Ireland. I set up an office this year and broadband set up was a problem – not as big a problem as some others but it took ages for a 21st century supposedly modern country to get sorted. I lost my home connection for weeks due to a service providers incompetence and that was a HUGE issue for me. Wifi hotspots and the cost of them are big issues for me in my work also. My friends on the continent pay half the price for 4-8 times the service/speed/capability.

These I suggest are some of the REAL issues that the government and the service providers need to be tackled about – frequently and often. Irelandoffline raised those issues, I was a reader of it’s mailing lists/message boards far far before I was a blogger or a BB user. However it couldn’t keep going on thin air, so when it wound up did people think these issues would go away? Or the capability to talk about the issues or dispute the spin?

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