Paul O'Flaherty

Kevin Rose Interviews Googles Marissa Mayer

Kevin Rose of Digg interviews Google’s Marissa Mayer asking her the 14 most popular questions as voted for by the Digg community.

“Do you ever get disturbed at what you see as most searched topics?”

“With products like Google Docs, Voice, Wave as well as Chrome OS, Google seems to strongly encourage the move to the cloud. However, a lot of users do not have fast internet access and have relatively low bandwith caps. Do you consider Internet Service Providers as a major bottleneck in the user experience of a cloud-oriented system? If so, what do you think can be done fix or circumvent that potential problem?”

“What are you going to do with all the data you are collecting on your users?”

“What happened to the 10th to the 100th promise Google made on its last birthday to put $10 million into the best ideas submitted to Google and winnowed by a vote of the public with final selections made by a panel selected by Google? The initial decision-making was to have come in December, then it was delayed due to the huge response… and now it appears to have gone by the wayside. (This is very disappointing for all who trusted Google to honor its funding promise.)”

“How do you feel about Bing? I believe the search engine has some very positive features. Does Google plan on implementing any significant changes in response to Bing’s release?”

“What product that Google has in beta are you most excited about at the moment?”

“What do you think of Wolfram|Alpha?”

“Who do you think is Google’s biggest threat?”

“Could you please take us through a day in the life of “the boss”?”

“Is Google Skynet?”

While the interview itself is very interesting, thanks to Marissa’s answers, is it just me or does Kevin Rose have about as much personality as a frozen turnip in this interview?

(Via Philipp Lenssen)

Alabama Crimson Tide (Firefox theme)

Alabama Crimson Tide is not some “Hunt for Red October” style adaption of a Tom Clancy novel, it’s a Firefox theme for the Alabama Crimson Tide football program, a college football team team that represents the University of Alabama.

As far as I can tell this rather bright crimson theme was developed by the guys at BamaOnLine, and while it’s not exactly my taste (I prefer dark and black themes), I’m sure many of my friends in Alabama will no doubt be looking to give their browsers a visual overhaul using this theme

If buildings could dream – Amazing 3D projection on a building!

I don’t know if this represents what a building would dream about if it could but projections like this are not only amazing art pieces but have a massive future in advertising.

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

(Via Freshome)

What worm has chewed up Apple?

Has there been a culture change at Apple? Looking back over the past few months I believe there has and it hasn’t been one for the best.

It’s not that long ago since Apple was bending the recording industry over hot coals and bending them to their will. Apple forced them to stay at a fixed $0.99 per song for way longer than they (the recording industry) intended to or wanted to.

Yet since Apple capitulation to allow variable pricing in the iTunes store, things have started to go downhill.

Now Apple is the one succumbing to external pressure. Apple has blocked Google Voice and Google voice related apps from the App Store at the behest of AT&T, and now they are expecting us to believe the utter bullshit that jailbreaking your iPhone “encourages cell tower terrorism”.

What has happened at Apple? How has such an innovate company managed to suffer what appears to be a major culture shift?

Rolling back the years 95 -96

Rolling back the years to 1995 when I was still in college and on the committee for the schools (Colaiste Muire, Cobh) computer club. I know geeky right? That’s me 3rd from the right on the back row (no jumper on).

In this picture, starting on the back row from the left:

Alan Hickey, Brian Ahern, Patrick Moore, myself, Dermot Hastings, Mr. Declan Kennedy

Front row from the left:

Mark Irwin, Philip Stockely, Damien O’Brian, John Doyle.

Thanks to Brian Barry for getting me to scan this in.

Twitter endorses naked avatars

Twitter thinks that having a naked avatar is good. In fact, they not only think it’s good, but you can have one even when you’re on the Twitter “suggested user” list.

I, of all people, am the last guy in the world to be prudish or worry about nudity. I’ve lived in countries where you’ll see full frontal nudity in commercials at breakfast time but after having a conversation yesterday about language and cultural sensibilities (particularly the American sensibility), I was a bit surprised to see an image of Rob Corddry (of The Daily Show) naked atop a giant foot in the Twitter recommended list.

Now, I’ve got no problem with Rob Corddry flashing his arse on Twitter, if I don’t want to see it I just won’t follow him, but I have to wonder if this is the kind of message Twitter really wants to be sending out – that “nude avatars are okay”.

We’ve seen a massive influx of porn spam on the service and god only knows the numbers of “horny kitties” I’ve had following me lately and if Twitter continues to, both allow the spam and promote Corddry as he flashes his backside to the world, then you can only assume that they endorse the use of such avatars.

I love boobs and bums as much as the next man, but when I log into Twitter I don’t want to see Corddry’s bum or billions of fake silicon boobs and photoshopped ass’s in thongs trying to get me to click through to porn sites.

Corddry, man to man, I appreciate you feeling free enough to show you’re body to the world, but please save that for your private page on Facebook and Twitter, please take a stand on this one way or the other!

UPDATE: On the picture upload page of Twitter, 5th point down:

Nudity or obscene images are not allowed.

So that leaves the question of why twitter is breaking their own rules and allowing nudity in the avatar of someone they’ve put on the “suggested” list?

Advertising on Twitter = Sex in Public

There has been a lot of services cropping up lately allowing you to make money off of your Twitter stream by dumping advertising of one form or another into it. I’ve been strongly opposed to this and have on more than one occasion stated that I will unfollow anybody using these services.

I’ve know inside that this form of advertising is wrong, yet couldn’t quite come up up with a good analogy considering I have advertising on my blog.

Today I think may have cracked that analogy:

Advertising on your blog is like having sex at home, you can do whatever you want in your home and it’s your own private business. If people don’t like it they can shag off.

Advertising on your twitter stream in like going out and humping on the bonnets of peoples cars in the middle of main street.

Nobody wants to see it, nobody should see it, nobody signed up to see it!

How Tim Burton and WP Super Cache brought my sites to their knees

We felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole last night. News broke that the the trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland had leaked onto the internet, Sara nabbed a copy, threw it up on Daily Shite and then all hell broke lose.

I didn’t think much of it at first, but then the traffic started flowing in and things started to go haywire.

All of our sites are hosted with DreamHost on various accounts, but O’Flaherty, Suburban Oblivion and Daily Shite are all hosted under the same account, which means they’re all residing on the same server (along with hundreds of other customers sites I would presume), so when my site started throwing 500 errors as Daily Shite came under heavy traffic I knew I’d done something wrong.

The worst thing about being on a hosted server is that it only takes one of your sites to be poorly configured in order to go over your resource allotment and take the others down as well.

So as the traffic spiked on Daily Shite I was left confused as to what was happening. The sites had been working fine under reasonable load, I had WP Super Cache installed so what could it be?

To make matters worse, getting into the admin panels of the sites to change settings was proving difficult as they all kept throwing “Internal Server Errors”.

I’ll cut a long story short and get to the chase, after a quick SSH login it became evident that the reason the sites were throwing wobblies was the very plugin that was installed to help the sites deal with heavy loads – WP Super Cache.

In my eagerness to get everything running smoothly and quickly, I’d enabled Gzip compression on all of the sites. Bad move on my part.

While Super Cache was doing what it should and serving only cached versions of the pages, instead of the whole batch of database calls it’s supposed to prevent by not recreating the page for every user, it was now using CPU cycles to compress the data being sent to readers browsers.

Now this is fine on an average load day, the extra CPU load from compression is negligible and provides a minor speed increase in load times for anyone viewing the site.

But when you’re seeing a spike like we did yesterday, it just brings the entire system to its knees.

Once I had Gzip compression, as well as “Coarse File locking” disabled everything came back to life and ran like a dream throughout the entire 2-3 hour traffic spike.

So, if you’re expecting or hoping for a huge traffic load on your site and are on a hosted server here’s my recommended settings for WP Super Cache:

• Don’t cache logged in users – Disabled (no check mark) If a logged in users visits the site with this enabled they force a rebuilding of the cache which uses up valuable resources under a heavy load.
• Clear all cache files when a post or page is published – Disabled (no check mark) This can significantly increase posting time as a the cache is cleaned out.
• Cache Rebuild – Enabled (checked box) – Serve a supercache file to anonymous users while a new file is being generated. Recommended for very busy websites with lots of comments. Makes "directly cached pages" and "Lockdown mode" obsolete.
• Coarse file locking – Disabled (no check mark) You probably don’t need this but it may help if your server is underpowered. It can cause some server configurations to lock up so best to leave disabled.
• Mobile device support – Enabled (checked box)
• Super Cache Compression – Disabled

One final tip for working with WP Super Cache: Don’t forget your .htaccess files. When you set up, or upgrade the plugin you have to insert (and check for changes in) rules in not just your root .htaccess file but you must also create a .htaccess file in “wp-content/cache” and manually populate it with the rules given in the plugins admin page. Also, don’t forget that adding mobile support requires and additional set of rules to be added manually.

Forgetting to add the rules can lead to trouble and the plugin will not work as it should.

Now you should be prepared to be dugg or any other massive traffic spike and won’t be caught with your trousers down like I was

You may have boobs and kids, but you aren’t a mommy blogger!

It doesn’t matter who you are, we all feel the need to be part of a group, part of a collective which we can identify ourselves with. It gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and direction.

In the blogging world, this is a great thing. Groups create influence and help drive recognition and traffic, however, it all goes to hell in a hand basket when that group gets infiltrated by marketers.

That’s what has been happening with mommy bloggers recently and they’ve been having a rather public crisis of faith as they attempt to define what a mommy blogger is.

It all came to my attention when Sara wrote about the storm surrounding the idiotic idea of a “Blogger PR Blackout”, and came up again today when Stephanie Azzarone asked:

One wonders what would happen if the marketing world instituted an extended “Blogger Blackout” in return — no samples, no giveaways, no coupons, no trips. And readers would then keep going to those blogs because … ?

Kind of shines a light on what the PR world really thinks of bloggers, right?

Mommy bloggers are facing this issue because some of them appear to feel the need to, as Maria from Mommy Melee puts it, “lump together every blogger with a vagina and a child”.

Are you female, do you have kids? Then you’re a mommy blogger!

It’s as bad as being a Roman Catholic! No choice is given, they take you as soon as you’re warm.

As I see it from the outside, the mommy sphere consists of two distinct types of blogger (and those who straddle the fence of course), the actual mommy bloggers who talk about their kids, their lives, their experiences plus anything else that interests them and then you have those who use their blogs as a marketing tool to shill products and services to other mommy bloggers.

Now before I go any further, let me make it clear that I know plenty of women who are mothers and do not identify themselves as mommy bloggers. They are not being talked about here. I’m only talking about those who identify themselves as such, not those who are identified as such by the defensive and needy mob.

I have no problem with monetizing your blog. I attempt to monetize this one.

I have no problems with mom bloggers doing product reviews and giveaway’s.

What I do have a problem with is identity.

Once the focus of your blog stops being your own content and your own ideas you stop being a mommy/tech/sports blogger.

When posts that are your own exclusive content start becoming filler posts between the next marketing article, review or giveaway, you stop being a blogger.

When the sidebars and content of your blog contain more adverts than the personals section of a cheap tabloid rag, then you stop being a blogger.

Do you know what it is you become? You become a marketer! If driving products and profit is your primary goal with your blog, then you are a marketer.

I would suspect that the most ardent voices within the “mommysphere”, fighting to say that blogs full of product reviews are acceptable as mommy blogs are those who have transcended blogging into marketing.

They know that by being identified as mommy bloggers companies will give them more products to hawk and by being a so called mommy blogger they have a built n market.

Remove the mommy blogger association and all they’re left with is a blog that would otherwise be considered a splog – a spam blog.

The “mommysphere” has split into two groups – the mommy bloggers and the “mommy marketers” and the sooner it realizes that, the better off it will be.

20 Tips for creating fresh ideas

We all need fresh ideas. From our personal lives to our blogs, from business to entertainment, rehashing old ideas gets, well old, and very quickly.

It’s good to have variety, it’s great to have spice and it’s even better when we come up with an idea that nobody else has, or is implementing. Those kind of ideas lead to happiness, profit and in my case an 18+ hour work day.

I’m posting 5 of my favourite tips from Daily Blog Tips “20 Tips for Coming Up with Fresh Ideas”, which I couldn’t resist linking to simply because they’re first tip is so me.. “Be really grumpy!”

• Be really grumpy! Keep track of the things that annoy you. This is a great place to start, as you know the problem intimately as well as being the first customer for any solution.
• Go people-watching. Unleash your inner spy! Spend time watching people go about their everyday lives. What are they doing? How do they do it? Can you spot any obvious problems?
• Distract yourself. Have a change of scene. Do something that you love doing that has nothing to do with your business or blog. Get lost in what you’re doing. Often we come up with solutions when we’re not even thinking about the problem in the first place.
• Critique everything. Question everything, and ask yourself “why?”! Intelligently analyse your environment and think of improvements. See what lessons you can learn about the good and bad things in your environment. – (It’s what  kids do all the time – Paul)
• Think like a child. Children have a fantastically simplistic and candid view of the world, something we lose as we become adults. Employ a strong sense of curiosity and simplicity when looking for solutions. So many things in this world happen due to convention or habit, so thinking like a child helps to break this pattern.

Google to Newspapers: Take your toys and go home!

I’m constantly amazed but never shocked by the constant departures into utter idiocy undertaken by main stream media, in this case a number of European newspapers who have become signatories of the “Hamburg Declaration”. (Scroll down to the “Note to Editors” to see the declaration).

The following extract is the piece that got my attention, and Google’s apparently.

Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost. We disagree with those who maintain that freedom of information is only established when everything is available at no cost.

Universal access to our services should be available, but going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.

Essentially this says in about as simple terms as I can make it: “Don’t crawl our content without paying us for it.”

Now I suspect that all the major search engines will have some sort of response lined up to this but my hat goes off to Josh Cohen, Google’s Senior Business Product Manager for his response:

For more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

If a webmaster wants to stop us from crawling a specific page, he or she can do so by adding ‘<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>‘ to the page. In short, if you don’t want to show up in Google search results, it doesn’t require more than one or two lines of code. And REP isn’t specific to Google; all major search engines honor its commands.

To paraphrase Josh’s well written post into more everyday talk: “Nobody’s asking you to play. If you don’t like it, quit your whining, pick up your toys and go home. You’ve always been able to, so put up or shut up. Let’s see how long you last without us!”

Bravo! About time Google!