Sinéad

A relatively inexpensive wireless technology that has been developed by Intel, with underdeveloped countries in mind, could work for rural Ireland.

The new technology can extend a wi-fi signal between two antennas up to a maximum of 96 miles. Considering Ireland is only about 190 miles wide, why not implement this kind of system? Rather than forcing Irish rural and island internet users to connect via ridiculously expensive satellite systems or leaving them lagging behind on dial-up.

Will someone please let the Department of “Communications” know about this, because according to Silicon Republic (and everyone else in the country) Ireland is below the EU Broadband average, and it’s all down to the rural “deficit”.

For the past month I’ve been using Google Reader on a daily basis. Not only have I discovered a wealth of information from the 100′s of blogs I’ve subscribed too, I’ve also discovered some wonderful functionality – some of which you can find on the sidebar of this blog.

Thanks to Elly I learned how to display an accurate selection of my currently subscribed to blogs. This is usually reserved for the WordPress links feature and came under the Blogroll heading. The difference being, my blogroll was never 100% up to date – it’s an easy thing to forget between posting new articles and tweaking the occasional feature or blog design. Today if I want to add a blog to my Blogroll I simply drag and drop it into the folders that I’ve created in Google Reader and it immediately appears on my own blog.

I went through a phase of using Digg, to social bookmark – to display a list of articles that I had read, that I found interesting and wanted to share. Google Reader has a similar feature built-in, though it doesn’t tell you how many other people have also marked an article as sharing-worthy, this might be something they will add once it has come out of beta. The last 5 articles I have marked interesting also now appear in the sidebar and the full list can be viewed here, you can even subscribe to this as it has it’s own RSS feed. If anyone else has one of these going, let me know. Sharing IS caring after all.

As I do most of my blog reading from work, I often don’t have the time to read everything, especially the longer articles. Obviously I’m not going to want to add it to my shared items if I haven’t read it, for this I can add a little star and view these starred articles on their own at a later date. This is especially practical if I find something related to my studies but don’t have the time to completely process the information. This is also great if someone posts a video or mp3 you want to watch/listen to when you’re in the comfort of your own computer.

I’ve been following the “Big Four vs Eircom” story today and getting very annoyed over the whole thing. Coincidentally, this month the MP3 Player is 10 years old, and 10 years ago the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to ban the sale of the first mass-market MP3 player (Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300). Diamond countersued, and won, claiming that the RIAA’s actions were an attempt to impede the growth of a market (digital music), which it didn’t control.

Rumour has it that in the late 90′s Sony were in the process of developing a hard drive based MP3 player, but pressure from Sony Records (members of the RIAA, and were obviously anti-MP3) meant the project was shut down. Then Apple came along in 2001, launching the iPod, thus reaping the oh-so-many benefits. 

Clearly the music industry bosses are just bitter.

They can’t keep up with the market and they certainly can’t control illegal downloading. There is no technical solution to filtering and banning peer-to-peer file transfers and Eircom can’t and won’t do it. There’s no point in trying to control the digital music black market, it will always exist and always HAS existed. What the music industry needs to start doing is offering consumers better value for money and incentives to start buying CDs again.

I mean, for god’s sake, they’ve had the last 10 years to think about it.

Over the last few years I’ve seen some fairly awful attempts to engage the consumer for example: full albums available on 64mb SD or MiniSD cards, access to secret sections of an artist’s website only if you purchase the CD, “bonus” DVDs that are really just teasers/trailers, etc.

I honestly don’t understand why I can’t just walk into HMV and connect my MP3 player via USB and pay to instantly download a full album that comes with a nice little book full of lyrics and artwork. I like lyrics and artwork. Yet, so many bands neglect to include lyrics in the album sleeves. So, why would I bother buying the CD if it doesn’t offer me anything extra, except for being another plastic dust collector on my shelf?

New Zealand company Simtrix have developed a novel alternative to the trackpad. It has the overall usability of a mouse but doesn’t restrict you to the tiny surface of a trackpad, by using the surface of your laptop (keyboard) as a mousepad. The tiny Swiftpoint “Slider” mouse can be tucked under your thumb, which allows you to very quickly switch between typing and navigating.

See it in action here (link: BBC news video).

For someone that does as much typing (some of this may or may not be chatting) whilst browsing the internet (all in the name of research of course), this would be a godsend. Not only would this replace my completely worn down trackpad and mini usb travel mouse, I can see this completely replacing any mouse I would ever think of using. Being able to switch between typing and navigating at such ease would be bliss.

I must have one of these. Immediately.

The PermanentTSB website won a Golden Spider back in 2005 and since then hasn’t really changed it’s overall site design, infact, it has been virtually the same since 2002. A heuristic evalution of the site (undertaken in the Human Computer Interaction module of the MSc in Cyberpsychology) easily leads me to believe that it is in dire need of a redesign (yet their more recently launched “Yourmortgage.ie” is almost a replica of the main site). Out of a possible 23 heuristics, it only fully complied with 12 of them – meaning the site is littered with design inconsistencies, broken links, very clearly deviates from the current standard web practices (PDF files? really?) etc., etc.

It’s just another fine example of Irish web design firmly stuck in web 1.0. The .ie domain is virtually (no pun intended!) littered with them. I’m sure there are plenty more examples of badly designed Irish sites (not necessarily .ie) and would be thrilled to hear everyone’s own personal “favorites”.

Eircom.net is another firm favorite of mine for its sensational orange menu with white text, and dark grey text on a grey background for its sub-menu. Wonderful stuff.

I’ve always loved the art deco front of the old Strand Cinema and I’m glad they kept it for this apartment redevelopment. Though the apartments themselves are quite pricey and unfortunately are situated in a rather iffy area on the North Strand Road and close to the East Wall too. If they were closer to Fairview they might be worth the €300,000 each (edit: not 100% sure about this price). A real pity too, because the building itself is gorgeous and the redevelopment is lovely – complete with art deco style foyer with old movie posters.

I keep on coming across the same Pat Phelan reaction to the iPhone pricing and wondering…

Am I the only one who has ever noticed how expensive ALL of the mobile phone tariffs are (especially the data charges), on ALL of the networks in Ireland, in comparison to the U.K? The phone prices are also very different, and the range of phones.

It’s nothing to do with the iPhone itself, it’s the same old adage in this country it’s “what the market can bare” rather than “best value for money”. O2 keeps its prices high because they can, and people are still going to buy the iPhone despite the download cap and excessive pricing.

As far back as September 2007 I suggested that those desperate for an iPhone would be better off with an iPod Touch instead. The iPod Touch has everything the iPhone has except it’s not a phone (though the iPhone isn’t exactly brilliant at being an actual phone – no MMS messaging, difficult SMS input etc.,) oh and let’s not forget that the iPod Touch doesn’t have that god awful 2 megapixel camera, what a loss.

Buying the iPod Touch is even better advice today because of the Joikuspot Software. Or, you could take Pat Phelan’s advice and go to the North, buy the iPhone and get it unlocked to use on any network. But that means being stuck in an 18-month contract and paying a monthly fee for minutes you will never get (though I doubt this is possible as you need to be a resident of the U.K to sign up to a mobile contract IN the U.K).

Even if you DO have an unlocked iPhone and use it on another network – you will still have to pay the high prices for Edge mobile data, so what’s the point?

I’m in the early stages of writing my second thesis. My first one, for my undergrad studies in Psychology Applied to I.T was based on online advertising, was only about 5,000+ words and I had about 80 participants in my experiments.

This one will be three times the size, it will weigh in at about 10,000 – 15,000 words and I’ll be needing about 1,000 volunteers to fill out multiple online surveys for me (this step won’t commence until at least September). So wish me luck! Below are some of the aims I have developed, they form the basis for my upcoming research.

Aims:

1. To investigate the immediate and initial factors that influence the perception of credibility and trust online, in regards to non-commercial websites and blogs.
2. To explore and evaluate cues of trustworthiness online.
3. To investigate trust-inducing interface design features and tools employed by non-commercial web designers, blogging platforms and blog writers, and examine their effectiveness.
4. To examine online trust formation from a user’s perspective, including brand awareness and social experiences.

Though there is a lot of research with regard to the topic of trustworthiness online, almost all of this research focuses solely on e-commerce (eBay, Amazon etc.,) and does not delve into information exchange. Recently Wikipedia and Blogging has come under scrutiny by the traditional media for an apparent misrepresentation for information. However, this has in no way effected the popularity of these mediums. What I want to know is – why? Why do people trust certain websites and blogs but not others?

The next stage is to develop sets of hypothesis, which I’ve begun to do and have quite a few so far. I’m very much looking forward to getting feedback on my initial ideas from the college, I may have to alter the above aims as time progresses. If anyone would like to contribute some feedback or direct me towards any existing research, articles etc., please do.

If anyone else, like myself, is currently in the process of doing research into existing literature, online, let me suggest a wonderful tool called Zotero. It’s a file management system that works in conjunction with Firefox to help you sort, tag, reference, etc., research papers from sites such as Google Scholar.

Lots of strong emotions about this gig and a lost blackberry. Have a listen to the band here. There are many many more photos on my flickr page.