Last night I went along to a meeting of bloggers and politicians arranged by Green TD Ciaran Cuffe. A tour of the Green party offices was followed by a round table discussion involving between about twenty bloggers, Cuffe, John Gormley and Deirdre de Burca. Eventually, we got to the point: How can politicians best use …
Monthly Archive: May 2009
May 13
Twits
Apprentice star Bill Cullen blasted the Greens as hypocritical after the party’s Twitter described him as a ‘permatanned snake-oil selling charlatan‘. The message was posted at the weekend by a party worker, and later deleted ‘as the tone was inappropriate’. Millionaire Cullen, who became a household name after writing the bestseller ‘It’s A Long Way …
May 12
De Mare
Dublin is to get a new directly-elected mayor within a year. The first directly elected city leader will be chosen by the capital’s citizens next summer. ’2010 will see the direct election, by the people of the Dublin region, of a highly-visible and accountable Mayor who will have the authority and powers to deliver real …
May 11
Not Quite There
It’s been a busy few weeks for anyone who uses office productivity suites – word processors, spreadsheets and the like. OpenOffice issued its newest version, and Microsoft released Service Pack 2, a free upgrade for anyone using MS Office 2007. MS Office now supports the Open Document Format (ODF), a great help for those of …
May 09
Good News
Provincial newspaper readers are older than average, and growing older. Younger audiences are unlikely to pay for content, but if they read, then they can bring advertisers. So how do you reach them? The most valuable local newspaper resource, its ability to generate ‘micronews’, content at the most local level targeted to its audience, is …
May 08
Old News
This week, the Leitrim Post closed its doors, laying off five people. This follows the closure of the Niall Mellon backed Voice group at the end of 2008. So far, no established provincial newspaper has folded. But several provincial titles, some with decades of history, are on thin ice. On a national level, the Sunday …
May 07
Bad News Bears
There’s a lot of shooting the messenger going on at the moment. An article in the New York Times, or a wrong word in a report from the IMF, and they’re off. ‘There has been comment which has been neither helpful nor, in my view, appropriate, and I would like to move on from that,’ …
May 06
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
My father showed me the brochure when I got home for the weekend. It looked well, very professionally produced, four A4 pages with full colour on glossy paper, good photographs, well lit, clearly taken by someone who knew their craft. The accompanying copy was well designed, not too wordy, but hit all the important bullet …
May 05
Celebrity Games
Fianna Fail are set to trump the Fine Gael coup in landing George Lee as an election candidate, announcing the Seoige Sisters as MEP candidates in the Ireland Northwest constituency. Stung by the news that one of their harshest economic critics is set to take the hustings for the opposition, party mandarins immediately met in …
May 01
Blessed Be Mammon
Two weeks from now, Thursday 14 May, has been pencilled in as National Blasphemy Day. The idea is simple. To protest the proposal to make blasphemy a criminal offence, bloggers will ‘deliberately set out to grossly offend the religious sensitivities of as many religious believers as possible, with the clear intention of causing outrage’. The …