February 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of February 2005.
The one thing that the Irish blogosphere is missing is its own search engine. Are there enough Irish blogs out there to warrant one? It is a difficult question and there is only one way to find out the answer - build a search engine for the Irish blogosphere.
Building lists of websites for Irish websites is part of what WhoisIreland.com does. However blogs are not like ordinary brochureware websites which update on a yearly basis. Blogs can be updated on an hourly or daily basis. The standard way of blog notification is to ping a server to indicate that the blog has been updated. It is the most efficient method of monitoring a large number of blog updates.
At the moment, the exact number of Irish blogs is hard estimate. Is it hundreds or thousands? And most importantly for a search engine operator, how often do they update?
Tags: IrishBlogs , Search Engines, Irish Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on February 28th, 2005 with 32 comments.
Read more articles on Search Engines.
Read this and consider if MLE had more in common with Swift’s Grand Academy than a modern research institute.
For five years what passes for the Irish technology press was drinking Medialab Europe’s eclectic koolaid. Very few journalists covering technology in the Irish press spotted that the MLE was a waste of money. MLE provided them with the technological equivalent of a piece of paper with PTO written on both sides. It kept them amused and confused for five years. But surprisingly it was the Irish Times, once a diehard supporter of MLE that uncovered the horrible reality of MLE. It was there that excerpts from reports obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that MLE wasn’t just badly run - it was more badly run than anyone had expected.
A post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog neatly identified the key points from Jamie Smyth’s Irish Times articles. One of the most important points is that the finance and administration unit was young and inexperienced. This was often the single point of failure for many dot.bomb businesses and MLE was in so many ways the ultimate dot.bomb business.
MIT/Medialab did not apparently want to contribute any funds to help out Medialab Europe. Perhaps it realised that MLE was a doomed venture. A few years ago, Medialab Asia had crashed and burned in India where the Indian government had some different view to Medialab about research. The Irish government didn’t seem to think that it had received value for money with MLE either. They were a little slower in waking up to the reality that MLE was never going to be self-financing when it came to research. It was a pure sponsorship play of the kind that only worked well when there is a boom market.
The Irish government commissioned a report on MLE from consultant Dr. Tom Higgins. This report advised that MLE should be linked with universities. MLE’s own management got in on the act and in 2004 it prepared its own report - the grandly titled “MediaLab Europe: Strategic Plan May 2004″ which contained some choice words describing the environment at MLE. The one quote from the MLE management report about the “inmates running the asylum” is particulary ironic given that Nicholas Negroponte pointed to a supposed appreciation that the Irish had for madness being one of the main reasons for situating the MLE in Ireland. Higgins’ report pointed to MLE’s somewhat lacklustre research record and the fact that it had only obtained twelve patents in five years. MLE wanted the Irish government to supply 9 Million Euros to help it out but according to Higgins, the funding that MLE would require was in the region of 35 Million Euros. It would have been quite insane for the Irish government to have funded MLE without significant changes being made. And that seems to have been a problem for MIT/Medialab.
A rescue package was on the table for MLE. It involved funding and significant changes to MLE. The board would be reconstituted as would the management of MLE. An academic programme would be instituted where MIT would be involved in degree courses. Cash payments to MIT would be reexamined. Funding from the Irish government would be capped at 3 Million Euros per year and a change to the whole intellectual property model would be required.
But at the core of all this is the concept of research. Was MLE doing any? Probably. Was it of any use? Maybe. Was it directed research with clear aims and possible commericalisation. Evidently not!
Research means different things to different people. To technologists, scientists and researchers it means identifying problems and possible solutions. To entrepreneurs and business people it means marketable results. An article by Karlin Lillington in the UK’s Guardian newspaper hit upon the differences in expectations :
“This suggests a big problem was mismatched expectations between government and MIT. MLE, a commercialising research partner to fledgling Irish industry? Please. That veers away from the research ethos of Media Lab and points to a wilful ignorance by the Irish, as MLE’s role was always to be a European, not Irish, institution. ”
Well I guess that we Irish just weren’t ready for the soi-disant artistic and intellectual geniuses who ran MLE into the ground and produced hardly much more than a few gee-whiz demos to justify the massive waste of money. Some of the research did apparently work out and twelve patents were applied for during MLE’s five years of operation. Researchers in other Irish institutes that I’ve spoken to found it hard to contain their anger at the money that MLE was getting. These were people doing excellent and relevant research on meagre funds compared to the people in MLE.
The Irish government, faced with increasing questions over the money it had sunk into MLE had questions to answer and their bosses, the Irish electorate were a little concerned at such poor results. We were asking a more fundamental question rather than whether the institution was a European or Irish one. We wanted to know where the hell all the money went and we are not going to take some flashing lights demo as an answer.
With the Irish Times’ FOIA requests and some decent journalism by Jamie Smyth, the Irish public and the world is finding out about MLE and Medialab in a way that would not have been possible had this been an enquiry into Medialab in the USA. The Comptroller and Auditor General confirmed in a reply to Labour Party Spokesperson on Communications, Deputy Tommy Broughan that he had completed a preliminary investigation into the collapse of MLE. The Dail’s (Irish Parliament) Public Accounts Committee is to investigate the collapse of MLE in April and a lot more may come out at this PAC hearings.
MIT got 14 Million Euros from the Irish government for the use of the Medialab brandname, management help and research help. The MLE was housed in a former hops storage for Guinness Brewery in Dublin. A common description of the lack of organisational skills is that someone “couldn’t even organise a piss-up in a brewery”. In the FOIA papers covered by the Irish Times, it was noted that MIT did not want to repay this money.
An e-mail quoted in the Irish Times was quite illuminating. In an e-mail sent in late 2004, Mr Higgins is irritated by the response of the founder of MIT/MediaLab, Nicholas Negroponte, to a set of proposals.
“Nicholas seems to have changed his mind - or not to have made it up. We could have lived with a few queries from Nicholas or even if he needed some clarification of points - but his response is so equivocal that it is impossible to discern a willing and enthusiastic partner working with us on a revised project or to have any confidence in MIT’s commitment to making it work.”
It sounds like Negroponte likes taking credit for success but can’t handle failure. That’s the one thing that distinguishes entrepreneurs from those who merely waffle about it. The entrepreneur handles failure by getting up and trying again.
An article by Brian Lavery in the New York Times quoted an e-mail interview with Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte had hoped that MLE would become a “virus” for spurring research and that it would prompt reviews of legislation like bankruptcy rules that handicap entrepreneurs. Negroponte waffling about things he knows little or nothing about is not new. In fact bankruptcy legislation does not necessarily handicap entrepreneurs. It is quite the opposite in that it limits liability. One of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs in Ireland have is getting funding. Why - because global village idiot operations like MLE waste millions funding in funding the delusions of relevancy of people like Negroponte. However some good may come out of this. The Irish government is intent on replacing MLE with a real research operation. Could this be evidence of an entrepreneurial streak in the Irish government?
Tags: IrishBlogs , Medialab, MLE , Media Lab Europe , MIT
Written by John McCormac on February 26th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
According to an interview on News.com, Microsoft is considering opening up the source for SQL Server under its Shared Source programme. This move, if it actually happens, would be significant as the SQL Server product is seen as one of Microsoft’s crown jewels. Microsoft has been eradicated from the low end web side of the market by Open Source databases like MySQL and Postgres. The move seems to be more an attempt to assure current users of the product of the security of SQL Server rather than to create a new Open Source product.
Tags: Microsoft, Databases, Open Source
Written by John McCormac on February 24th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
According to a report in the Irish Times (sub required), the collapse of Medialab Europe is to be investigated by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The reasons for the collapse and the contract with MIT will come under scrutiny.
Tags: IrishBlogs, MedialabEurope, MLE
Written by John McCormac on February 23rd, 2005 with 7 comments.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
Internetnews.com reports that Microsoft is getting involved in Television over IP. It has come to an agreement with Alcatel to combine Alcatel’s access and integration technologies with Microsoft’s IPTV software. I don’t particularly have any great respect for Microsoft as a software company but this could make the problems that RIAA and MPAA have with p2p downloading insignificant. When it comes to conditional access systems, Microsoft hasn’t clue zero.
Microsoft probably sees this a way of quitely infiltrating its Digital Rights Management systems into domestic equipment. However the interesting aspect is that IPTV may become a lot more important in the near future as it would provide a method of legitimising the distribution of movies and television programmes. The big problem is the fact that copyright areas still dominate the television and movie business.
Tags: Microsoft , IPTV , MPAA , RIAA , Conditional Access Systems, DRM
Written by John McCormac on February 23rd, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
It seems that the Irish Internet Association has launched a cheaper membership option to try to bring in more members. The Associate membership of IIA is priced at 95 Euros per year and is aimed at designers, developers, consultants working in internet related fields according to IIA’s blurb. Exactly the kind of people who couldn’t be bothered to pay the expensive full membership fee in the first place. The associate membership will entitle the member to discounts on IIA seminars and events. Most of the events and seminars seem to be in Dublin or Cork so they are irrelevant to those in the internet industry outside those places. Ironically it was not possible to sign up for this new associate membership level as the IIA website had not been updated to include it yet. The IIA now has Corporate level membership at 495 Euros, SME level membership at 350 Euros, Individual membership at 220 Euros and Associate membership at 95 Euros. The 95 Euro membership does seem to be the more acceptable option.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Irish , Internet Associations
Written by John McCormac on February 23rd, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
The February 2005 WhoisIreland.com figures for the Irish hosting business show that it is still a few years behind the rest of the world. The main hosters for .ie domains are still the ISPs. But the dedicated hosting service providers (HSPs) have now overtaken the block of ISPs. In the freer and more competitive com/net/org/biz/info market, the ISPs have been left standing. The statistics below cover Irish hosted domains in the ie/com/net/org/biz/info tlds.
Hoster Tiers : Market Shares As Of 01 February 2005 - Identified Domains = 88878
Hosters Domains Market Share Market Segments
Tier 1 24 25430 28.61% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
Tier 2 21 44079 49.59% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
Tier 3 56 11493 12.93% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
Tier 4 262 7368 8.29% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
Tier 5 427 834 0.97% Individuals/Firms/Web Developers < 7 domains
Tier 6 25 859 0.97% Educational And Government And Registry
The statistics cover identified Irish hosters. Some hosters are now using registrar nameservers to cover their newer clients from poaching by other Irish hosters. The trend is that the ISPs are losing domains to the HSPs and the market share of the ISPs may continue to drop over the next year as the Irish hosting business becomes more competitive. The hot zone will be Tier 2. This is where the main players in the Irish hosting business exist. Most of them will have to target the clients of ISPs or other hosters to continue their growth patterns.
Tags: IrishBlogs, Hosting , Domain Names, Internet Statistics
Written by John McCormac on February 22nd, 2005 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
An interesting post on Bernie Goldbach’s blog about tags and tagging the Irish blogosphere brings the Semantic Web to blogging. The Semantic Web is an attempt to classify the web giving it a clearly defined structure. From a search engine operator’s point of view, a more structured web is a good thing. It would make it easier to create niche search engines and directories and make the web more usable. However it is an academic idea and like most academic ideas, there is a gap between academia and reality.
The reality of the Semantic web is that the web developers have to implement it. It has to be part of the webdevelopment software that the average web developer uses to create that five page brochureware website. Until that universality is achieved, the Semantic Web will remain, mainly, the subject of seminars and course books. But tagging seems to be routing around academia and into the reality of the web.
The rise of tagging on the web has been slow. The Technorati self-categorisation model is interesting. By using an Irishblogs Technorati tag it is possible to include a blog in the Technorati’s Irish blogs. It makes it easier to identify Irish blogs but there is a catch. Not all Irish bloggers use these tags. Any such self identifying movement goes through this phase before it reaches the mass market. The early adopters find it first and then the connectors and super salespeople the “The Tipping Point” book by Malcom Gladwell explains the process well (Amazon.co.uk) (Amazon.com).
Tags: IrishBlogs , Semantic Web, Technorati Tags , Tagged Web
Written by John McCormac on February 19th, 2005 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
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