March 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of March 2005.
Subscribers to Eircom broadband and to rebranded Eircom broadband resellers will see their bandwidth increase from April. In what appears to be a reaction to the pervasive Smart Telecom advertising, Eircom issued a press release today.
The details are below:
Starter - €39.99 - Now: 512kb - New: 1Mb
Home Plus /Business Starter €54.45 (€45 excl VAT) Now: 512kb - New: 2Mb
Business Plus €89 excl VAT - Now: 1Mb - New: 3Mb
Business Enhanced €169 excl VAT - Now: 2Mb - New: 4Mb
Esat will apparently follow Eircom and upgrade the bandwidth allowances. However a lot of Esat’s product is really just rebranded Eircom DSL and as such Esat is passing on the bandwidth. Esat will offer 1Mb for €39 per month and 2Mb for €47. Netsource and the other Eircom resellers will probably follow suit.
Smart’s attempt at a landgrab with its free line rental for life to its first 100,000 customers is an good idea. However with this new price war, Smart is going to learn that anyone can start a price war and only the big guys can finish it. By having a DSL product already deployed, Eircom and Esat can effectively cash in on the Smart advertising by splurging on the advertising. If Eircom does it well, people will find it hard to remember the Smart adverts.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Broadband , Eircom , DSL
Written by John McCormac on March 14th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
An interesting project for exploring Bluetooth’s security at a distance. Ever since GSM smartcards were reverse-engineered and the algorithms compromised, the security models of mobile phone systems has been examined, often with devastating results for the security. The format of the hack would be a bit inconvenient for Ireland.
Tags: IrishBlogs,Bluetooth, Security
Written by John McCormac on March 14th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
The latest WhoisIreland.com statistics for the Irish Hosting Business show that the HSPs now have over 50% of the market. The market shares of the ISPs has continued to fall. It could be that the Irish hosting market is beginning to consolidate with smaller hosters and ISPs finding it difficult to compete with the Tier 2 hosters.
Hosting365.ie is maintaining its position as Ireland’s biggest hoster and is showing the highest net growth for the period. However it has less .ie domains than many of its close competitors. To date, Eircom’s and Esat’s market position was based on a strong .ie cctld base. However both ISPs are continuing to lose .ie domains and clients to the HSPs.
Market Shares As Of 01 March 2005 - Identified Domains = 90479
Tier - Hosters - Domains - Market Share - Market Segments
- Tier 1 - 24 - 25200 - 27.85% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
- Tier 2 - 22 - 45620 - 50.42% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
- Tier 3 - 59 - 11880 - 13.13% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
- Tier 4 - 263 - 7273 - 8.04% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
- Tier 5 - 419 - 814 - 0.95% Individuals/Firms/Web Developers < 7 domains
- Tier 6 - 25 - 877 - 0.97% Educational And Government And Registry
Tags: IrishBlogs, Hosting , Domains , Internet Statistics
WhoisIreland.com publishes monthly reports on the Irish Hosting Industry. These reports provide the statistics for approximately 800 Irish hosters. They cover the new domains, deleted domains, domains transferred in, domains transferred out, active domains, active websites and market shares. Subscription Details .
Written by John McCormac on March 12th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
Some time ago, Technorati.com introduced tagging and over the past few weeks, I’ve used it on some posts here. The idea is that bloggers would add a tag to their posts to allow Technorati to group the posts in with other similarly themed posts from other blogs. Simple idea? Yes but there is a catch - the bloggers have to include a tag on their post that links back to technorati’s server. (Eg: http://technorati.com/tag/IrishBlogs).
Tagging is to blogging what meta data is to web pages. Back in the mid 1990s, meta data made web pages easier to categorise. Each page would, theoretically, have a description and keywords. Technology was expensive then and meta data offered search engine operators a cheaper and more effective method. Web pages and web sites could simply be categorised by stripping out the page title, the description and the keywords. But like any simplistic system, it was easily gamed for commercial purposes. Some keywords guaranteed hits. As the price of technology fell, full text indexing of webpages by search engines became viable. Even then there were people stuffing keywords into the text of webpages. These keywords where in the background colour so that only the search engines would see them - the user would not.
Meta Data is a nice academic concept but like its tagging offspring, it relies on one critical aspect - the website developer has to include it in the webpage source code. Even years after they were introduced, at least 70% of webpages do not have proper meta data. A recent check on Irish websites showed that out of 33239 .ie websites, only 9710 sites have title, description and keywords. Like meta data, tagging is self-categorisation. But often bloggers will already have specific categories listed on their sites.
The problem with tagging is that it is an “early days” solution to a complex problem. With ordinary websites, the link model is one that describes the links between what are often static business sites. The link model with blogs is different. Blogs are often a stream of consciousness. Bloggers link to each other rather than to websites. Simply grouping blog posts rather than discovering their interconnectivity is an easy way for Technorati to develop what is in effect a dynamic web directory of blogger posts. But like any automated system, it has weaknesses. The IrishBlogs tag has essentially been taken over by Richard Delevan (a freelance journalist in Dublin). Because he posts early and often, Technorati’s date based grouping bumps his blog to the top of the list. This is not gaming the system. Technorati is best thought of as a group of tags with each tag having a small set of associated blogs. The effect of sorting using the time that the page or post was last updated means that the most recent post will appear at the top. This problem of updated content is an old one for search engines. The solution that search engines adopted was to effectively remove the update or ping aspect from the user side and to periodically spider websites.
Irish bloggers do not typically incude Technorati tags in their posts. As blogging becomes a mass-market phenomena, including tags has to be made easy. It has to be made part of the blogging software so that bloggers can include a tag as simply as clicking on an icon. But by the time that tagging hits the mass market, the big search engines such as Google will have deeply integrated blogs into their existing search indices. Google could even be planning their own blog specific search in the same way that they have a news, usenet and image search option. Given the size of the world blogosphere and the frequency at which it updates, it would be trivial for a large search engine to create its own blog search index. But by including blogs in their main search indices, the larger search engines regard blogs as part of the mainstream web.
Tags: IrishBlogs , Technorati , Tags , Search Engines
Written by John McCormac on March 11th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
Microsoft is to establish a research and development centre in Ireland that will employ 100 people. The new facility will carry out research on Microsoft’s terrestrial digital television and IPTV projects. Microsoft already employs over 1100 people in Ireland and this research facility is an unusual addition to Microsoft’s Irish operation but not for the obvious reasons of Ireland’s well educated and creative workforce. Charlie McCreevy has been integral to the European Software Patents fiasco. Perhaps it is conspiracy theory thinking but is there a connection between the position of McCreevy and the Irish government during Ireland’s EU presidency and the establishment of Microsoft’s facility?
Tag: Microsoft , IPTV , Software Patents , IrishBlogs
Written by John McCormac on March 11th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
Novara.ie (Host.ie) announced today that Tornado Dedicated Servers is merging with the company with immediate effect. Tornado’s market segment is the high-end and dedicated server market rather than pure retail. This boosts Host.ie’s postion in the lucrative dedicated hosting section of the market.
The move is an interesting one as the Irish hosting business is still a very fragmented market and it is overdue for consolidation. Recent trends have shown that the ISPs are continuing to lose market share. The Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) now have over 50% of the Irish domain hosting business. Host.ie is one of the top four Irish hosters and it may overtake Esat.net as the third largest Irish hoster later this year.
Tag: Irish Hosting , Irish Domains , Domains , IrishBlogs
Written by John McCormac on March 9th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
A post on fmk’s blog shows that Fianna Fail still does not get technology. Shane Cassells’ election diary was revealing in more ways than one.
Written by John McCormac on March 9th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
Google launched version 1.0 of its Desktop Search. It extends searching to the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored in
music, image and video files. It also supports Firefox and Netscape browsers and the Thunderbird and Netscape e-mail clients.
Tags: Google , Desktop Search
Written by John McCormac on March 7th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on General.