EirePreneur

Advertising Startup positions, part 2

Conor O'Neill of Argalon Solutions has followed up on an earlier converation we had regarding the disintermedation of jobs listings for Irish startups.

The job-seekers have no easy way to identify which start-ups are looking for people whilst start-ups like ourselves find the cost of advertising nationally on a regular basis prohibitive.

Our comment to James was that we found the costs too high and the results to be mediocre in using both Monster.ie and The Irish Examiner. The cost of The Irish Times was unacceptable and we figure there is not much difference between Monster, IrishJobs and RecruitIreland apart from cost.

The reality is that the services offered by the online job sites are simply overkill for companies such as ourselves. All we want is somewhere to post basic job descriptions and receive CVs in return for a minimal fee.

As Conor points out there could be an issue with building up enough momentum but I feel that Feed Grazers like OPod and Taskable, which allow us to nibble at feeds without subscribing, will greatly help. If any other startup has positions to 'advertise' or would like to be added to my startups Reading List please email me or comment here.

Best Technology Blog nomination - thanks!

The competition is hot so I daren't hope to win but it's an honour to be nominated for the Best Technology Blog category of the Irish Blog Awards. And fair play to Bitbuzz - Ireland's largest independent wi-fi network - for sponsoring the category.

UPDATE: Wow, I just noticed that Web2.0 Ireland, the group blog Emmet Connolly and myself started together is also nominated in the Best Technology Blog category. Thanks!

PXN8 gets Scobleized, explosion to follow?

So right after reading that Don Dodge post that Fergus pointed to (boy has he got his finger on the pulse), I realize that Walter Higgins' PXN8 has just been Scobleized. So Walter gets a chance to evaluate Don's thesis -

"Simply engage a couple of the "A-List" bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus,  Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours."

Fingers crossed for Sxoop. I still think it was a mistake for Walter to pack in the blog and I hope he can resurrect it to take advantage of the forecasted traffic spike.

Damn, why didn't I invest before the stampede? ;-)

RSS to IM on mobiles via Google Talk

Now that Google Talk has connected to the public XMPP network I can use JabRSS to monitor RSS feeds via Agile Messenger on my Nokia 6630. Nice :)

FeedXS is.... nothing new

TechCrunch reviews FeedXS which it says "forces you to think about RSS in it’s purest form: a way to broadcast content." Mike Arrington also loves "that it exploits RSS in a somewhat new and interesting way."

The thing is though, Nooked have been doing this with their FeedWizard service for about a year now. FeedXS, after RapidFeeds and FeedForAll is just another validation (as if Nooked needed one) of their interesting business model.

Dave Winer is a Movement

... and the proof is there for all to see in the comments to his announcement of newsRiver - his new 'river of news' style RSS aggregator. A mere few hours after posting and the 74 replies are peppered with gushing praise. At the dawn of 2006 users are partying like its 1999.

Of all the fortune-telling for the coming 12 months I've read this past week the only thing that hangs in my memory is the advice that - the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And that, clearly, is what Dave Winer does all the time. But why is it that his vision of the future wins out despite the "inferiority" of RSS and OPML against the likes of Atom and XOXO? Well, because, he's so much more than a technologist - he's a one-man brand, marketeer, evangelist and union leader all rolled up into one. His union is the union of users, the ordinary everyday internauts like me who are absorbing the messages about RSS and OPML while those about loftier technologies go right over our heads. That must be incredibly frustrating to those who snipe at Winer but if they could stop throwing mud for a while they might learn his secrets.

How lyrical it is that the father of blogging should use his own creation better than anyone else, as a pulpit to spread his gospel across the expanses of cyberspace. If you're a software entrepreneur forget all the soothsaying you've read this week and concentrate on the lessons to be learned from the Winer Movement: - developing great software isn't about impressing your geeky peers with the technical genius of your 'boil the ocean' vapourware. Rather, its about communicating clearly the benefits of software that does a little, does it well and does it now. A lot of littles can add up to a lot, especially when you have an ardent army of followers to embrace and extend your vision.

I find Winer's abrasiveness irritating and I wish he'd bury the hatchet with Adam Curry but personality flaws (and some would argue that they aren't) shouldn't blind us to genius.

Is being offline like being disabled?

I've been without broadband for the last three days for reasons I won't go into (its boring). It was about this time last year that I made up my mind I'd have to move house if I didn't get access to high speed internet within a couple of months. It was simply becoming impossible to keep running the business on dial-up. Luckily I was signed up with Eircom within a few weeks of that decision and its only now when I'm back on a 56kps modem that I truly appreciate what a difference it's made.

The issues are of course both psychological and technical. I need to be 'always-on' so I can respond to customer queries, process orders and moderate forums in a timely manner. But instead I'm logging in for 45 minute sessions every few hours, both to keep costs down and to keep the home line free (I got rid of the second line when I got broadband).

And that's just the critical stuff. Besides that my RSS aggregator (FeedDemon) is a sea of red ink (flagged items) which I can't click through on for further reading. I know Dave Winer advocates a 'river of news' approach to RSS consumption, ie. that you should forget about items that have aready gone downstream. But while that's fine for fluff blog (flog?) pieces these flagged items mark stories that I really need to delve into, to keep pace with competitors and to develop new ideas. Needless to say my blogging is also suffering.

I notice that Bernie Goldbach is suffering a similar sense of withdrawal and it occurs to me that the human race stands at an extraordinary threshold. Will it become more and more uncomfortable, disconcerting and disorienting to be offline? Not to belittle the issues facing the disabled but I literally do feel somewhat handicapped when I'm not jacked-in. We define disability as the loss of a physical or mental faculty, not being able to interact with the wider world to the same degree as able bodied people. Well I definitely feel like I'm not interacting with the world at full capacity when I'm offline.

So I'm sorry if it's not quite politically correct to say so now but I'm sure that in years to come people will wonder how we ever lived with the disability of being cutoff from the global mind.

Cork City Classifieds service based on Ning

The intital excitement around Ning has died down somewhat but I've been wondering how long it would take for Irish developers to start pumping out Ning based applications. Then, today I read on the rather useful Guide to Irish Shopping blog that the author has just launched a Ning based Cork City Classifieds service.

Looks interesting but I wonder if it can rise above the crowd? Its such a challenge nowadays to generate enough momentum to gain a critical mass of users there is a huge marketing hurdle for a service like this. But best of luck to them!

Please steal this OPML node...

.... or even just borrow it. Under the Entertainment -> Pubs & Restaurants branch of the open Irish Directory I've now added a separate Limerick City node. Please feel free to include (or transclude) this node in your own top-level directory if you so wish. I will continue to expand and maintain it but you're always free to make your own copy too. Remember - there is no ownership of an OPML based open Directory :)

So who's ready to build similar nodes for other cities in Ireland?

Why would I want a laptop targetted at children?

Because it`s the coolest and most ingenious form factor I`ve ever seen.