I attended the Phoenix Convention last weekend. The con is a literary Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy gathering, which this year included some fascinating panels on micropublishing and ebooks, both easily worth the price of admission alone. I will hopefully do a more detailed post on the con as a whole in the near future, but for now, here are a couple of business ideas that struck me during the panels.

A Federated Media For Podcasting
John Battelle’s Federated Media is a medium sized company which aggregates the eyeballs of several …

Synopsis:
I detail my experiences with a WordPress hack across multiple shared hosting sites, the steps taken to recover WordPress and secure against future attacks.
Introduction:
On the December 15th I discovered a number of my WordPress installations had been compromised. Rather than a concerted attack, this was likely the result of widely available scripting tools that allow ‘crackers’ to exploit known vulnerabilities in out of date WordPress installs. Due to the large number of WordPress installs on my server, and a reluctance to run bleeding edge software, I’d been a little …

Many thanks to John Breslin for organising Irelands first Webcamp, last Wednesday 7th March. The afternoon was an enlightening look into the development, search, analysis and productive uses of social networks.
I’ve wiki’d some notes on event. Ina O’ Murchu of DERI should be posting videos of the talks in due course.
Particularly interesting was the response of designated Bebo’s spokesperson, Mark Tarbatt of webvertising firm Generator, to my questions about potential Bebo censorship. The impression Mark (whose firm seem solely responsible for selling branding on Bebo, at least in Ireland) gave …

It’s come to my attention that I have a free URL registration knocking around my flaky but sweet Dreamhost hosting package. Any lewd, amusing, or perish the thought, useful suggestions?
Update: Jackdawfool.com it is.
As in..
The lions sing and the hills take flight.
The moon by day, and the sun by night.
Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool.
Let the Lord of Chaos rule!

Google have just begun rolling out a terrific feature, which allows users to grab email from other accounts (work, yahoo etc) via POP3. This could be a godsend for users glued to horrible proprietary corporate email accounts with ineffective spam filters, or anyone tired of multiple simultaneous email logins, who for whatever reason (multiple desktops, mobile access etc) need to use web email rather than a stand alone client. Combining this feature with Gmail’s existing ‘Send mail as’, allows your Gmail to now be used as your central email.
To access …

Just came across this article, via the swearing lady. Apparently Technolotics was mentioned in ye olde paper blog, The Irish Times.

If many young students are not yet using modern technology to express themselves, three have done so successfully. Technolotics.com is billed as an irreverent look at technology, politics and the media by three Irish students and for a year it stood as one of the few Irish videoblogs.
Technolotics is cheap and cheerful and it proves an important point. Viewers don’t need RTE-grade production values to engage with new personalities. …

Yahoo mail UK has been down for me all day..

C:\>ping uk.mail.yahoo.com
Pinging rc1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com [217.12.6.29] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from **.***.***.***: Destination host unreachable.
Reply from **.***.***.***: Destination host unreachable.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 217.12.6.29:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

Not getting anything from google news, technorati, or google blog search on this – but I’ve tried accessing through a few proxies, so it’s …

Recently I posted about layering (for the most part dynamically generated) OPML atop the existing web. Turns out people have been doing the opposite, creating sites built from the ground up using the outline structure of OPML to implicitly define and manage content hierarchically. Check out this article posted by OPML creator Dave Winer, written way back in 2002.

I think I just got it. For the past few weeks I’ve been puzzling over what the OPML, RSS, AJAX alphabet soup will ultimately end up tasting like.
I’ve intuited for a long time that the whole gestalt is far more significant than most programmers or technology commentators realise; and of far more ultimate utility than as a succinct method of information categorisation. I now realise, OPML (or an OPML like outliner standard in XML) underlies the future of both the browser and the web.
Firefox 3, or its equivalent, won’t function …

Inspired by Tom Raferty’s recent interview with EirePreneur’s James Corbett at the Irish Blog Awards, I’ve been messing around with OPML this evening. OPML is an ‘xml format for outlines‘, in laymans terms a sort of meta-feed, allowing the consolidation of URI’s and RSS Feeds.
As we all gradually transition from getting our news and information from a series of site visits, to subscribing to tailored feeds of postings, postcasts, vidcasts and media streams, methods of rapidly, accurately, and inclusively navigating the morass of information will become increasingly important.
Already I’m finding …