Thats is the answer to my question, apparently 60,000 people are employed by Irish companies in the US [1], where as 90,000 Irish people [2] are hired directly by US companies in Ireland.
Interesting fact I think.
[1] Brian Cowen on RTE news.
[2] www.amcham.ie/article.cfm?idarticle=315
Ok, I admit it. It took about 10 minutes to cross the street in Phnom Penh for the first time.
I was standing outside my hotel. On the otherside of the road were the banks of Mekong River. Between us: Chaos.
Motorbikes, tuk-tuks, trunks, bicycles; all going in different directions, at different speeds.
Stop, Look, Listen
I meekly step out into fray. Shit, a moto, step back. It passes. Once more into the void; I step out again, a shout from behind me, back again. Locals are looking at me. Children are laughing. Oh, Green Cross Code Man , where are you?
Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, …The waters were divided
Right, I didn’t come 10,000 miles to be stopped by a busy road!
Chin up, back straight, walk. It worked. The streams of traffic slowed or adjusted course to allow me to pass, without one tut of a horn or an angry gesture. I had made it to the banks of the Mekong.
Guess thats how you cross the road in Phnom Penh then!
RSS and ping (and trackback) are what made the blog explosion happen. Content was routed, manipulated, aggregated, tagged and tracked.
What enabled this were the blogging tools and software, that allowed users to simply create content and RSS-ify it.
So what would the tools for a business need to do? Well you tell me!! comments please!
Here are a few ideas to get going..
I think RSS takes care of most of this.
e.g. We are a furniture shop, retail.
… add services available at each outlet? E.g . wifi available, handicap accessibility.
This would simplify comparison for prices etc. across vendors. Both Yahoo! and Google (Froogle) have their own standards for this.
Sale on 14th – 15th December, 20% off everything.
Once these pieces exist, you should be able to ask questions like,
Show me furniture shops near me holding a sale in the next week.
or
Show me furniture shops with items described as couches, with prices less than 600 Euros , that are open after 6pm
…. and we all know that would be good.
I read over on Robin’s Geared Up Blog, that a Danish company Aresa has developed a genetically modified plant that can detect landmines. If this works, it will be wonderful. I recently spent a day with Landmine victims in Siem Reap, Cambodia, some missing 2 limbs, and blind. They still had a smile for a visitor. Many amputees have been outcast in Cambodia society, so education is important part of the programs too.
1300 people still are injured by landminds in Cambodia each year. There are between 8 and 10 million mines in Cambodia.
If you ever visit Siem Reap in Cambodia to see the most amazing temples in the World , Angkor Wat (and you should!) , please drop into the Rehab center and throw a couple of bucks their way.
Jimmy Carr had a great solution to the broken software that is PPARS on RTE’s the Panels last night.
“I’m no expert, but what you should do is, turn it off and then turn it on again”
[near as I can remember!]
Well it was bound to happen!! Google launches Google Reader, and webbased RSS client. It was linked from the labs put it dissappeared !!! It was pretty slow, but I did catch a screenshot!!
It has some sort of RSS discovery, so you can just enter the URL, e.g. www.maccarthy.org/blog finds the feed at http://www.maccarthy.org/blog/feed/ .
It also has opml import and EXPORT!!! Yeah!
The BBC is reporting from PodcastConUK, Europe’s inaugural podcasting conference, in London.
There are some interesting quotes from the BBC and Virgin radio on Podcasting:
“It won’t be too long before this [podcasting] becomes the normal route to discover new talent,” says Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Interactive.
and
In the short term, thinks Mr Kimber, this is likely to affect the types of programmes that get commissioned for the BBC radio output.
and
At PodcastConUK, Mr Cridland announced that Virgin’s new unsigned band show, Virgin Radio Extreme, had been created with podcasting at its heart
There has been a lot of stuff happening at Microsoft recently, as the software giant struggles to fight its stagnant appearence. One of the Microsoft products that is going to get a much needed facelift is Hotmail. The beta is called “Kahuna”. Over at channel nine they have posted a video with the developers talking about the technologies used and the overall goals of the new GUI, which basically means AJAX (not that you will hear that buzzword mentioned once)
However watching the video, a worrying fact come it light; the UI is targeted towards IE 5.5 and IE6. Thats mean NO browser on Apple or linux. No Firefox, no Opera, no Safari.
You would think that the users of Apple and Linux , Firefox etc. are the people microsoft should be trying to impress? They are the segment of the market they DON’T have. Makes you wonder.