Tom Doyle :: TALK

It’s that dreaded time of the year again, Haloween. Once my favourite night of the year, has now in my old age, become one my most dreaded nights of the year.

It’s not the fireworks, it’s not the horrible mess the day after… no… it’s something more simple than that. It’s when you’ve run out of sweets and choclate bars that the kids now demand when they visit your doorstep!

I live in a quite little area, with no more than a handful of kids (they’re small kids) - however, Haloween brings them all out fo the woodwork. And just when you thought you had bought plenty of sweets to cover the amount of children that visited your house last year, you find yet again, that within the hour you have run out of sweets to give out to all these kids!

Last year it was so bad that I resorted to handing out apples, oranges and just about anything that was in my fruit bowl. But, the for the kids of today, that’s just not good enough. “Hey mister, I don’t want apples or nuts, where’s your sweets?”, they’d cry in anger… It’s no wonder our kids are so fat nowadays…

So whatever happened “Any apples or nuts?”. Why have we all of a sudden turned into a nation of “Trick and Treaters”? I wouldn’t mind, if you asked the kids to do a trick they’d look at you and say “wha?”.

Bring back the old days (without Curly Kale - yuk!) - apples and other types of fruit are much better for our kids!

The IIA Net Visionary Awards shortlist have been announced and I have to say, I am very much disappointed with some of the shortlisted entrants.

For so long now, I have been touting the Net Visionary awards as the most prestigious Internet awards in Ireland today. They were the only awards that actually selected the best of the best from the innovative side of the Irish Internet Industry. Now though, I’m not so sure that the Net Visionary awards are actually any use at all. The shortlisted companies just don’t make any sense to me at all.

To give you a few examples:

The Internet Marketer of the year award it contains 3 people I have never heard of and nothing of their business either (apart from RaboDirect).

In this category ther were much better entrants. For example, Dave from Red Fly Marketing, one of the most competent online marketing people in Ireland at the moment.

I could easily critique each site of the shortlisted companies and give you issues with each of them, but I won’t bore you with that. I’ll just say, a simple backlink check says it all in my opinion.

On google, the following results appear:

Links to RedFlyMarketing.Com (212)
Links to Flowersmadeeasy.ie (9)
Links to NetAssist.ie (0)
Links to RaboDirect.ie (23)

Now I know there is a lot more to online marketing than SEO, but for me, it’s the most basic and the most important thing you can do in online marketing.

In saying that, I can’t give out too much about RaboDirect as I am familiar with their web ads and they are obviously doing quite well to build awareness. But I have never come across the other two companies and that worries me.

In other categories, best blogger is the first to come to mind.

Denise Cox, as much respect I have her, a best blogger shortlisted with a blog of no more than 80 articles is a bit boggling when you have many other prolific and great bloggers such as Michele Neylon, TheMenace, Dave (RedFlyMarketing), Red Cardinal, Alan O’Rourke etc.

Web Designer Excellence… well what can I say…
I can’t give out too much about Webfactory, they’ve always been very impressive in terms of design.

But IrishJobs.ie?????
Where’s the design? When was the last time they redesigned the website?

Graphedia - well lets just say… “Design is very subjective”…

Web Developer Excellence
Again, another category I obviously looked out for. IrishJobs.ie was shortlisted again, I can’t give out too much about that one as it was a pretty impressive application in its day. But, how long ago was it last upgraded? What great new innovative solutions have they brought to the web?? I can’t think of any by looking at the website to be honest.

Pigsback too would be another that I would question their innovation.

All in all, what a disappointing list of shortlisted companies. If these guys are supposed to be the top scale of the Irish Internet industry, we’ve a very poor showing this year.

At last, Google has finally given 2bscene.ie some PageRank love. Although not back to it’s orginal PR 7, I’m happy enough at the moment with our PR 6 and the fact that inner pages have also received some PR love too.

Look : http://digpagerank.com/index.php?url=www.2bscene.ie&dc=10

On the back of last weeks talk - when a number of high PR ranking sites lost their Google PR - i was afraid that it might have taken a bit longer to get some love from Google, but all is looking up at the moment.

Now let’s hope it makes changes to the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) too!

Hot on the heels of the governments announced last week on the new Road Safety Strategy 2007, Minister Noel Dempsey has now announced that the requirement for second provisional licence holders to be accompanied by a licenced driver of two years has been deferred until June 30th 2008.

What a typical example of our great government……

Announcing it in the first place, just showed how out of touch the government is with the real world, but this is just another example of why we should never take anything the government says seriously.

Personally I welcomed the new laws. The only people that seemed to disagree with it, were those who held provisional licences. In particular, those who held their second provisional licence.

I can’t help but as… What do you all expect?

Firstly, no-one on a first, third or fourth licence (or more) are meant to driver alone anyway so I don’t see what they are giving out about.

Second provisional license holders are one of a few things in my mind….

• Too lazy or not bothered to apply for a driving test because they didn’t have to.
  or;
• Drivers who have failed their driving test.
  or;
• someone who has got a first license but never used it and reapplied again.

The only argument they seem to have is that they claim to be better drivers than some fully licenced drivers. I can’t disagree with that, however, the fact that the fully licenced driver went through a test, gives them more of a right to be on the road than those that haven’t or those that have failed.

As a country, we always knock change. Remember when  the smoking ban was announced? But no-one can say that hasn’t been a huge success can they?

Yes I do agree, concessions have to be made for those who have already applied for a test, but those who haven’t bothered, should be forced to drive with a fully licenced driver.

I just tried to log on to www.drivingtest.ie - the site is down.

I guess the new road safety act has frightened thousands of people into trying to apply for a test on-line now. Just shows you how lazy most of those learner drivers actually are huh?

They knew there was no real benefit in having a full licence - until now of course!! So they finally get up off their backsides to apply for a test because they know they’ll need one very soon if they want to avoid large fines and penalty points.

So Fianna Fail, what you gonna do now about the driving test waiting lists?

From midnight next Monday (29th October 2007) all learner drivers will have to be accompanied by a driver who holds a full licence for at least 2 years. This new law will also include second provisional licence holders, who have in the past been immune to the law requiring learner drivers to have a full licence holder with them, when driving.

The new Road Safety Strategy 2007 was announced by An Taoiseach, Mr. Bertie Ahern T.D., the Minister for Transport, Mr. Noel Dempsey T.D., and the Minister for Justice Mr. Brian Lennihan T.D. yesterday.

The key changes in the to be introduced are:

• The provisional licence is being replaced by a learner permit to emphasise the fact that the holder is learning to drive.
• Existing provisional licences will continue in force until their expiry date after which the holder will be issued with a learner permit.
• A holder of a second provisional licence/learner permit for a car must be accompanied at all times.
• The accompanying driver must in respect of any licence category hold a full licence for the category for at least two years.
• From 1 December 2007 a learner motorcyclist must wear the letter L on a yellow fluorescent tabard.
• From 1 December a provisional licence/learner permit holder must hold the licence/permit for six months before taking a driving test.

They have a completely new graduated license process, similar to that of the UK. Here’s a diagram to show you the process. (click to enlarge).

So what does that mean for all those provisional licence drivers now? Well anyone caught driving without a licence holder of two years or more, will be hit with a €1,000 fine.

All sounds good in theory, but how will the Gardai clamp down on these drivers? For me, I think it will just push provisional drivers underground. I personally think this is just going to drive learner drivers to remove their L plates and pretend to be full licence holders.

As much as I welcome these new laws, how they will enforce these new laws.

The new laws are likely to cause huge public debate and confusion, generally based around the holders of second provisional licences. As mentioned above, these drivers (120,000 of them) have legally been allowed to drive on Irish roads without a licensed driver - from Monday though, it will be illegal to do so.

I spoke today with a current second provisional licence holder. He is outraged and feels he should have got more notice of the new law. As much as I have sympathy for him, I don’t think he should have been given more notice. He has held the second licence for a while now and he admits he didn’t bother applying for a new licence because it wasn’t illegal for him to drive with his second provisional.

This law is well overdue and is made to create a safer environment for all road users, which lets face it, is nearly all of us. It’s ludicrous to think that someone that has failed a driving test - can get straight back into their car and drive on our roads. I’ve spoke about this before here >>

The next big question now is how will this affect the waiting lists for getting a licence?? It’s always been a nightmare to get a test, what are the government doing to shorten the waiting lists?

Will there be provisions for drivers on the waiting list? If so, is this just a pointless new law that won’t be at all effective???

NEWSFLASH: What a government we have…. only announced and then this
Friday, 26 October 2007 13:06  >> http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/1026/roadsafety.html

For the past few months, my web design company has been in the process of dropping our 2bscene.net domain name in favour of our 2bscene.ie domain name.

It has caused major issues with our rankings for our main keyphrases, the site has basically dropped to page 3 or 4 for most phrases. We knew it was going to effect us, but weren’t entirely sure just how much.

One thing I really wanted to keep was our Google PageRank of 7. It took a lot of time and effort to build this up. Taking advice from peers and my own knowledge, I thought my best plan of action was to use a 301 redirect on my old domain, in the hope it wold transfer over all the weight. That has happened and for months, the .net domain still had a PR of 7 until just the other day. Now my main .ie domain and the .net domain, report a PageRank of 4.

I beginning to wonder now if it’s something else that could be an issue. Then I came across this post the other day. http://valleywag.com/tech/search/is-google-punishing-dirty-linkwhores-314513.php

Basically these fairly popular sites have also lost their high PR.

• The Washington Post PR7 to PR5
• Statcounter.com - PR10 to PR6
• Forbes PR7 to PR5
• Chicago Sun-Times PR7 to PR5
• San Francisco Chronicle PR7 to PR5
• Autoblog PR6 to PR4
• Engadget PR7 to PR5
• ProBlogger PR6 to PR4
• Copyblogger PR6 to PR4
• Joystiq PR6 to PR4
• TUAW PR6 to PR4
• Search Engine Journal PR7 to PR4
• Search Engine Roundtable PR7 to PR4
• The Blog Herald PR6 to PR4

So what is Google up to? Are they penalising these websites and possibly my own?

Are these cases results of the clamp down on paid links that Google talked about for so long?

Whatever they are doing is a very dangerous act in terms of the knock-on effects it could have. How are they distinguishing what links are paid for and what links are genuine?

I guess only time will tell.

Google announced the release of their Gmail IMAP facillity yesterday on their official blog.

This is a handy little addition to their free email service. It means Gmail IMAP users will be able to interact with their Gmail account from anything from a PDA to a desktop computer.

More information here >>

We’re currently in the middle of a fairly large project in which we will be converting and playing video’s on the fly. So on my research travels, I came across this great little FLV player the other day that I thought was worthy of a mention.

Jeroen Wijerings’ FLV Player is perfect for anyone wanting to play videos, mp3s, etc. on their website - http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player

The FREE player offers a host of features, which can you can see in action, by playing around with the settings on this page >> http://www.jeroenwijering.com/extras/wizard.html

I’ll be able to show you an example of it in action over the next couple of days!

PC gone mad or what? What’s wrong with “sex change”?
We have to use the phrase “gender realignment”, it’s more sensitive and politically correct….. anyway……

I’ve had to edit this article because I was wrongly informed. I was let to believe that Lydia Foy lost her case today for the right to change her birth cert to show that she is now a woman. But in fact, it was quite the opposite.

I have nothing against people who decide to go under the knife for a sex change, but I really don’t think it’s right to put it on their birth cert, especially if it means it changes the record of the sex they were born.

I understand that people like Lydia really feel that they were born in the wrong sex body - but unfortunately that’s life. We got to live with what we are dealt with.

Should anyone be allowed to be dupe into believing that you were born a particular sex, when you weren’t?

I think it’s a case of the world gone mad. Why should anyone have the right to proclaim they are a different sex, when they are not???