Tom Doyle :: TALK

The Brazilian government is asking that newly discovered tribe in the Amazon be left alone.

Some astonishing photos of the isolateed tribe who inhabit an area close to the border between Peru and Brazil were released by the Brazilian government in an attempt to protect the tribe from illegal logging.

Here are some of the amazing photos:

The website which posted the websites seems to be having trouble loading with the interest http://www.funai.gov.br/

I don’t know what way to take Jim Corrs take on the Lisbon Treaty. Jim appeared on TodayFM in an interview that sounded at times like a hysterical dooms day prophet. None-the-less, I do think he has some points that people should be made aware of… so here you go… draw your own conclusions:

Well here’s another bit of information I was sent regarding the Lisbon Treaty. Take a close look at the results of the voting and how the majority shot down Amendment 32 which read “The European Parliament undertakes to respect the outcome of the referendum in Ireland“.

So even if we don’t ratify the treaty, does that mean it’s happening anyway??

Another year without the Eurovision for the Irish. Our great hope, Dustin the Turkey didn’t make the last 10 in the semi-final of the Eurovision song contest. This means we will have no-one representing Ireland in the Eurovision this year.

To be honest, I’m quite happy that he didn’t make it. What a joke putting him through in the first place. The arrogance of this country shows through yet again when we thought we could send a Turkey to the Eurovision and win it…

Maybe I’m taking this a little too seriously!

If profanities offend you…. don’t watch this!

It won’t be long now before we go to the polls to vote on the latest “re-jig” of the treaty that was rejected some years ago and I’m still none the wiser as to what way to vote.

So far all the government and the treaty supporters seem to be saying is that it will make us “look” bad if we don’t give it the green light. But not one of them has talked about the benefits of ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. I’ve seen them say that we could lose jobs, lose out on the funding for farmers and the best one, lose FACE!

On the other side of the coin we have the No campaigners. Although some of their claims can be failry debatable, they are at least talking in lay mans terms and telling us what the cons of signing the treaty will bring.

For example, take the issue surrounding our neutral status. The yes voters continue to say it won’t affect our neutrality at all, however, the No voters rightly say (IMO) that it will. The solidarity clause of the treaty states that “Member States are obliged to assist each other if one is the victim of a terrorist attack or a natural or man made disaster. The precise details of this co-operation would have to be agreed unanimously by the Council.”

Another key issue for me is Tax, especially corporate tax. From what I have read and from the information I get from the No campaigners is that they EU will have the ability to control our tax rates. The yes campaigners say they won’t but don’t back it up with anything.

There are many other issues not to mention the fact that after 800 years of oppression we can so easily hand over the rule of our country to someone else - I don’t get that one, but Bertie Ahern thinks that is just a “nostalgic dream” which is quite offensive… anyway, would love to hear from other people what they think.

Maybe the debate can start here and you can all try to make me a yes or no’er!

Well my beloved Man United have done it again! Well done lads!!!

In a tightly fought competition they came out on top again to win the league by 2 points. That’s another item of my new year predictions

TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay $110m the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for failing to hand over logs on the activity of users of their website.

The landmark ruling will send shockwaves to the thousands of small torrent search websites and maybe even some of the larger ones that offer a similar service to the one TorrentSpy offered before it shutdown in March of this year.

TorrentSpy in effect, was nothing more than a torrent search engine. It never held or stored any copyrighted material on it’s server. However, it did allow users easily find copyrighted material.

So in effect, TorrentSpy has been sued because it “linked” to copyrighted material, something that Google, Yahoo! and MSN do all the time with their search engine.

A simple search on Google will give you “links” to millions of copyrighted material. Here’s a very simple example of this http://www.google.ie/search?q=intitle%3a%22index+of%22+eminem

Why don’t the MPAA doing anything about this? Is the muscle behind the larger corporates a bridge to far for them to fight in their war against copyright infringement??

A friend of mine just recently completed his driving test. Luckily for him, he passed, but just about. One of the bad marks he received that had him close to failing was for “misleading”. He received the bad mark for thanking someone for letting him out of a junction. It was misleading of him to do this according to the driving test.

I was aware of not being allowed to do this when I did the test myself, but just hearing that he was close to failing the test for this, really got me thinking about it.

The test for me has always been about making us drive like robots. In reality, the only time people drive like this is in the driving test. If everyone went around not thanking people with gestures for common road courtesy, what would road rage be like then?

I don’t usually do this, but since someone else is blogging about a (so far) successful campaign that we were involved in, I thought “what the heck?”.

So here it is - Blue Sky Mortgages Ireland - Number 2 on Google.ie for “Mortgages”. Now if I’m honest, I’m not 100% convinced the latest Google SERPs are going to last that long - so while it’s there, lets talk about it!

I’ve talked before about the importance of a web designers role in the proper preparation for search engines when designing a website and to be honest our job would not have been easy if it wasn’t for the work of David Behan.

David designed the site perfectly, not only from look and feel, but also from it’s preparation for the search engines. If every site was designed in this way, we wouldn’t have much work!

Of course there was always the consultation and strategising, but the on-site work was mostly already done. So well done David, we need a few more like you in the industry!