— I’ve got to take my hat off to the people behind TechLudd and toast what was, by all accounts, a huge success. Jessica Roy says “It was the most successful most attended event, barring a conference, that the Irish tech community has ever seen”. See what you missed by browsing some of the great photo albums on Pix.ie. I’m certainly looking forward to the next event in Limerick. P.S. fair play to Microsoft for jumping in, yet again, as sponsor of a grassroots tech event in Ireland.
— Even though the Collaborative Map of Irish Wifi hotspots has been around since July of last year it has really only taken off in the last few days – thanks primarily to coverage by a number of Irish blogs, even the Irish Times.
And boy has it taken off! Over 11,000 views in the last 48 hours and now heading for 100 hotspots. There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments section where Conor O’Neill explains how he was able to export all Access Point locations to his Nokia N95 (GPS enabled mobile phone). Conor says it’s a “killer app for me”. Will King of GeoData Solutions explains how to keep that mobile view live. And I’ve posted instructions for subscribing to an RSS feed with notifications of new points added.
— Cork OpenCoffee is growing stronger than ever. And the coverage is excellent. As well as a full rundown on the blog Conor streamed live video from yesterday’s session including a talk from Brian McAuliffe of Something.ie.
— Blogger Coffee in Limerick went off very well and I’m definitely not missing the next one.
EirePreneur 
January 26, 2008 at 2:12 pm |
Please do also link to any gallery which isn’t hosted on the truly bloody awful pix.ie. Looking at broken image icons and blank brown squares gets old after the first few minutes.
January 26, 2008 at 2:36 pm |
I haven’t come across any broken image icons or blank brown squares – can you point them out?
January 26, 2008 at 5:15 pm |
Thanks for the quote and the great comment on my blog.;) It truely was an amazing night. Next time you’ll be blogging about how many contacts you made at the one in Limerick hehe! Can’t wait to finally meet you!
January 26, 2008 at 5:16 pm |
PS pix.ie RULES!!!! Rock on Marcus!
January 27, 2008 at 2:25 pm |
Thanks for the mention eirepreneur. Great idea to actually get these things mapped. I’m impressed with the amount of views the map has but one thing puzzles me.
17000+ views but just over 100 points added. It should have more like 1000 points with that number of views.
This means that either;
1. Most people too lazy to add a point.
2. Most people don’t have a Google account and don’t want one.
3. Most people don’t know how to edit the map.
4. Most people don’t know at least one wifi access point. Or want to keep them secrets.
I assume it’s number 2 which means that there is a natural stumbling block to user generated mapping. To truly encourage this Google should open up to any user with an email address.
Will
January 27, 2008 at 5:52 pm |
Interesting points Will. I must admit I’d no idea that there were so many hotspots in the country – from where do you draw the figure of 1,000? Agreed, gmail mapping is still a stumbling block but I guess it’s nevertheless one of the easiest if not the only solution for now?
January 28, 2008 at 1:04 pm |
James – is trackback working ok? I linked to here this morning but it hasn’t come through.
January 28, 2008 at 1:11 pm |
Yes Paul, trackback is working fine, but my trackback logs show no recent ones from your own blog. Are you sure you entered the address correctly?
January 29, 2008 at 10:09 pm |
nearly 25000 views on the map – you are obviously good at publicity!
How about another push to get the whole country covered?
January 29, 2008 at 10:53 pm |
The thanks goes to you Will and for the amazing amount of hotspots you’ve added. Thanks again! How many have we got on there now? Yes, I’ll definitely give it another push 🙂
January 29, 2008 at 11:38 pm |
Cool. 663 hotspots on yesterday evening, reckon over the 700 mark now.
It was good to have a look at kml and the benefits/drawbacks to this kind of mapping scheme as it was something I hadn’t time to play with much until now.
If you’ve been bitten by the community mapping bug I reccomend you check out OpenStreetMap – http://www.openstreetmap.org – if you haven’t already.
January 30, 2008 at 9:42 am |
700? Wow! I must go and have a fresh look at OpenStreetMap alright Will, it was the project which inspired me to start OpenEir a few couple of year ago –
http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/openeir/index.html
But, as you can see, after a promising enough start that never took off.