The shortlist for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards has been announced. The Community At Large is nominated in the best group blog category. Thanks to all those who voted for TCAL. Go here to see the full shortlist.

Nice little doohickey for browsing Irish blog awards nominated websites; it randomly picks a blog to display; use the header up top to view another one. Clickety clack. (via.)

Public voting for the Irish Blog Awards 2007 is online here. TCAL.NET is nominated in the best blog and best group blog categories. A full list of all nominees across all categories is here. Voting form. Previously.

Twenty Major,(wikipedia) has moved his site to twentymajor.net. It looks pretty plain at the moment and has lost a bit of the character of the old site, but hopefully the bearded one will sort that out in between Guinness poos soon.

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Pretty animations & fun random quotes from accross the interblag. Animations ran quite slow on my machine…

wefeelfine.org.

Via.

Edit: In making this post, I feel like a missed an opportunity to contribute, so there you go, wefeelfine.org.

When submissions opened for the 2007 Irish Blog awards, the form used to submit votes was a bit fucked up. It’s been fixed now and you can vote for all categories in one handy quick form post. So go do that if you are so inclined.

So you want to see fantastic photos. Go straight to rymus.net and just take a look. The more stormy action shots are breathtaking to say the least. And then when you are done browsing around there, take a look down the right hand side at the Photoblogs links - hours of quality photo browsing fun.

An article entitled Blogging, the nihilist impulse.

Media theorist and Internet activist Geert Lovink formulates a theory of weblogs that goes beyond the usual rhetoric of citizens’ journalism. Blogs lead to decay, he writes. What’s declining is the “Belief in the Message”. Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artefacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

This article has got so many sentences like this I couldn’t not link to it:

There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark.

The last sentence is (sorry for spoiling it:)

Doesn’t the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

What a question. What a load of cock. (via.)

Nominations for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards are now open. There’s a post over on the official awards site about it.

The Nominations round for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards is now live. It will run until 11.59pm on Friday the 26th of January 2007. Go to http://awards.ie/nominations to nominate your own blog or another blog for one of the 21 categories.

The submission form is a bit fuxored at the moment, but they are working on updating it to allow multiple submissions at once.

Previously: TCAL won the Best Group Blog award at the 2006 Irish Blog Awards.

Want to know what’s really going to happen between now and the general election? Screw Questions & Answers, The Irish Times and everything else. Twenty Major has the entire election blow by blow, month by month, right up until July 07, posted at his blog. An excerpt from February:

After 34 gangland murders in Dublin in the first 3 days of the month the opposition accuses Minister for Justice Michael McDowell as being ‘as soft as Scarlett Johannson’s dirty pillows’ on crime. The PD leader says it’s not his fault and lays the blame squarely on middle-class recreational drug users saying if it wasn’t for them there’d be nobody to buy it.

Bertie Ahern agrees and threatens to plunge the country into recession unless people from Foxrock and Rathgar stop buying cocaine for their dinner parties. ‘Maybe then you’ll appreciate everything we’ve done for you feckless eejits’, he says.

Countdown to the next election @ twentymajor.blogspot.com.

So, you are being blasted by ads on the tv for treadmills and cross trainers, and the radio sounds like Jackie Skelly and Ben Dunne are either going to kill each other or have sex… Screw all that, all you need is some fitgrrrl.com an Irish runner blogging the whole fitness thing.

Tuppenceworth.ie editor Simon McGarr is wondering if anyone recorded the News Review of the Year, from RTE which was on at 6.25pm on December 31st. Leave a comment or head on over there and contact him.

X17 Inc., a Los Angeles photo agency known for its images of stars in personal or embarrassing moments, has filed a $7.6-million federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Hilton.

Hilton’s Los Angeles-based site, PerezHilton.com, posts tabloid photos of celebs and adds cheeky captions and rudimentary doodles.

That’s a lot of money. CNN story. PerezHilton.com, which I’m so happy to say I’d never seen before.

but then, so is everyone else.

The next issue of Time magazine will announce it’s person of the year award, by putting a mirror on the front cover.

It is in recognition on the impact those who produce information on the internet have had on the world in 2006.

Full story

‘Unethical behaviour’ of Sam Smethi, now ex-editor of TechCrunch UK & Ireland is responsible for the blog going on hold after unfavourably reviewing Le Web 3 conference in Paris, whereupon:

Conference organizer Loic Le Meur, however, took offense at the post and left a regrettable comment, calling Sam an “asshole”.

It’s all in the ‘Crunchnotes‘.

Pointed out by a thrilled Rob. The review of his gleaming new baby, panthius.com shall remain on the front page until the ‘hold’ is lifted. Congrats!

I’m not sure exactly how new the new village.ie is, but they were pushing it on the front of last weeks edition, so lets have a look.

Wow, it looks like a big grey mess. From the front page of the magazine it sounded like they’d actually made an effort. Click on one of the badly arranged breaking news stories and you get something like this:

Are we supposed to read that? Why is the writing so close together?

The Village blog at least succeeds in being mildly readable, but hasn’t been updated since the first post on December 1st. Nice URL to it too: http://www.village.ie/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,5151/

Also:

Purcahase a Gift subscription to Village.ie Premium Content for friends and relatives for Christmas.

Indeed, I just can’t wait to purcahase. How long has that typo been there?

John Breslin with a tag cloud analysis of Planet Journals Ireland.

Here are the top 20 most common tags.

irishblogs (2804)
ireland (2122)
general (2077)
uncategorized (1099)
technology (814)
music (804)
blogs (797)
politics (721)
blogging (707)
photography (636)
dublin (625)
irish (606)
personal (541)
business (496)
news (452)
media (423)
internet (372)
events (367)
football (359)
blog (344)

He has a large tag cloud image here.

Tags annoy me. As far as a tagtard is concerned there’s almost no semantic difference between “blogs”, “blogging”, or “blog”. Having said that - catagories annoy me too. Catagories force me to choose, probably between catagories that are themselves badly chosen. My only preference for tags over catagories is that they allow me to choose anything to mark something with, badly, if I want. Role on an intelligent semantics analysis system that allows us to search for meaning, not catch phrases.

Cool little index card infographics updated every day. Indexed. Found because it’s number one on this list: Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading.

Wahey, another google eating irish blogs aggregating site. Irish-blogs.com.

Nialler9, an Irish music blog is hosting a poll to figure out the best Irish albums of 2006. Head on over there and vote. Nialler9 looks like a quality site, we’d never seen it before.