Bing is the “new kid” when it comes to search engines. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t used it much, partially because I’m happy enough with Google and partially because Bing keeps getting confused about my location. (Some of the time it think I’m in the UK, other times it knows I’m in Ireland)

In any case Bing (Microsoft) have done some kind of deal with Twitter to offer more of a “realtime” search experience.

The new Twitter service on Bing was launched in the last couple of hours, so it’s brand new.

What’s cool about it is that gives you tweets + links.

So a search for “ireland” will give you the latest “tweets” (messages posted on Twitter) followed by the most recent links associated with the keyword. So if you post a link to something cool on Twitter it should be picked up almost instantly and “ranked” against the rest of the community.

Danny Sullivan has posted in more detail over on SearchEngineLand. Hopefully Bing / Twitter won’t be swamped by the spammy junk that can get sent onto Twitter by automated scripts…

Related Posts:

• Will Google+ (Plus) Finally Be Google’s Social Media Success Story?
• So When Will Google Plus Have An API?
• Where Do People React To Blog Posts?
• Reducing Clutter On A Mac – Doing A Clean Install Of Snow Leopard
• Why Cuil Sucks

I’ve owned Vbulletin licenses for years.
It’s a great product.

BUT

I am seriously considering switching to something else.

Why?

Because they obviously don’t care about their existing customers.

Vbulletin emailed license holders earlier this evening to announce a “wonderful” presale event (I’m not even sure if the word “presale” even exists!)

If you have active licenses ie. that you’ve paid for AND renewed you can “avail’ of a “discount” on v4 when it’s released (no idea when that will be)

If, however, you have valid licenses that haven’t been renewed ie. you paid for the software license but haven’t paid the annual renewal fee, you are snookered. Plain and simple. There is no way to renew the v3.* license. You are forced to upgrade to a product that doesn’t even exist yet.

To be honest, you’re snookered both ways.

Even if you have an active valid owned license you still have to pay at least $130 to be able to get v4! (and that’s supposedly a “generous” discount!)

Apart from anything else I’d wonder about the legality of their actions. If they’d been a bit clearer in their communications on this it would be one thing, but it seems to me that they’ve moved the goalposts significantly.

You could try to follow the debate over on the Vbulletin forums, but it looks like they’re dealing with the feedback by deleting threads!

And for the curious, here’s the full email they sent:

“Dear Michele Neylon,

Update 14/10/2009 @ 1030: Some interesting posts over on the Vbulletin forums, though a lot of threads are getting locked or deleted

Related Posts:

• Blocking and Culling Spammers On Vbulletin
• Another Web Project Goes Live
• Facebook Connect Comes To Vbulletin
• Upgrading Vbulletin 3.* to Vbulletin 4.*
• A Bit of SQL For Jobberbase Open Source Job Board

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion during the Nominet registrar conference next month.

The panel will be talking / debating / discussing / arguing about the “future”, though more specifically “The Future of the Internet”. I’m not sure who else will be on the panel, as the speaker list is still a “work in progress”, but it should be interesting regardless. I also feel quite honoured that they asked me to participate.

Since I’m hopeless when it comes to navigating London’s geography I had to ask Nominet’s staff to point me in the direction of a suitable hotel. If you’re planning on heading to the conference the Danubius is pretty close. Booking.com‘s rate also seems to be pretty good compared to other sources.

I’m currently planning on spending a couple of nights in London and hope to meet up with a few people while there ie. maximise the trip’s value. Of course planning to meet a bunch of people and actually getting to meet them all may not be the same thing …

Related Posts:

• Off To London
• UK PM Wants To Censor The Web?
• Houses – Budva, Montenegro
• Prague – Tourism Is Alive And Well
• Hilton Brussels City Secret Bandwidth Caps

I hate paying to attend events. More often than not the organisers use the event as a “money spinner” and attendees get very little value from it.

So it’s nice to see that another event is taking place next month which is going to be free to attend and promises to be interesting.

IRISS-CERT’s Annual Conference is being held on November 19th in the D4 Berkley Court hotel. While details on the day’s sessions are a bit scant at present I’m sure they will be interesting. What’s also interesting is that they are also organising “Hack Eire” on the same day:

“HackEire, will be held to identify Ireland’s top cyber security experts.  HackEire will see 10 teams, up to a maximum of four people per team, compete against each other in a controlled environment to see which team will be the first to exploit weaknesses in a number of systems and declare victory.  The purpose the HackEire competition is to demonstrate how attackers could gain access to your systems and allow you to learn from the event on how to prevent such attacks from impacting your network.”

More information will presumably be available on the IRISS site

Related Posts:

• Cork Isn’t Near Dublin and Ireland Isn’t British
• Ryanair Cuts Cork Off From Dublin
• Hanging Out With Domainers In Dublin
• JC Decaux Obviously Doesn’t Want Good Publicity
• Dublin Airport – Is There Any Hope For It?

I’m heading up to Dublin for the Irish Web Awards.
I didn’t attend last year, but everyone who did had a good time. So I’ll get to find out for myself later this evening!
The shortlist for this year’s event is impressive, so anyone who made it that far should be proud – they’re in excellent company. It’s also the first time that it won’t be competing for attention with the IIA Net Visionaries, as they were held much earlier in the year.

Related Posts:

• It’s Award Season (Again!)

The PIrate Bay. Love it. Hate it. Unless you spend little or no time online, you’ve probably heard about it.

The site has been controversial for years and has been forced to move home several times in the last few months. Most recently it’s ended up in the Netherlands.

But the site’s operators still have a sense of humour:

If you don’t get the reference I’d gently point you in the direction of a copy of the Dirty Dancing DVD .. Seriously ..

You might also remember the nastygram we got about filesharing … *sigh*

Related Posts:

• ThePirateBay Eircom and IRMA

I mentioned the introduction of free shipping to Ireland yesterday. At the time it didn’t appear to be available and the article in The Irish Times hadn’t specified when it would be ..

This morning I can confirm that it is live and available.

I placed an order a few minutes ago for over £25 and did NOT pay shipping!

See screenshot below:

Great news for everyone!

Related Posts:

• Amazon To Introduce Free Shipping To Ireland
• Cork Isn’t Near Dublin and Ireland Isn’t British
• Carlow Business Directory Now Live
• Ikea Don’t Get The Web
• Amazon Outdo Themselves

Seemingly Amazon UK has finally “seen the light” and is planning on introducing free shipping to Ireland for purchases over £25.

There’s more coverage in The Irish Times, but it’s not exactly clear WHEN they are going to start offering this. (They obviously aren’t today)

Related Posts:

• Amazon Free Shipping To Ireland Is Live
• Amazon Outdo Themselves
• Amazon Marketing Inserts – Teasing Me With Delights
• Only In Ireland?
• Marketing Gone Wrong – The Titanic

Paul from Blackdog was chatting to me earlier today about Jobberbase, so I naturally asked him if he’d managed to hack around its rather annoying “200 status” issue on “pages not found” ie. ones that should return a HTTP response of “404″.

I’ve been using the software for the last few months on two free job sites that I setup – freelancejobs.ie and technicaljobs.ie.

Not only did he share the information with me, but he’s made it available to the public here – cool!

Related Posts:

• MSN Messenger Broken on Adium and Pidgin
• TechnicalJobs.ie Now Live
• A Bit of SQL For Jobberbase Open Source Job Board
• Linux Is Bad For Your Health
• Apache Mod_rewrite Tips

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting some form of media server solution setup for quite some time. I had initially been interested in setting up some way of streaming all my audio CDs, but more recently I was interested in doing something similar with AVIs and DivX.

I don’t use Windows that much and I currently don’t have a functioning desktop PC at home (hard drive death).

So that leaves me with my MacBook Pro and an Xbox360, which I got a few months ago from Microsoft Ireland.

The Xbox does have support for video and audio, but the problem is getting the files onto it or to it..

Fortunately there are solutions available.

Connect360, which costs $20, is a simple, yet powerful, bit of software that can help turn your Apple Mac into a media source for your Xbox.

Download the installer, run it and then tweak the settings a small bit and off you go.
I currently don’t have iPhoto installed, but it recognised both the Xbox and the various multimedia files on the hard drive of the Mac.

The only other setting that I tweaked was the location and scan frequency for “movies”:

The one possible downside is that the Xbox itself will display absolutely all the directories and subdirectories of the source, so you could end up doing quite a bit of scrolling to find the file you want to watch.

In terms of supported formats, the Xbox seems to support most of the common ones that you’re likely to encounter, though some AVI files I threw at it wouldn’t open.
Passing them through Avidemux seemed to resolve a lot of the problems.

Of course, if you can’t view the file using something like VLC on your Mac, then trying to get the Xbox to open it is probably futile.

The Xbox’s user interface for playing AVIs etc., is reasonably intuitive and includes basic play, pause, fast forward controls.

Being able to watch various video formats on a decent sized screen with the audio going through my AV receiver is a significant improvement over trying to watch them on a 15″ laptop screen with “tinny” audio.

There are, of course, other ways of doing this.

In terms of commercial software there is also a package called Rivet, which retails for slightly less than Connect360. According to this review Rivet has better structuring in terms of the navigation of files on your Mac.

I also came across a “free” way of doing streaming, but haven’t had a chance to try it out.

Related Posts:

• iTunes Weirdness
• Apple’s 1984 Ridley Scott Advert
• Audio Dedication To Jobs
• Apple OSX Lion Turns My Desktop Into An Expensive Paperweight
• Apple Keyboards – Which One Is Best?