Gareth Murrans Blog » Viral

YouTube tool to create an iTunes RSS feed from YouTube

gmurran — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:53:41 +0000

I have just come across an amazing tool that converts any YouTube search into an iTunes compatible RSS feed. You just do a search on YouTube and then just wait for iTunes to download the files.

One tip is to make sure that you go for the high quality mp4 version and another is to amek sure the search term is not that popluar because if it is you could be sittng there waiting for the download to complete. Find it here

YouTube tool to create an iTunes RSS feed from YouTube

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Dublin Premiere of Children of Manila and The Cemetery People

gmurran — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:35:36 +0000

Some friends of mine are having a viewing of a film they made called Children of Manila. it is is a documentary made by the non profit Children’s Relief Fund, it was filmed thanks to the help and groundwork of the members of the Children’s Relief Fund (CRF) and its local partner the Papa John Centre (PJC). All filming was undertaken on a volunteer basis, in order to raise awareness about the plight of street children, abandoned and neglected children, and families living in poverty stricken conditions throughout Manila.

The filming took place for the most part in April 2007 in Manila but the long anticipated viewing takes place in the Button Factory in Temple Bar on August 6th 2008 at PM. The two eagerly awaited filmshad a combined world premier at the prestigious Galway film festival a few weeks back.
The films were made possible by friends family and the following contributors

Irish Times mistake

gmurran — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:54:42 +0000

Have you tried to visit Ireland.com in the past few weeks? Seemingly without warning the Irish times website the 40th most visited web site in Ireland according to Alexa ratings changed its domain and in the process every link, bookmark, browser landing page was broken.

The paper has been full of opinion on the new design with allot of comments from a non web savy readership being. People do not like the portal style information overload nature of the new design. Two things in particular have shocked me most

The total disregard for the readers allot of people have bookmarked certain sections of the site. These are now buried and hard to find. This might be good for the advertising but not for the users.
The SEO implications of changing from a domain that has seen 5 revisions and been online since: 30-Sep-1997 has been ignored. You now go to some strange tourist orientated site. This should leave someone fired.

Amazingly the traffic has actually shot up, but page views are down for the site, so I’m thinking that the thinking behind the move is that a tourism site may generate more hits outside Ireland than a national newspaper site does within. A quick
whois lookup shows that the ownership has not changed so it seems like an odd move.

The new site itself has been well develop. the site is written using web standards and attempt to incorporate the best elements of the BBC, New York Times and theGuardian.

Ten Years of Change

Irish Times mistake

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amazing word art

gmurran — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:40:02 +0000

Wordle is an amazing tool for generating some great word art. The tools allows you to specify a paragraph and get a collage of words making u some random pattern on your chosen background. Really great stuff, fantastic fun.

amazing word art

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RSS Easy

gmurran — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:28:30 +0000

“You wanted it, and now you have it. We’ve incorporated RSS feeds into the browse and search results experience. Subscribe and stay up to date with stories from all categories or for specific searches that you perform. We appreciate all the feedback that you’ve given us. We take it all seriously and do our best to respond. Try us out (http://news.live.com/), and keep the feedback coming!”

RSS needs an easy button. Just commented on a post on Mashable.

RSS Easy

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La Magia

gmurran — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 16:18:19 +0000

Welcome to La Magia where you will find lingerie and corsetry for sophisticated tastes. Celebrating femininity the site says. But Google says shemale. No offensce to anyone meant by this but this is one of the oddest search results I have seen. ” La Magia” on google.com turns up this result.

Try it yourself.

La Magia

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South Park now free online

gmurran — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:12:11 +0000

NewTeeVee is reporting that the web just got a whole lot funnier as the guys behind South Park have made every episode of their hit show available for free online. That’s right — every. episode. South Park Digital Studios will house everything South Park including all the episodes (not embeddable — boo!), 3,000 video clips (embeddable — yay!) and spearhead other digital initiatives.

South Park now free online

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Tibet uprising

gmurran — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:55:46 +0000

Wikileaks have released censored material from the Tibetan protests. The press release is seen below. Help support Tibet by blogging and posting about the current situation.

Today Wikileaks released over 120 censored photos and videos of the Tibet uprising and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the Chinese internet censorship regime — the so called “Great Firewall of China”.

The transparency group’s move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau’s carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people’s recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his need’ sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly ‘from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need’ seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this “need” and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

The first ingredient of civil society is the people’s right to know, because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything, let alone a political party. Knowledge is the driver of every political process, every constitution, every law and every regulation. The communication of knowledge is without salient analogue. It is living, unique and demands its rightful place at the summit of society. Since knowledge is the creator and regulator of all law, its position beyond law commands due respect.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment framers of the US Bill of Rights understood this well when they began the First Amendment’s constitutional protections of speech and of the press with ‘Congress shall make no law….’.

As knowledge flows across the world it is time to sum great freedoms of every nation and not subtract or divide them. Let us then unite in common purpose for the surest way to protect the freedoms of any nation is to protect the freedoms of every nation.

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest photos (92 photos on a single page)

leak:tibet-protest-photos.zip (92 photo archive)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - display (35 flash videos on page)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - FLV format (Flash archive)

Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - AVI format (AVI/mpeg4 archive)

Tibet uprising

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Qik. What is it good for?

gmurran — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:14:16 +0000

I have signed up for unlimited data on my Nokia 6120 classic. it only costs €15 a month and can be taken away at any time. My main purpose was in order to use Qik.

This is a fantastic site that allows you to stream directly to a website. fantastic in itself but the Question is. If your not Robert Scoble, what kind of things is it good for? I think I will figure this out over the next few weeks.

Qik. What is it good for?

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