Category Archives: Random

Dolly mixture

Beautiful Graiguenamanagh at the weekend
Beautiful Graiguenamanagh at the weekend

‘Dear Me – A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old-Self’ is an interesting little book I picked up for my bookworm that seems to be going down quite well. The blurb goes: “If you were to write a letter to your 16-year-old self, what would it say? In DEAR ME: A LETTER TO MY SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD SELF, some of the world’s best loved personalities have written just such a letter.” The Elton John AIDS Foundation will receive £1 for every copy sold and there’s a blog going alongside it at dearmebooks.com where you can read and even submit other letters yourself.

The first Irish Discworld Convention kicks off in Ennistymon, Co.Clare this Friday. There’s a schedule here and a load of info here. I’m a total newbie when it comes to Discworld but loving what I’ve experienced thus far and really looking forward to the weekend.

Mike – who is among other things the tech magician at X Comms – has launched a blog and is looking for a topic for a minor research dissertation that he’s doing for the M.Sc. Management Information Systems at TCD. Some very cute guinea pig pics up there too!

The founder of the little known Wikipedia Jimmy Wales is giving a public lecture at TCD on Friday Nov 27th. Tickets and info all available here.

Got my copy of Futuretainment by Mike Walsh last week. Now if I could just find the time to devour it. Beautifully designed book and it’s got a beautiful little website to go with it. Cheers to the Cybercom team for the introduction at their Cybercom 10 celebrations last month.

Ah, watch this space. Or not.

And to celebrate the safe return of Mr. Mulley to the internets, I’ll take a leaf from his blog and leave you with a song. This was going on while I was in jazz-recovery-sleeps in Cork about a week ago, streamed live over the web. Whatever will they think of next?!

A mixed bag

Sweet – like chocolate

Spooky – Twitter meets speed dating

Nerdy – pay-per-click and YouTube

More nerdy – AddThis adds Google Analytics integration

Sublime – Maneater from Hall & Oates

(Potentially) ridiculous – BenDunne.com is up at last

And last night I danced like mad to Spring Break at the Windows 7 launch. Oh the fun!
So there's @rickoshea talking to a whoopee cushion

Yes, Rick talking to a large whoopee cushion.

The fabulous Spring Break
The fabulous Spring Break

BenDunne.com – what the heck?

I listen to Newstalk most days while at work. Over the past 3 weeks or more I’ve heard the advertisement for Ben Dunne’s latest venture ‘BenDunne.com‘ at least 5 times a day.

The ad itself is yet another classic from the Ben Dunne school of advertising – the man himself telling us about his latest product/service over some background music. Simple, slightly comedic (the Tom Dunne show on Newstalk goes so far as to make parodies of them for use as advertising of their own show) and repeated A LOT.

This latest campaign for his latest venture – BenDunne.com – has had me a bit baffled from the start. First off, the website seems to be proposing to offer a service similar to DoneDeal.ie or BuyAndSell.ie. No mean feat going up against established websites like that but then add on the specialist online outlets such as Daft.ie, Adverts.ie and Carzone.ie and you’ve got quite the challenge on your hands.

BenDunne.com
BenDunne.com

I had a look at BenDunne.com. As pointed out on the radio ad, the website is due to launch on Monday 19th so I wasn’t expecting more than a simple landing page with the launch date and maybe a newsletter sign-up form. Wrong – I found a JPEG of the proposed homepage. For the not-so-web-savvy I can imagine it must have been a little confusing to say the least if you tried clicking on links and buttons with nothing happening.

Fail #1: Putting up a flat graphic of your proposed homepage is a ridiculous idea – visitors will think your website simply doesn’t work and are less likely to return or recommend it.

Last week the radio ad altered slightly as we approached launch date. So has the website. It is now a blank blue page (as above).

Fail  #2: A blank page is the only thing worse than a flat graphic of your website design as your homepage, particularly when you’re advertising the website heavily on national radio.

So it’s one day past launch date and all that BenDunne.com has to offer is a serene shade of blue capturing some Google Analytics stats.

“If Dunne can’t do it, it can’t be done”

THE classic quote from Mr. Ben Dunne himself. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of website/product/service gets launched if ever it happens. Will it prove his immortal words right or will he be eating them?