I was surprised to hear that the Habitat stores in Ireland have been closed suddenly and without prior warning. The stores, located in Dublin and Galway, were closed on Friday and a note was posted on their doors. See the notice on their website here.

Rent issues?

Previously, the Dublin Habitat store moved from it's Stephens Green location to its College Green base because of high rental costs on Stephens Green. The rent they were / are paying must be astronomical.

Sometimes I wonder how businesses manage to survive at all in Dublin with the rental cost of retail space.

Let's encourage the government to be good European citizens and remove the anti common market vehicle registration tax on cars in Ireland.

If the Government wishes people to vote Yes on the upcoming Lisbon Treaty, the least that they should do is to remove the protectionist barriers and allow people to participate in the Common Market.

David McWilliams explains the issue in his piece in the Sunday Business Post today. He says...

Let’s make a contract with the government. We will vote Yes to the Lisbon Treaty when it starts to treat us European citizens on a par with the other citizens of the union.
....

Our state demands that we sign up to a treaty, yet every day it thwarts thousands of citizens who are trying to reap the benefits of the common market.

If an Irish citizen wishes to import a second hand car from the UK, for example, the Government imposes a Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) on the car before it can be used legally in Ireland. This is clearly in contradiction to the European Community laws outlining of "The free movement of goods".

Watch the video here. Maybe next year.

This is very good:

Here Comes Another Bubble by The Richter Scales

check it out.

The web is an exciting place, things move at breakneck speed and the competitive landscape shifts on a daily basis. Billions dollar companies are grown from multi million dollar investments, good ideas and reasonably good technologies.

By the way, I think most people realise that the equity stake taken by Mirosoft in Facebook was not a pure equity investment. It was a mixture of a pre-payment for an advertising deal and an equity stake and therefore it doesn't place a clear valuation on Facebook.

Microsoft's advertising on Facebook is atrocious. Who in their right mind clicks on those banner adds anyway? Less and less people according to Businessweek.

I've think that Facebook have to be careful not to become the new AOL. Social networking is a relatively new phenomenon and the market has yet to be played out in full.

What Facebook are doing is building a walled garden which holds the user community inside. I have my Linkedin page and I have my Facebook page, but what am I missing out on by not participating in myspace, bebo, ning, xing, friendster?

I would like my profile to be on the open web but I still want the functionality of privacy and friend finding and linking, sharing pictures, news and movies with my friends only. Registration with Facebook should not be required to connect with me.

Technically, this is a trivial challenge and is already being addressed see Slap in The Facebook for a discussion on this and the open friend project for more technical information. The crux of the matter is that there is no way to define social relationships on the open internet and social networking sites have stepped in to provide this and have been successful at it.

The Google OpenSocial initiative is not addressing this as far as I understand - it is just addressing the development of widgets for social networks and porting these applications to participating sites. Not really a big deal as sooner or later some smart developer would have created an interface library for this anyway.

What is more important is that as social technology matures, the internet will reassert its open and free principals and closed walled gardens will not be favoured.

This is fundamental to the basis of the internet: openness and freedom, not freedom from constraint but the more important one: freedom to participate.

Since Linkedin are making money from advertising on my Linkedin page.

And Facebook have signed a 240 million dollar deal with Microsoft for exclusive advertising on my Facebook page (and all other Facebook pages).

These sites rely on user generated content. Will people get tired of providing content for free to billion dollar enterprises with no payback?

Maybe I should start a new Facebook Group called "Please pay me if you are making money from advertising on my page".

What do you think?

And, no, I do not want to buy a Linkedin tshirt.

I read these recently and thought they were funny...

Request

In the local the other day there were two lads playing guitar. After they finished a song someone shouted to them;

"here do ye's do requests"

They said they did

"Well **** off cause your bleeding brutal"

Overheard on Wednesday, 26th September 2007 - Clonliffe House by sheriff2



Like a needle in a haystack...

I regularly have a coffee in a coffee-shop on D'Olier Street and it takes me past this nice, softly-spoken bloke from Dublin Bus. I think he must be a supervisor or something. One day, I overheard him talking calmly into his walkie-talkie: "And tell us. By any chance, did you ever find that bus?"

Overheard on Tuesday, 25th September 2007 - D'Olier Street by Anonymous

Great article from Silicon Valley Watcher regarding the Telecoms Luddites in the US.

In his piece, he states that "The cable and telco companies are anti-competitive and their actions will make sure that the US becomes uncompetitive". I cant help but feel that this is just as relevant to Ireland. At least the US have Silicon Valley which is willing and capable of fighting back.

Recently, the MD of eBay Ireland referred to the Irish broadband situation as "Fraudband". Upload speeds of many "Fraudband" packages are still fixed at 256k (even when they are making a song and dance about download speeds of 6MB).

How are we supposed to upload your music, pictures, movies and data and participate in the multimedia online world with upload speeds like this?