Side Project #2 – Monitoring New Planning Applications

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A couple of weeks back, I outlined our interest in Electric Mill to public data projects , and an initial example of how A&E attendance figures could be presented. This is a good example of the data being available, but delivered in such a way as to make it kind of hard to get at.

So cue Side Project #2. If you live in Ireland, chances are you are either interested/intrigued/repulsed by house prices. This national obsession with home ownership is well recognised.

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Managing a Businesses online reputation – common sense should prevail

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We are becoming pretty familiar with bloggers every now and then ripping into businesses that are providing poor customer service and poor customer experience.

I’m talking here about someone that writes a less than complimentary blog post on a product or service; I am not talking about conversations and threads on an online forum, etc.

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There is no such thing as a free lunch.

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Listened to a podcast featuring Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine on the IT
Conversations network last night while out walking.

His talk centred around his motivation and proposed proposed model for giving away his next book for free.

This was a pretty painless 30 minutes for a quick whip around of the notions of free that we are all familiar with, but have not maybe considered for our own businesses.

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Side Project #1 – A&E Attendance Figures in Ireland

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Public data and public information interests us a lot in Electric Mill. A good reason for this is that you will often find that government agencies, departments and other public bodies – while they may publish information – will normally do so in formats which while fulfilling duty, are not exactly easy to read, interpret or compare.

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Resolution of a CSS styling issue running PHP5 on IIS

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A small piece of development work that we completed for a client in December 2007 threw up an unexpected problem.

We developed a small PHP based application to enable staff to easily import and validate data from a Lotus Notes system through an administration console, while at the same time enabling the public to easily search and view the same data.

Things were slightly complicated by the fact that the application was to seamlessly integrate with an existing ASP.Net CMS application – particularly with regard to the overall look and feel. the illusion to be created was of one system.

It would not be the first time that PHP has been asked to co-exist on an IIS server. We did our research, developed the system, did test Read more

Are viral internet marketing campaigns just pot luck?

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This paragraph, deep down in a Fast Company article questioning the fundamental reasonings behind The Tipping Point summed up the argument nicely :

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”

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