For those who only read my feed...

I've added a section near the top of my blog called "Where else on the Web is Mike Croghan?", so now there's one-stop shopping if perchance you want to be my Facebook friend or LinkedIn contact, or take in some truly amateurish Flickr photos (unless Tina took them). Also, there are some new photos up on Flickr. (That has a feed too, in case you don't want to miss a single poorly composed, out-of-focus, infrequently posted masterpiece.) FYI.

Cruachan Ai

A few days ago, I got an email from another Mike Croghan. Here it is:

Just thought I would say hi.

I was googling my name and came up with your site.

Regards.

Mike John Croghan.

Cruachan Aí Heritage Centre,
Tulsk, Co. Roscommon,
Ireland

Web: www.cruachanai.com

So, go ahead and click on that link, why don't you? Isn't that cool? So I asked Mike if there's any linguistic connection between "Cruachan" and "Croghan", and he replied:

Yes there is a connection between the two names. Cruachan is the gaelic for Croghan.

The name Croghan is a west Roscommon east Longford name and in translation it means people of the conical mounds. In fact this area has hundreds of conical mounds as it is the ancient seat of the kings of Connacht.

The fact that your ancestors came from Galway is no surprise as we are only about 30 minutes chariot ride from the Galway border.

There are very few Croghans left so be proud of your heritage!!!

And I am! I had no idea about any of this. If I ever manage to get off-continent, Ireland is tops on my list of places to visit, and now Tulsk is tops on my list of places to visit in Ireland. Croghans are cool, don'tcha know! :-)

I want roller-skate shoes...

...like my friend Elizabeth has. It would make getting around the corridors at work more fun.

Unfortunately,

1. If I had them, I'd get even less exercise, and
2. I don't think they're ideal for someone as vulnerable to gravity as I am.

If you were thinking you might find something of substance on this blog today, my apologies.

Open social networks

A few weeks ago, I was brewing up a post on "open social networks", in which I was going to get all philosophical and rail against the "walled gardens" of online social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Friendster, LinkedIn, etc., etc., where they try to reel you in and keep as much of your internet social experience as possible within their "walls", so you'll be looking at their ads. They do this by limiting interoperability. You can't be on Facebook and make friends with somebody on MySpace or LinkedIn. It's easy to make connections to folks' blogs, photos, videos, etc. within the walled garden, but not so easy to connect to these items if they're outside the garden on Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, etc. And you need to set up a different username and password - and type in all your gorram profile data - separately on each site. This sucks. I was all set to decry it.

But then, in the intervening time, I became a Facebook addict, which undermined, somewhat, the soapbox upon which I'd intended to stand. (It's fun! Join up! Be my Facebook friend!)

So, thankfully, iPete came to my rescue, sending me a link to an awesome BBC News article by internet law professor Michael Geist. Instead of getting all boorish and philosophical like I would have done, Geist makes the case pretty concisely and compellingly, in terms of self-interest:

The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.

Some services may believe that it is in their economic interest to stick to a walled garden approach; however, given the global divisions within the social networking world, the mix of language, user preferences, and network effects, it is unlikely that one or two services will capture the global marketplace. The better approach - for users and the sites themselves - would be to work towards a world of interoperable social networking

Read the whole article if you're interested in this sort of thing, but I hope the social networking corporate decision makers are listening to Michael Geist.