Social Media

Audioboo is a web and mobile application that enables you to record and publish audio segments directly to the web and straight into other social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook if you have enabled the connections.

In this debrief one our correspondents, Bernard Goldbach, shares his enthusiasm and his experiences with the application as an educational and Social Media tool.

You may want to listen to this compilation that he and Peter Donegan put together to get an idea of the breadth and depth of what is possible with the audiboo format. It is also a rather lovely soundscape of Ireland in 2010.

click image for "Irish Boosters"
(background via Google Earth)

So how did you get started?

Over the last 13 years, Mark has worked with major corporations such as Dell, Airtricity, Trinity Biotech and Johnson & Johnson. Mark is one of the founding organisers and speakers at Bizcamp Limerick. He is also a member of Engineers Ireland (IEI), the Irish Internet Association (IIA) and the MBA Association of Ireland (MBAAI). Mark is also a guest lecturer in the University of Limerick, Ireland, in entrepreneurship and marketing, with a focus on social networks and social media. Mark is also a co-founder of Social Bits, an Ireland-based consultancy firm specialising in the application of social media and Semantic Web technologies. You can follow him on Twitter at @markcahill.

1. Could you tell us about your background (where you're from, what you've done)?

My background is in engineering and information technology. I have a BEng in Computer Engineering, and I have always had an interest in anything computer related. I worked with Dell for over 11 years before leaving to work for myself. Before leaving Dell, I commenced my Masters degree in Business Administration (MBA) which I completed in 2008.

Facebook is engaged in another legal fracas in Germany. But that won’t date this article as I am sure Facebook and other social media services like them will continue to be hauled before the courts until they wake up and realize what the real issue is here. It is not about privacy. It is about consent.

If someone takes something without permission, it’s not inconsiderate, it is stealing. Taking other people’s information is not about whether it is private or not. It is about acting in a non-consensual manner, very much in the way of tin-pot dictators and other assorted bully boys throughout the ages.

One argument goes that because anything you put on the Internet is public or is assumed to be public, even if protected, then it is somehow fair game. We know this isn’t true because if you libel or defame someone on the Web, you face the same legal consequences as you would if you had done it any other medium.

I'm happy to announce that Social Media Ltd., the company behind socialmedia.net, has a new home at NUI Galway's Business Innovation Centre. It's exciting when you make the move from being a virtual organisation to having an office and a desk, and Tom has already checked into the socialmedia.net HQ on Foursquare.

We'd like to thank everyone at the NUI Galway Technology Transfer Office for their help in getting set up. The TTO are also well represented social media-wise, on Twitter as @nuigalwaytto and on YouTube as nuigalwaytto.

The services Foursquare and Gowalla, while not for everyone, point to a new and important dimension to our online activity: the ability to apply the power of the Internet to our immediate geographical neighbourhood.

We can find cafes, ATMs, cultural activities with just a quick look into an application such as Vicinity. But shopkeepers and stores can also find us. We can be offered all sorts of goodies such as sales offers, discounts in cafes, lunch du jours at nearby restaurants, notifications of special events that are happening soon and just around the corner. “Come along if you have few minutes spare, why not?”

With these hyper-local services we now have a street full of shop windows in our pocket. It will get easier, social media strategist Ted Vickey says:

“By using little bits of technology, even the smallest business in Galway, [Ireland] can compete with the big companies who are advertising to the same customers. So it’s making it more personal. It’s taking that online community and putting a face to it. And it’s allowing businesses to attract customers. And the customer really is in the core of the decision-making process to buy something.”