Interviews

Drupal is a content management system that is free and open source. It allows you to build and configure complex and multi-faceted websites without first learning how to code or program. A new version, Drupal 7, is due for wide release very shortly. The system itself is stable and is in use on some major sites such as Examiner.com. However, there are still some bugs in the upgrade process which are awaiting resolution.

Lin Clark majored in Communication Design from Carnegie Mellon University and is engaged in her Master’s program at DERI, NUI Galway in Galway, Ireland. Her thesis is entitled “Semantic Web Technologies and Content Management Systems”. For those interested in working with Drupal or who are just starting out, she has made a series of video tutorials which can be found on YouTube and at semantic-drupal.com.

Images of Clixtr HQ.

Fergus Hurley, a native of Galway, and a graduate of University College Cork and MIT, now resides in California. He is the CEO of Clixtr. His new venture - Picbounce - is in beta and will be live shortly. In a very short time, he has acquired a lot of experience doing business in Silicon Valley, and he shares some of his thoughts with us here.

We started off by discussing the role of venture captialists (VCs) in Silicon Valley.

”In businesses there are certain things that have to be done every time that are replicable and repeatable, and the same for every business and other things that are unique to that business. You have to excel on the things that are unique and that makes you different because other people are going to be very, very good at doing the business side of things and executing very well. So the VCs are able to execute well on the business side while you are able to innovate well on the product side.

Bill Liao is the author of the “The Stone Soup Way” and is involved with Xing and WeForest. The latter is an organization set up to empower local communities to reforest their environment by offering training in permaculture techniques.

Bill spoke on the first day at BlogTalk2010. He was interviewed afterwards and we would like to share some of the things he had to say.

“I am a great believer in a thing called permaculture which is an ethical design science. If you want to look at the height of civilization in my view, then it’s design.

"You can design a future that’s beautiful or you can design a future that sucks. Most people don’t bother to design the next five minutes let alone a future they really want to live into.

"It’s about designing a future you really want to live in and then creating a narrative about it that other people really hear and treating everyone with compassion. Hearing them, having them feel heard. Because most of the time we’re [left feeling] right about something because no one’s listening."

On the internet and mobile phones

In just four short months from April to August, 2010, SpunOut.ie have raised the number of people on their Facebook page community from around the 400 mark to nearly 12,000 participants, as of writing. This is a remarkable achievement for a small Galway based charity whose stated aim is to educate and inform young people in the 16 - 24 age on the issues that concern them and encourage engaged citizenship through social activism.

Ruairí Mckiernan, with the help of some friends, started SpunOut.ie from his bedroom in 2004 using a dial-up modem which would sometimes take half an hour just to send an email. SpunOut.ie, (the term ‘spunout’ comes from the notion that youth culture is fed up with spin; political spin, religious spin, spin from teachers, the media and advertisers.and they are 'spun out',) was always intended to be web-based. Taking advantage of platforms such as forums and informational pages to share information and have discussions about issues such as sexual health, mental health, drugs, alcohol and other matters of concern to young people.

Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. He was a columnist for the San Jose Mercury for a number of years and is a regular contributor to Salon.com. In his soon to be new book, "Mediactive", he writes about how people need to stop being passive consumers of media and become more engaged. Plus, in addition to inherited principles of journalistic ethics, we need to take a deeper look at new ideas such as transparency. The book also looks at how our society will be transformed by the new social customs that are forming.

Dan will be a keynote speaker at BlogTalk 2010 in Galway, Ireland.

We began our interview by discussing the state of flux in the mainstream media (MSM) and how it is coping with the changes brought about by the developments in the online technological landscape.

“My sense of the traditional press is that they are still caught up in a manufacturing model of journalism and that is a constraint all by itself. If that’s how you do your work, the whole process infects the rest of it... you’ve automatically constrained your ability to go beyond what you might otherwise do.