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It’s finally settled, Trapattoni is in the FAI hotseat after about 111 days of searching. Along with him comes a fresh challenge to the pun kings of Ireland, namely the tabloid sports writers. What will the headlines be like over the next two or so years? Here’s a little taster of what you may see in newspapers like TheStar, TheSun and TheMirror:

 ’Shut your Trap’ - Guaranteed to be used, perhaps when the smack talk begins between himself and rival managers in Group 8, or perhaps in response to Stephen Ireland if he dishes out more made up stories.

 ’Trap Rap’ - If Trapattoni gets disciplined by UEFA, Fifa etc?

 ’Through the Trap door’ - Perhaps in reference to getting into South Africa via the playoffs?

 ’Trap-ped in Group 8′ - Perhaps in reference to failing to qualify?
 
 ’Offside Trap’ - If Ireland or our opponents score a controversial late goal?

 ’Trapa-phoney’ - If Trapattoni turns out to be completely useless?

 ’Crapa-ttoni’ - As above.

 ’Snapa-ttoni - Perhaps if Trapattoni loses the head and does a Jack Charlton/John Aldridge USA 94 job?

 ’Trapa-stoney’ - If Trapattoni ever admits to smoking pot… perhaps in a heart to heart interview with ‘Dobbo‘?

 ’Gio-canny’ - If he makes an inspired substitution?

 ’The Italian Job’ - Going from his name to his nationality, of course I’m sure we will see it thrown in a couple of times too. Hopefully it will be in the context of Trapattoni engineering a big result for us and not in the context of a defeat by the Italian team.

‘Godfather’ - If he becomes loved by the Irish public?

‘Don Trapattoni’ - As above.

OK well I’m kind of clutching at straws now so I’ll leave it at that but there’s a few other good ones floating about the net, send in any I’ve missed. By the way if there are any budding tabloid headline writers among us check out http://www.rhymezone.com/ to see what you can come up with yourself.

Perhaps old news in the blogosphere at this stage, but I wanted to give Perlico a mention for their recent viral marketing campaign involving a duck quacking on their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) telephone system. Yes a duck quacking, you read it correctly. Ring 1890 88 66 07 and wait to hear option three. Before any of the options are read out you do of course have to listen to their marketing lines about how much cheaper than Eircom they are.

The marketing team at Perlico obviously knew that people would talk (and write) about this because it’s a bit off the wall however I’m not sure they were expecting over 70,000 calls to their sales number in just over three days. The 70,000 figure comes from Mark Cleary, Perlicos COO. Cleary says “Since this launch, based on the volumes of calls, the campaign has been a phenomenal success. In just over 3 days we have received over 70,000 calls and added a significant number of new customers as a result which make this one of the most successful viral campaigns in Ireland.”

Cleary also says “This campaign started off entirely by word of mouth which helps to demonstrate the power of the Internet and Email as a viral marketing approach. The duck quacking IVR has now been featured on several radio stations across the country and the call volumes continue to increase by the hour”

Of course we all knew the power of the Internet and Email as viral marketing approaches, right? right? Fair play to Perlico, their marketing team deserve a raise for this.

Since I’m still suffering from last nights work social to get drunk with my now ex boss one last time before he left our ICT team and since I’m off to the fight tomorrow (no not in the Swiss Cottage - in the point depot!) and hopefully the big Dublin & Kerry game in Croker on Sunday I’m just going to take it ham & cheesy tonight and relax with a few beats and update my blog.

For this update and in true Richard Hearne style (see Unison & Continuum) I’m going to ‘out’ someone for not playing by the rules. The unfortunate ’so and so’ on this occasion is popular Dublin based radio station Spin 103.8 who appears to be conducting some good old fashioned meta jacking on their offical website located at http://www.spin1038.com/. Meta Jacking is the process of putting your competitors names in your meta keywords and or meta description tags in the hope that if someone searches for your competitors name your website would come up in the results too. Spin have done this by including the names of rival radio stations such as 98FM, FM104, Today FM and some others in their meta keywords tag, similar stuff is being done with their meta description tag too. Although I’m not a lawyer I believe I’m right when I say that this is a form of trademark infringement and could potentially result in a day in court for the Spin 103.8 legal eagles. The meta keywords tag as lifted directly from their home page is below:

I’m wondering who does their search engine optimisation because even putting aside the legal issues this sort of technique doesn’t even work. It may have worked somewhat years ago but these days meta tags aren’t given much value at all by the search engines so it’s actually a complete waste of time. Your thoughts are welcome, additionally I wouldn’t mind a couple of trackbacks …

Was doing a search earlier today for a Dublin based company called Sureskills who provide a variety of IT Services & Training. Logically my first step was to search for ‘sureskills‘ on Google as I wasn’t sure of the exact URL. Google being Google returned their site #1, however I noticed that one of Sureskills competitors namely New Horizons Ireland was running an Adword ad triggered by the keyword ’sureskills’. This is obviously an attempt by New Horizons Ireland at taking business directly from their competitors and is completely allowed under the terms and conditions of Google Adwords. If however a competitor of Sureskills tried to plug the term ’sureskills’ into their actual ad text well that’s something that can find its way into court quite quickly.

I found another example when I searched for ’Webtrade‘. Webtrade are a web dev/design company (who I actually interviewed for a couple of years ago) based in Rathfarnham, Dublin. In this case however not one but two competitors are bidding on Webtrades’ name. Not quite sure where I stand in regards to the question of ethics in relation to bidding on competitors names, the more striking question for me however would be the value (or lack of value) of bidding on competitors names. If someone is searching for a specific company, for example Sureskills, is it likely that they will click through to a website that isn’t that of Sureskills? Perhaps it’s useful for a competitor to simply get their URL/ad seen anyhow just in case the searcher might visit them after being on the Sureskills website?

Incidentally you may also notice a lot of companies actually bid on their own names. Examples of companies which I’ve spotted doing this recently include Vodafone, PaddyPower & Clearscape. These companies are doing this perhaps as a counter-measure to anyone else bidding on their name. Whatever the reason the technique of bidding on your own name is advocated by one of Irelands leading PPC experts and thus may be worth some consideration.

Has anyone seen shots of (or been in) any of the apartments in the new docklands development? From the ground this whole development looks stunning however it was only when on daft.ie the other day (I’m looking at renting options) that I actually got my first look inside this developments’ apartments. I have to admit that I was just blown away by some of the apartments, most notably though those in Hanover Quay. The contemporary style & decor is right down my street, unfortunately the prices are not. Judge for yourself, here’s some pictures (credit to daft.ie for these shots - I did not take them!). Click on the thumbnails to open fully sized pictures in new windows.

   
As you can see the main living room area has a contempory well lit design and is particularly impressive, as is the very large balcony area, whether or not it ever stops raining to use the balcony is another thing though. Hanover Quay (and the docklands development in general) certainly beats the socks of the new developments down my way (Santry) anyhow.              

If a certain someone up above could arrange for me to win the euromillions on friday I’d definitely snap one of these up straight away. One thing is for sure though, if I ever get to live in a place like that everyone will be leaving their shoes in the hall.

Recently the number of deaths on Irish roads so far this year has topped the 300 figure. It was a government target that the total amount of deaths this year would be less than 300, so not even halloween yet and already that figure is surpassed. What can be done about this then? Well the RSA (Road Safety Authority) is in the process of putting together it’s Road Safety Strategy for 2007 – 2011. It wants everyone including Joe Soaps to get involved and submit ideas and suggestions about what can be done to improve our roads.

Councillor Damien Blake of Letterkenny Town Council is taking a particularly proactive approach with his ‘Stop the Carnage’ campaign which attempts to use what’s known as the Irish Blogsphere (basically the Irish blogging community) to raise awareness of the problem in general and raise awareness of the fact that the RSA are listening and do want your views. He encourages blog owners to post their suggestions on their blogs and encourages others to leave their suggestions as comments on the various blogs which post about the campaign. Councillor Blake will then draw up a report based on the suggestions and forward it to the Minister for Transport, Taoiseach, Road Safety Authority, Insurance Federation and every member of the Oireachtas.

As far as my own suggestions are concerned, well I’m not a driver myself but some of my thoughts are outlined below.

Provisional Licenses. People who fail full driving tests should not be allowed to drive on their provisional licences without having tackled the reasons why they failed.

At the moment pretty much anyone can drive a car via the provisional license system, often people take their time and do 15-20 lessons before applying for this license, but other times only 3 or 4 lessons might have been conducted. This amount of lessons is not enough, I think before being allowed to apply for a provisional license a certified instructor will have to have signed off that MR. Smith (or whoever) has successfully conducted at least X amount of lessons. I would certainly make the theory test harder and possibly invest in some simulation systems to test peoples ability in various real driving scenarios.

Not sure if this is law already (think it is but it’s not enforced) but there should be a maximum amount of people allowed in the car of a provisional holder. A lot of young men get very ‘cocky’ when all their mates are in the car with them, it is this feeling of cockyness and the desire to ’show off’ that often results in a fatal road accident.

Again this might already be the case but I think provisional drivers should only need say 5 or 6 points on their licence to be taken off the road and not a whole 12 as is the case for full licence holders. This is the way it is in France and they have cut a third off their road death figure over the past four years, of course they have implemented lots of other ‘tactics’ too to reduce road deaths and thus this plays only a small part.

Insurance based rewards for good driving. If we really want people to slow down we have to give them an incentive to do it. Unfortunately the whole ’slow down and save lifes’ approach alone does not work. I recommend giving rewards in the form of lower insurance premiums to people who stay within speed limits and who drive safely and or people who make an effort to improve their driving skills. I believe the scheme run by Hibernian and promoted by ‘Duffer‘ called Ignition is an outstanding idea. It is mostly young people that get hit with huge insurance premiums and here is a scheme that promises to reduce premiums by at least 20% if one successfully passes a one day course designed to improve your driving skills, I really don’t understand why more insurance companies (possibly backed by the government) haven’t designed similar offerings.

Wasn’t there also talk of a speed monitor device being fitted to cars? This device would submit data back to some insurance company which can later analyse how many times the driver of the car was outside the allowed speed limit and raise or lower that drivers insurance premiums accordingly and thus drivers would be encouraged to stay within the speed limit as although they mightn’t think that it (it being death or paralyzation due to a car crash) would ever happen to them they will know that going over the limit will increase the likelihood that they will have to pay more for their insurance next year.

I think the goverments and of course the insurance companies should push for more speeding reduction schemes perhaps like the above because let’s not fool ourselfs here folks, IT IS SPEED WHICH KILLS, stray deer are not responsible for the over 300 deaths on our roads so far this year.

Drink Driving. Actually I think on this issue progress is being made particularly with the recent changes in the law which allow for random breath testing by the Guards. It has to continue though, there is no use in something being enforced for a couple of months only for things to then go back to the way they were.

Communication. I think a useful area of exploration which might enable better communication of safe driving practices to Ireland’s young people is to make use of the Internets many ‘cool’ sites such as Youtube, Bebo and MySpace. Young people respect these sites and are much more likely to listen to them than say the 6 o clock news which talks about the latest road safety guidelines.

OK enough jibber jabber from me, nearly time to sign off I think. In closing then I would like to ask you to please support Damien Blakes campaign and post your own suggestions for improved road safety either here or on his blog, alternatively if you own your own blog (Richard, Ken, Janine I’m looking at you) help spread the word by writing a small post about the subject, remember the more suggestions that come in the more likely the RSA will find one suggestion or indeed multiple suggestions that will really make a difference to the safety of Irish roads.