Hundreds of words on why Spotify isn’t so sweet. It misses the point completely; Spotify is easy to use. Simple as that. I sign-up, I pay a couple of bucks a month and I have 24/7 access to as much music as I can listen to. Sure it could all disappear one day, but then I’d stop paying and find an alternative. This isn’t life and death, it’s just a nice music service.

via @marklittlenews comes the smart economy, the knowledge economy, the science and research economy. Ireland’s future apparently. Which I suppose is why there has been an “unintentional” 15% cut in funding.

Nifty embeddable document viewer from Google Docs.

“the online disinhibition effect refers to a loosening of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interaction during interactions with others on the Internet.”

Help Gaelscoil Philib Barún in Tramore, Waterford end 24 years of neglect.

“Dolphin safe tuna” fishing methods are devastating other types of sea creatures. The outlawed dolphin unsafe methods were not devastating dolphin populations. The problem is we value sea mammals more than other sea creatures.

Gist has gone live today. It is a fantastic service that “connects your inbox to the web.” Basically it finds news, links and information about contacts and their companies from your inbox. No setup, no rebuilding your social network, just plug-in your email. I also like their site design.

RedBeacon, announced at TechCrunch 50, reminds me of a bunch of services prototyped at the TSSG and other research centers. But without the clever and useful location and communications tech. provided by IMS.

The Bin Laden Recommended Reading List. (via @zeldman)

Irish internet statistics. 69% of Irish people are regular internet users. The average online spend of an Irish consumer was €1700 for 2008