Fergus Cassidy

Snippet from Jeremy Paxman's speech last Friday on the state of the television industry. Telling it like it is.

The above was made with, amongst others, Twizzlers, Twix bars and liquorice. How it was made.

Photographer Norbert Wu shot this incredible image of a scyphomedusa, a plankton with tentacles stretching over 9m, for his new book called Under Antarctic Ice.

More of his photographs on Time.com 

According to ENN: "All applicants for a dot-ie domain in their own name will be required to provide proof of identity in an effort to avoid instances of cyber-squatting."

Okay. The article also says that: "The IEDR has announced that it has consulted with dot-ie resellers…", an announcement which, alas, I can't find on the IEDR site.

But surely opening up the .ie namespace to personal names (a welcome move) is going to involve a lot more than just proving identity?

How many Sean Murphys are there, each with a rightful claim on seanmurphy.ie? A shallow search on google.ie for "Mary Kelly" comes back with over 19,000 hits. 30,00 for "Michael Murphy".

With popular surnames (Murphy, Kelly, O'Sullivan, Walsh and O'Brien apparently), what happens when more than one person with the same name applies to get the .ie?

Will it be a 'first come, first served' process? Will there be a judgement based on timestamps or some such? And what about the transparency of such a system?

If there aren't clear and transparent rules on the process, getting a website in your own name in the .ie namespace will be like buying a lottery card. (I managed to get mine through the sole trader route).

So why not have a lottery? As least that could be done out in the open, in full public view. Independent monitoring etc.

The .ie namespace is a valuable and finite resource. Opening it up to personal names is a good idea. A 'first come, first served' approach, however, is not such a good one.

The above photograph by Marilyn Affolter titled Oregon Storm, was a finalist in Smithsonian magazine's 4th Annual Photo Contest.

All the finalists' pictures are on the Smithsonian mag site. The categories were People, Americana, Altered Images, the Natural World and Travel.