Irish dance darlings Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding go to digital dark side - VIDEOS

Rock the vote for Irish EU logo! (VIDEO)

A new Irish logo is about to go prime time and you can help decide which of the four prototypes will become the official logo for Ireland’s European Union (EU) Presidency during the first six months of 2013

Vote now until Dec. 31 (by 5PM Irish time) at the Irish government site, merrionsteet.ie, where you’ll find a complete write-up on the four finalists, summarized here in brief:

Ireland ups flow of greatest export - culture

While economic storm clouds were joining all the other clouds that typically gather over Ireland, the government decided to increase the flow of its greatest export to its most significant market. Lacking much in the way of currently accessible oil reserves, rare earths, precious metals, athletic shoe factories or excessive amber waves of grain, the government placed a $5.2 million bet on something hard to quantify -- culture -- in an initiative called "Imagine Ireland, A Year of Irish Arts in America 2011," which is now drawing to a close with a flourish.

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On Facebook, Twitter & Google+, giving thanks for Guinness! (VIDEO)

Guinness drinkers are putting down their pints and picking up their iPhones to post their praises for their favorite brew. Over the past year, Guinness got more shout-outs from social media users than any other beer, according to a new social media analytics report from Amplicate.

World design capital title Pivots away from Dublin

Ireland punching above its weight in design, too

Curse you shimmering, trend-setting Frank Gehry designed museum in Bilbao. Curse you gorgeous seaside and mountains setting of Cape Town with your peppy BRICSA economy. Dublin is right back at you with its new Kevin Roche designed Convention Centre and so much more! Ireland has been pulling off a few upsets in international sporting competition (rugby, okay, but cricket?), and has already confound the odds by making the shortlist of three, along with Bilbao and Cape Town, for the international designation in 2014 of “World Design Capital,” an honor previously bestowed on Seoul and Torino and which will next go to Helsinki.

Social media fuels Irish artist’s cycling odyssey

So quaint--itinerant artist pedaling through the Irish countryside, paying for a night’s lodging with a deftly done painting—all so very analog. But it’s digital that drives this clockwise, one-man, two-to-three month, slo-mo, 32-county, social media cycling and painting tour of Ireland.

Israelis, Palestinians and an Irishman and the stories they tell

You’ll be hard pressed to find a business more disrupted than media. While figuring out how to make a living in media may be a work in progress, there’s a relentless energy in media, a constant pushing, probing to bring stories into the light of day. Fortunately the Irish are very good at stories.

June 16th blooms as another great day for the Irish

Obama in Ireland gets pint's worth of coverage in U.S.

He came, he saw, he conquered? Obama, or O’Bama, captivated Moneygall, a youthful Dublin throng and most who watched it all on television or streamed online (thank you RTE!), and it’s no surprise he owned the front pages of Irish newspapers, including the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner, but to this stateside observer, U.S. media coverage was pretty light.

Jon Stewart is the Mack, but not all authors so lucky (VIDEO)

The internet lit up with rumors and tweets that the world’s last typewriter factory had closed. Though obituary now appears a bit premature, it's another reminder of how much the world of the writer is changing. Most writers ditched their typewriters years ago, but when it comes time to sell books, many are finding old media needs new media. Now once they write their books, they may need to write multimedia marketing campaigns…or they could just get booked on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Century-old Irish films go from time capsule to YouTube (VIDEO)

There’s a bit of YouTube to the 100-year-old film clips that emerged back in 1995 from barrels in English basement. They’re short, unscripted, a little rough around the edges, the stars were regular people and, in what would pass for 4G speed in 1900, they would be shot in the afternoon and screened that same evening. But unlike digital media, they weren’t supposed to live forever, given the unstable and highly flammable nature of the nitrate film stock.

England beats Ireland in Rugby...on Planet Nike (VIDEO)

As Cathal Dervan reported in his blog here on Irish Central yesterday, Nike is hanging its swoosh in shame after jumping the gun—and the shark--by making a high-end TV commercial celebrating the English team’s anticipated Grand Slam win in rugby’s Six Nations Championship. On Planet Earth, however, Ireland would actually crush England 24-8 to deny them the coveted Grand Slam.

Twitter rants & raves a geek chorus to Irish elections (SEE VIDEO)

Social media is a political power player, from the upheaval roiling the Arab world to an admittedly less dramatic but growing role in democratic power shifts. Ireland managed to channel its considerable political tensions peacefully into the just concluded general election, reported on, commented on, critiqued on Twitter under the hashtag #GE11 (standing for "General Election 2011." A hashtag is a shorthand Twitter label using the “#” character with an abbreviation or acronym that makes tweets on a particular topic easy to find and follow).

Search #GE11 on Twitter to find a steady stream of election reactions: thoughtful, inflammatory, partisan, hopeful, snarky and satirical. Here are just a few seconds worth of #GE11 tweets:

@owensdamien: Good day for Sinn Fein. Quite a few people will be rolling over in their unmarked graves #GE11

Digital natives: how Irish teens live online. SEE VIDEO

Plugged-in: study finds Irish, ages 13-19, are teenagers…as in typical teenagers, living much of their lives on-line. A recent study of the media habits of Irish teens show them communicating with friends by text messaging (56 percent) and by Facebook (38 percent) and with their parents by shrugs, scowls, eye-rolls and monosyllabic grunts (87 percent--not part of the study, pure conjecture on my part).

The Irish Digital Teen Survey was undertaken in November by Mulley Communications Ltd., an online marketing and PR consultancy based in Cork and Dublin that actively studies Irish digital space. You can download a pdf of the just released Irish Digital Teen Survey, but here are some highlights of their look at Irish teen media interaction:
· 14% have a part-time job
· 28% spend their money on socializing, 27% on phone credit
· Gig tickets and music is what teens buy most online
· Most teens use their parents credit card or laser to buy online
· Phone is the most treasured item of teens
· Teens are not downloading all their music for free
· Most music recommendations come via friends
· Nearly half of teens use the online TV players from media organizations with 40% streaming TV and over one-third watching via playback services
· 44% of teens are on Meteor (Irish cellphone/mobile digital provider)
· Nokia are the most popular phones, the iPhone is the most desired
· 74% access the Internet on their mobiles per month
· Communicating with friends: 56% via text message, 38% via Facebook, phone call 28%, email 27%

Irish video nuggets from YouTube stream SEE VIDEOS

Looking back at the Irish digital media footprint in 2010, I’m stumbling across a few video nuggets gleamed from the relentless social media stream. As 2010 really put the “dismal” in the “dismal science” of economics, maybe these YouTube robots, teddy bears and cartoon characters make as much sense of the Irish economic situation as anyone else.

Twitter hashtag brings out positive thinking and reality checks in Ireland

Ireland is world news hotspot for all the wrong reasons. Traditional media from around the globe is declaiming on the dire economic situation, backed by a Greek chorus of social media chatter. A new Twitter hashtag, #positiveireland, has surfaced, attracting a real time digital stream of good Irish economic news to counter the prevailing Celtic doom, gloom and ire (represented the video surging on YouTube linked to below). Here's a sample of what they're tweeting with the #positiveireland hashtag:

“Do they have the internet in Ireland yet?” asks a yahoo on Yahoo! Answers

At Yahoo! Answers, people ask and answer questions online on a wide and sometimes wacky range of topics. Recent internet queries include:

Viral video PowerPoints out that Ireland means business. SEE VIDEO

After reading here on “IrishCentral” of a government response to Ireland’s financial crisis that involves cheese (though probably better cheese the US distributed in a similarly under-whelming economic response back in late 1980s and early 90s), I was relieved to surf to this slick, snazzy YouTube-hosted PowerPoint creation of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) which powered past doom and gloom to put a positive spin on “Ireland by the Numbers.”

Belfast filmmaker’s YouTube video finds cell phone mystery in 1928 Charlie Chaplin clip

But who was she talking too? And oh, those roaming charges! Belfast filmmaker George Clarke is a big Charlie Chaplin fan and as he studied newsreel footage shot outside of Grauman's Chinese Theater at the opening of Chaplin’s 1928 film “The Circus,” he saw something he couldn’t explain. Showed it to 100 people. They couldn’t explain it either, but all agreed that it sure looks like a woman talking on a cell phone...82 years ago. Evidence of a time traveler? Here’s an excerpt of the YouTube clip he posted a few weeks ago.

Baseball’s debt to a Gaelic game: learning about the GAA during the ALCS

How do say “Play Ball!” in Irish?

With the long baseball season finally segueing into the playoffs, I was using the time between pitches, while the batter wanders around adjusting himself, to wander around online, and just as the batter stepped back out of the box to start the adjustment process all over again, I surfed onto this internet factoid: “Baseball was probably derived from Rounders, a game played in Ireland since the fifteenth century.” I hate to admit it, but this was news to me…but not of course to the GAA.

This revelation came from a HuffingtonPost.com slideshow entitled “US History: 13 Myth-Busting Facts That Will Make You Rethink Everything You Know,” written by three guys from the endlessly diverting Mental Floss website (http://www.mentalfloss.com/). Myth #5 was “Baseball is Distinctly American” (http://huff.to/92Bz97). The post noted that by the 18th century, the Irish game of Rounders (Irish: cluiche corr) incorporated many of the basic elements of modern baseball and that starting in the 1820s Irish immigrants brought Rounders to America “where local variations developed.”

YouTube viral video hit for ex-Riverdance duo gone rogue. SEE VIDEO

A cool post-modern, post-Riverdance, YouTube video has gone viral for a pair of traditional Irish dancers gone rogue. “Look Ma, No Feet! - Irish HAND Dancing,” types one online fan of the quirky 2:20 minute video clip featuring the hands, arms, and off-beat (and on-the-beat) talents of dancers Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding, alumni of Riverdance and creators of their own original take on Irish stepping, the multimedia enhanced Up & Over It!.

Cleary and Harding first met on the Irish dance competition circuit where they jigged their way to a slew of championship titles, earning them a four-year tour with

South Park a home on the range to 20,000 books? No joke says Irish-American bibliophile.

Though there’s a social media component to this story in the form of websites and blogs, this time “Irish Media Nation” is kicking it old school with traditional media--the printed word in the form of books, lots and lots of books, amassed by a collector in Denver, Co., and hopefully bound for South Park, Co. (yes, that South Park, as seen on TV), to be housed in a facility inspired by a library in Wales. And there is the requite Irish angle here in the form of an Irish American natural historian and book collector, Jeff Lee (yes relation--Jeff is my younger brother). Many years ago he and his wife Ann Martin, who could pass for Irish but is actually of Norwegian/Swedish ancestry, had stayed at the St. Deiniol's Residential Library in northern Wales, a kind of “Bed, Breakfast & Books” for bibliophiles, “a health farm for the mind” in the words of its website.

This ye olde media center concept stayed top of mind for the two when they returned to work at Denver’s legendary Tattered Cover Bookstore, especially as they contemplated just what to do with the over 20,000 books on the natural history of the Rocky Mountains region Jeff had amassed. They envisioned a library and site-specific environmental education center, where people could come to study, explore and even stay for a while. They call their rustic rendering of St.Deiniol’s (http://st-deiniols.com/) the Rocky Mountain Land Library (RMLL).

While nudging their dream along inch by inch, they launched the Rocky Mountain Land Series in partnership with the Tattered Cover, an author series focused on the land and communities of the American West featuring such authors as Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Lester Brown, Stewart Udall, and John & Teresa Kerry. With the common goal of connecting kids to nature, the RMLL partnered with Denver Water and the Thorne Ecological Institute to established a 3,000 volume Kids & Educators Library.

Racing’s Clancy brothers top contentious Saratoga newspaper field

When the horses are running, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. is a newspaper town. As the fans roll into America’s most popular thoroughbred track, they run a gauntlet of vendors hawking competing broadsheets from Albany, Schenectady, Troy, Saratoga Springs, the New York City tabloids, tip sheets such as “Clocker Lawton” and “The Wizard” as well as Daily Racing Form and the track’s own Post Parade. But a standout in this crowded newspaper field is the upwards of 40-page Saratoga Special, a daily digest of the Saratoga thoroughbred season. Launched in 2001, The Special provides an insider’s view of the action and intrigue at the country’s most historic and significant racetrack, through the eyes of a pair of Irish American track rats who grew-up around the races, Joe and Sean Clancy.

Taoiseach on Twitter? Irish Government now a social media adopter

Inspired by the digital media initiatives of Obama and Sarkozy and the model of the UK government website Number10.gov.uk, the Irish Government today launched its new social networking-based site, www.MerrionStreet.ie, named for the address of Government Buildings in Dublin. Using off-the-self, open-source digital and social media platforms such as WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, the project was built by the Dublin-based web developer Arekibo reportedly for less than €40,000. The site went live earlier today.

Media history made in Ireland

FOI’led again! Irish digital journalist uses Freedom of Information to open Irish government

Cork native, Dublin resident Gavin Sheridan is putting his considerable energy behind a new journalism for the new media, digital media era. Employing evolving techniques of data-driven journalism, process journalism and computer assisted reporting, he’s using digital technology and Ireland’s Freedom of Information (FOI) laws to nudge the Irish government towards transparency, accountability and openness.

He’s found some of the most tantalizing information at the granular level of government expense reports. “I can see the expense claims, the receipts--I can see this guy spent 400 euros on hiring a hat for his wife to go to the races in England,” he said of John O’Donoghue, the former Speaker of Ireland's Parliament who resigned in 2009 after an expenses scandal related when he was Minister of Arts, Sport and Tourism.

Tangible benefits of social media, digital media and internet content creation on Irish economy

Irish and Irish American businesspeople, civic leaders, entrepreneurs and digital media innovators at the recent Tangible Ireland meeting in New York invoked the power of social media, the social web, internet content and online communities as vital tools in reenergizing the Irish economy.

Virgin territory: Irish social media CEO turns ordeal into opportunity

Around St. Patrick’s Day, when you’d expect to see the Irish all over the news, one Irishman monopolized the media, but not because of the holiday.

Internet entrepreneur David Hugh Martin, a native of Coolock, a few miles up the R107 from Dublin, became American media’s most wanted after he used his own social media platform,