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KidareStreet – Bringing Access To Government A Step Further

Leinster House, home of the Ireland's parliame...

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Successive Irish governments have talked about “initiatives” to encourage “egovernment”. Some of the work they’ve done has been pretty good, but a lot of it wasn’t exactly stellar.

So it’s great to see that a totally independent, citizen volunteer project like Kildare Street has not only managed to give us, the people, access to Dail (parliament) transcripts, but also allows to pass comments, get alerts and so much more.

Kildare Street is the brainchild of John Handelaar and is based on similar project in the UK.

John’s announcement explains it all:

Since 20th January 2004, the Dáil has been in session for 493 days (including today).

Up until this morning TDs made 249,489 speeches, and asked 160,503 questions which received written responses.

On average, TDs are producing 507 speeches and 326 written answers per sitting day.

And Handelaar’s site has now made all of that content accessible and searchable.

Now that is cool!

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Get Some Gift Inspiration

peoplelovepresentsThe people behind People Love Presents sent me a captivating email a few weeks ago and I have to admit I found the site itself to be captivating in its own right.

The idea behind it isn’t terribly original, but the presentation and execution is simple and stylish, which should make it a “winner” in many respects.

Basically the site editors trawl online shops for new, exciting and quirky goods and then recommend them to readers based on gender, age, price etc.,

One little detail impressed me – they clearly state whether an item is available for delivery to Ireland or not – that alone saves time!

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IrishBlogs.ie

irishblogs.ie logo

While it may not be the most visually attractive website, IrishBlogs.ie wins me over as it’s so useful.

IrishBlogs.ie is a blog aggregator ie. it collects the blog posts from multiple blogs and bloggers, which in this instance are all Irish or related to Ireland.

As you explore the site you can see that it groups posts on particular subjects etc.,

A handy resource, especially if you want to find out what Irish bloggers are saying about you or your business

On a related note.. the Irish Blog Awards are now accepting nominations

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Louder Voice Reviews

loudervoice logo

People buy goods and services based on recommendations from other people. You can advertise to your heart’s content, but other people’s recommendations make all the difference.

LouderVoice, which is Irish by the way, allows people to share their reviews of products, services, books, films, etc., etc. very easily. You can either post your review directly on their website or interact with them using a range of other methods, such as SMS or “tags” on your blog or twitter.

While the service always struck me as being “cool” and all that I couldn’t see how they were going to make any money out of it. However they have since unveiled their business solutions which do have a proper revenue stream.

Their new business service allows business owners to easily collect reviews and testimonials from their customers (one company is encourages customers to post reviews by putting stuff on the bottles they sell!)

It’s a really nice idea and hopefully the business side of it will prove successful.

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