Date created: March - September 2003

About the Project: Another one from my archives. I was employed by Riverdeep as Project Coordinator and Lead Artist on ‘Princess Snorebucks‘. This was a large project that involved a great deal of project management as well as the creation of original artwork and the animation of characters within the brand guidelines. I became very attached to the Powerpuff Girls while working on this project, particularly Bubbles, the little scamp.

The Powerpuff Girls are a trademark of The Cartoon Network, all rights reserved.

I learned two nifty new things this week- how to set up a Google Map, and how to install and customise a PHP calendar. I feel chuffed that I’ve crammed something useful into my poor tired brain, and both of these tools will come in very handy for lots of future projects.

Custom Google Maps are reasonably complicated, as they require a lot of javascript and the plotting of latitudes and longitudes.  I created one on oxfamireland.org for our very popular Oxfambridal shop.  But Google also have MyMap, a handy tool for more complex maps  - and I used it for setting up a map showing the locations of all the Oxfam Ireland shops.

The first customised, editable calendar, also for Oxfambridal, was set up using Easy PHP Calendar.  This is a nice little application that only costs $20 per domain, and which creates flexible and customisable calendars.

Date created: April 2007

Web Address: eoxfam.ning.com (however, this is a private network and is only open to Oxfam staff)

About the Project: I set up this custom social network with two of my international Oxfam colleagues to create an online meeting and discussion space for Oxfam staff who work in multimedia and ecampaigning. Ning.com allows you to set up and customise your social network for free, and is one of the most user-friendly web apps I’ve ever used; it takes about five minutes to get set up.

Date created: Summer 2007

About the Project: This was a postcard for an Oxfam Ireland competition at the Festival of World Cultures in 2007.

I am back, back, back! from holidays and ready to post a few updates on this poor neglected site.

I attended a symposium this morning on Privacy vs Publicity in the Virtual World, which was put on by the Darklight Festival. The keynote address was given by Daniel J. Solove, of the George Washington University Law School, and the panel (chaired by digital rights expert Caroline Campbell) featured journalist Jim Carroll, Hotline.ie director Cormac Callanan, Relevant Media owner Niall Larkin and Irish blogger Damien Mulley.

The symposium was generally pretty good; although I find a common problem with these kind of events is that the information within is often pitched at quite an introductory or basic level. It has to be done that way for obvious reasons, but it can be a little disappointing when no new ground is covered. The main address was interesting and engagingly presented, but covered mostly familiar concepts and examples.

The panel discussion and Q&A threw up some newer issues for me. I have always been aware of the privacy issues that surround social networking, particularly Facebook, but was surprised to hear from one panel member that Facebook have a practice of providing personal info without subpoenas to US law enforcement.

Some other points were raised that may give you food for thought:

• Consider what goes on behind the scenes at a social network – you may have set your profile to private, but the social network still has all your data in their database. Are they sharing that data?
• The focus in the West tends to be on the use of personal data in marketing, but in repressive regimes breaches of online privacy have much more serious implications – see the Yahoo! China scandal.
• As one audience member pointed out – there is much more damage done to individual personal reputations by bloggers than by governments or corporations.