Back in 2004, as part of its 5th birthday celebrations, CLUAS ran a readers' poll to identify the top 50 Irish albums of all time. Over 1300 votes were cast by CLUAS readers, giving the poll some sort of statistical legitimacy and indeed the majority of the albums that made the final top 50 were clearly deserving candidates.

Nonetheless the final results were not immune to raising a few eyebrows especially now, 4 years later, when you look through the list. For example, a Frames fixation among a certain part of the CLUAS readership back then resulted in a voting bias that helped push onetwothree four Frames albums to make the top 20. Indeedy. It's also curious to see that 10 of the top 50 40 albums came from the 

A month ago I surveyed over 30 leading Irish music blogs and websites in terms of how heavy they were when it came to the number of kilobytes visitors would have to download once they hit the site's home page. As you do, like.

The results showed a huge diversity across the sites: the slimmest (that'll be CLUAS) stepped in at a super-svelte 97 KB, while the heaviest (egocentric) was over 20 times heavier with its scale-busting 2.1 MB of data that each visitor had to download just to access its home page.

Alas, the trut ...

Yesterday I posted a blog entry ranking Irish music web sites, from the skinniest, to the most bloated. For those of you who missed it (or don't have the time to check it out) I basically started off riffing about how, despite the growth in broadband penetration in Ireland, website owners and bloggers should remain acutely sensitive to the size of their blogs as: a) there is still about 7% out there who are on a dialup modem and b) broadband users are an impatient bunch you don't want to annoy with bloated pages that test the outer limits of their download capabilities. I then ranked the top 30 or so Irish music sites and blogs in terms of their page size.

To ...

In Ireland recent years have seen progress in the availability of broadband services (in July 2007 it was up to 15.5% penetration, according to the European Commission). However that does not mean that dial-up as an access route to the web has gone the way of the Dodo. CLUAS.com's experience is that about 7% of our visitors in 2007 visited the site via a dial-up modem (based on Google's web traffic analytics service we use). If you ask me, many website and bloggers targeting Irish readers would do well to keep it in mind that a decent chunk of their readers are still dependant on a dial up connection to access the ...

For years people have been talking about the day when we'd be able to access the internet on our mobile phones. The first technology that had a stab of bringing the web to a mobile phone was WAP ('Wireless Application Protocol'). It raised its clumsy head in 2000 or so and was - to be polite - an excruciating experience for users. In any case only a tiny number of sites (bless 'em) went to the trouble of providing a WAP enabled version of their website.

"Fret not", we thought back then, "glorious pocket-based browsing is surely just around the corner now that the telcos have splurged all these countless billions on 3G licences& ...

Something that never fails to get up my nostrils is websites that use Macromedia Flash. Used when appropriate Flash can create nifty looking and often informative websites - I'll concede that - but such niftiness comes invariably with a pretty hefty downside for both user, and for the website.

In a nutshell Flash based sites break all sorts of well established best practices for user navigation in addition to making the website, for all intent and purpose, 'invisible' to search engines (i.e. invisible to one of most important WWW 'launching pads' for surfers around the world). A few years ago on the CLUAS Discussion boa ...

In the last few years it has been as clear as crystal to me that there were - and continue to be - so many things that CLUAS needed to do better (or, for that matter, just simply start doing). Finding time to do them for me has always been a problem.

Thankfully 2007 saw some essential building blocks finally get put in place - the launch of the CLUAS blogs, rolling out the ability for writers to directly publish reviews to the site themselves and optimisation of the site for search engines (one result of which is that Google now features new CLUAS articles usually within - literally - minutes of them being published). The last 12 months also saw CLUAS secure thousands of valuabl ...

Journalist and blogger Adam Maguire has kicked off a campaign to get Tom Waits classic "Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis" to the top of the Irish charts this Christmas. Quite right too.

For a purchase of the song to count for the chart you need to buy it by this coming Thursday (Dec 20) from any of the outlets listed below (all of which are used by IRMA when they compile the charts each week). I've culled these links from the Official Blog Adam has set up for this initiative, I've just split out which services work with what type of platform.

Indulge me a moment as I have a moan. It pains me gre ...

Back in 2003 I stumbled across an internet-based radio station called Accuradio. As can often be the case with internet radio 'stations', to call it radio was a bit of a stretch - there were no DJs and with a click of your mouse you could move onto the next track they had lined up. Anyways, back then over a period of about a week I tuned in regularly to their American indie channel and discovered a whole bunch of acts that up to then I had been oblivious too such as The Shins, Modest Mouse,

Not happy with pegging concert ticket prices at ever increasing prices, some of the biggest names in the music industry now want to now get a slice of profits made on tickets resold on the web. They are proposing that a 'Resale Rights Society' (RRS) is established that will slap a levy on the sale price of every ticket resold on sites like eBay.

Apparently Radiohead, Robbie Williams and

It would come as a surprise to regular visitors but CLUAS is - for the moment - Ireland's no. 1 website for Jazz music. Official.

Well, official at least in the eyes of Yahoo, or Microsoft's 'Live' search engine because, at the time of writing, those two search engines are ranking CLUAS as the number one result for searches for 'Irish Jazz Music' (see Yahoo's results here, Live.com's here). What's more Google was also ranking CLUAS as the number one result up until last week when they (getting a dose of common sense or something) decided to rank an ...

Anybody who tried to access the CLUAS home page, blogs or discussion board this morning (from about 6am GMT to 1pm GMT) would have seen a big fat 'sorry you can't access this website, mate' error.

These sort of errors happen once in a while around these part so it's - normally - no big deal, just a bit of an inconvenience. However this time around it was the first time that the ability to access parts of the site was deliberately blocked by our hosting company because there was too much traffic to the site (to be perfectly precise, access was not blocked to CLUAS but our website was disconnected from the database that contains the content of our blogs and discussion board; the other parts of the site not depending on the database were still accessible).

Being blocked for attracting too much traffic is good news (hey, hey we're attracting more users!) and bad news ("damn, we're going to have to toughen up the hosting infras ...

Bob Dylan has (cue mass rumbling of moral indignation) gone and done an ad for Cadillac to help them sell one of their top-of-the-range SUVs.

It's easy to get outraged by this sort of carry on, especially when you consider the anti-establishment line that defined his first decade as a performer. But, it's really no big deal.

Dylan nailed his colours to the corporate mast many a year ago (hell, there's probably some pompous heads out there who would try and tell you he did so back in 1961 when he signed to Columbia Records). There's been plenty of huffing and puffing at the various points when Dylan made it clear that cutting deals ...

Suffering from how-Radiohead-have-utterly-changed-the-music-industry fatigue yet? Yeah, me too. Despite this I have one final blog entry relating to the release of 'In Rainbows'. It'll be the last one from me, I swear.

I wrapped up my 'Radiohead in smooth download shocker' blog entry last week hoping that techie details of how Radiohead delivered the album would be released so that other acts in a similar position could at least go about a similar venture in an informed way. The details I was hoping for? They are at last out.

This weekend some fas ...