Europeans sit glued to the television for hours on end whilst the entries perform and scores are read out by each and every country for each and every entry (bar their own).  As a kid we used to make up score-charts, copying every entry from the newspaper onto a piece of cardboard. Oh how we’d agonize on the "matrix" and usually, we’d screw it up at least once.

Ireland’s won it an inordinate number of times, most famously with Dana’s "All Kinds of Everything" but for me it’ll always be Johnny Logan with the melancholy tune "What’s Another Year?". That song is emblazoned on the far reaches of my mind from hours of repeat play on TV and Radio at a key point in my early development.

This year’s entry is from Dustin the Turkey. Dustin is a hand puppet with a Dublin accent. It’s a long journey to Eurovision success but as Dustin would say "Rome wasn’t made out of hay". [LINK]

http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rdf.aspx?&startTag=Australia&endTag=Dell

So little did I know that IRELAND was at the bleeding edge of this next chapter of the internet and is in fact leading the charge in research.

Nova’s recent post describes his visit to DERI in Galway, Ireland [LINK] and all the interesting things he saw there. Some note-worthy items are…

"Semantic Reality. …perhaps one of the most eye-opening demos I saw at DERI, is the Semantic Reality project. They are using semantics to integrate sensors with the real world. They are creating an infrastructure that can scale to handle trillions of sensors eventually. Among other things I saw, you can ask things like "where are my keys?" and the system will search a network of sensors and show you a live image of your keys on the desk where you left them, and even give you a map showing the exact location. The service can also email you or phone you when things happen in the real world that you care about — for example, if someone opens the door to your office, or a file cabinet, or your car, etc. Very groundbreaking research that could seed an entire new industry."

"Semantic Web Services.  One of the big opportunities for the Semantic Web that is often overlooked by the media is Web services. Semantics can be used to describe Web services so they can find one another and connect, and even to compose and orchestrate transactions and other solutions across networks of Web services, using rules and reasoning capabilities. Think of this as dynamic semantic middleware, with reasoning built-in."

Seems Ireland is still living up to its history as "The island of Saints and Scholars" (although there’s less evidence for the former).