Mayo-e-Moments Newsletter 30 March 2002
http://www.castlebar.ie - The Castlebar & Mayo Community Web Site
Headlines:
>> WHAT MAYO PEOPLE ARE REALLY THINKING
>> THE REAL INFORMATION AGE BEGINS
>> ADVERTISE ON WWW.CASTLEBAR.IE
>> BROADBAND FOR THE WEST
>> MARCH PHOTOGRAPHS ON WWW.CASTLEBAR.IE
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>> WHAT MAYO PEOPLE ARE REALLY THINKING
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If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of what Mayo people are thinking you can do no better than to check out the daily polls taken on the front page of www.castlebar.ie. The Oscars were topical in March and the lovely Hale Berry was the clear Mayo favourite for best-dressed lady at the Oscars with 49% of visitors voted her the best dressed from a field of five contenders. Perhaps related was the poll showing that Sex and the City is incredibly popular with 69% of those who have seen it rating it as excellent. In contrast Fergus's Wedding on RTE got a 75% BAD rating - a real stinker it seems in spite of the massive RTE advertising campaign. Fair City faired better with 50% saying it is excellent, 21% mediocre and 29% of those of you who have seen it declaring it "BAD".
Moving quickly along from sex to politics - three days before the Referendum, 57% of you declared that you were going to vote in the Referendum on 6th March. Our 'exit poll' however suggested that only 46% of you actually voted (not too far from the real figure). It was a wet day! Looking forward to the General Election, 45% of voters on the Castlebar website declared a preference for FF, a 25% FG vote and just over 1% each for Labour and the PDs with the remaining 27% or so was for 'others' (Greens and Independents). Related to this also, some 48% were satisfied with the Government and 52% dissatisfied - omitting those who claimed to be totally apathetic about politics. Some 89% of you thought late night street violence had increased in the last year but on the other hand 63% thought that the Sopranos should not be banned for excessive violence.
Turning to religion, 42% of voters said that they do still fast on Good Friday and, while St. Patrick's Day parade attendance is not exactly a religious event, 43% of visitors stated that they attended a Patrick's Day Parade. Of course 46% were prepared to drink green beer on Patrick's Day too! A variety of other topics were covered in March including a poll revealing that 81% of you think the new 15 cent levy on plastic bags is a good idea. Some 28% of Castlebar visitors admit to smoking and 31% had already taken out Government SSIA savings accounts by 11th March. Lots more polls to come in April.
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>> THE REAL INFORMATION AGE BEGINS
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You may have seen the item in the newspapers stating that eircom has recently ended all support for the Information Age Town concept. The experiment has been declared a success by eircom. In Ennis the €3M euros remaining to be spent will be managed by an independent company separate from eircom. All of the Castlebar prize money has been allocated for some time now and eircom have requested that all eircom logos and advertising material be removed from the Chamber of Commerce and the Castlebar web site. Has it been a success in Castlebar?
The Castlebar story began in November 1996 with a meeting in the Welcome Inn. A committee was established and a strong Castlebar bid was submitted in May 1997. By late 1997 Ennis, Kilkenny, Killarney and Castlebar were chosen as the winners from 56 applicant towns. Ennis received £15M and the other three towns £1M each. This £1M allowed Castlebar to embark on an ambitious range of projects which are outlined on the castlebar web site. These included a subsidy for purchase of home computers, ECDL training and attracting IT businesses to town (e.g. Cedar). Computers were given to approximately 70 clubs and organisations in the town. Special help was given to schools in the town and a community Internet and computer access centre was established. The latter has resulted indirectly in some additional funding from the government sponsored CAIT project which runs to the end of 2002. This latter provides computer-based IT training with an emphasis on those who would not normally have the opportunity to undertake computer training. The Castlebar web site was also a direct result of the competition with Castlebar being one of the first towns to succeed in obtaining a .ie domain name in early 1997. The Castlebar Server Project Ltd. now runs the website on a non-profit basis and depends on a large voluntary input from enthusiasts and community groups to keep the site going.
A further outcome is the presence of an Internet Server Network in the town which is connected directly to the Internet and provides web hosting, email, DNS and domain registration services, ecommerce and ancillary services plus local consultancy and help for businesses wanting to get on the Internet. A large number of companies both local and national now host their web sites on the Castlebar server network. The seriousness of the venture is shown by the installation of a large diesel generator to ensure continued operation of its servers in the event of power cuts. Redundant lines, tape backup and RAID disks also ensure additional security for hosted data. This has provided a highly reliable Internet connection with 99.9% uptime for sites hosted.
The Information Age Town Competition has resulted in a high level of IT literacy and skills in Castlebar which are significantly above the national average. But it is also interesting to note that the traffic coming to the Castlebar web site and the sites on the Castlebar Server network generates something of the order of €150,000 euros per annum in Irish telephone calls. So the experiment has been a success for eircom as well as for Castlebar - but now the real information age begins.
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>> SUPPORT WWW.CASTLEBAR.IE
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You can support www.castlebar.ie by advertising your business with us. Our current online advertising rate card for www.castlebar.ie may surprise you. While, www.castlebar.ie is a non-profit community web site with a lot of voluntary effort, it does cost money to keep it going. The project team are keen to obtain additional local advertising support. This is a new departure as there has been very little advertising on the site up to this point.
For as little as 7.50 euros per 1000 pages you can put your banner on the front page of the Castlebar web site and for just 100 euros you can be guaranteed that 20,000 viewers will see your advertisements. Alternatively you can place a small micro-banner advert on the site from just 10 euros per week. Another option for businesses is to sponsor special pages such as the webcam, crossword, email directory page, the local paper reviews, and a range of other pages for just 50 euros per month. We also invite sponsorship for our online competitions at 100 euros plus the prize to be offered. There are also a number of free advertising slots on the site for jobs, buy and sell and business directory for local businesses.
Virtually all our visitors have Mayo links so it is a highly targeted advertising opportunity for Mayo businesses. The demographic survey for the site shows that 69% of its readers live in Ireland (with 47% of these within a 10-mile radius of Castlebar town and 54% in County Mayo). Of the remainder 15% live in the USA, 9% in the UK and 7% in the rest of the world.
So if you want to build your local business brand name with our 70,000+ monthly visitors check out the rate card or email adverts@castlebar.ie for details or ring Ray McDonnell (094-24845) for further details.
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BROADBAND FOR THE WEST
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In spite of the end of the Information Age Town experiment, the future beckons already, in the form of a new local authority and Government-funded broadband network. Mayo and Roscommon County Councils successfully bid to construct a western arm of this broadband network. The management of Mayo Electronic Publishing Services Ltd., who are the project managers for the Castlebar Server Network, are delighted to have been also directly associated with preparing the broadband application.
This project will lay a fibre optic line from Athlone through Roscommon and Mayo in order to provide necessary broadband capacity — which commercial companies are unwilling to fund. The broadband proposal is based on a similar model operating in parts of California, which has been very successful in reducing Internet access costs. A vital aim of the project is provision of low-cost access to the Internet in the West. Currently a 1MB line can cost well over €50K with the bulk of this being the charge to hook up to the Internet backbone. This is many times more expensive than in the USA and is a huge deterrent to companies wishing to establish businesses here that require broadband Internet access. The Information Age Competition has put Castlebar in a strong position to fend for itself in the new Digital Age.
Hopefully the aim of providing affordable 5Mbit always-on broadband Internet access for every home that wants it by 2005 will become a reality in three years time. When we look back three years to 1998, online Internet shopping was still almost a fantasy when www.castlebar.ie took in the first credit card transactions — they were for an online auction in aid of the Omagh Bomb victims. Now the facility is readily available for all businesses in Castlebar and County Mayo as a routine service from the Castlebar Server Project Ltd. with a number of local businesses selling all over the world. The forward planning that brought the Information Age Town prize to Castlebar will hopefully bring even greater benefits in the future building on the head-start that the competition has given us.
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>> PHOTOGRAPHS ON WWW.CASTLEBAR.IE DURING MARCH
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The Patrick's Day Parades around County Mayo — Castlebar, Balla and Westport plus celebrations in New York provided great photographic opportunities as always. Lots of people emailed or uploaded their photographs to the website to share them with the world. Of particular note were some great shots of Cllr. Michael Kilcoyne with former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani and Senator Hilary Clinton (how does he do it?). Mayo fireman also paid their respects to their New York comrades at the NYC Parade.
Michael Noonan visited Castlebar during March and was much photographed at a civic reception. As always there were lots of photographs from social events including the Castlebar Lions Club 25th year anniversary dinner with President Barney Kiernan taken by Ken Wright and Castlebar Rotary Club's annual dinner hosted this year by Rotary President Henry McGlade. The Davitt College Musical, How the West Wasn't Won, was also photographed by Michael Donnelly with some great photos of the cast and crew. The Castlebar web site provides a handy search facility that allows you to put a face to a name by searching for named individuals in the photographs taken for the site going back over the years. Photo essays in March included photos taken in Argentina by Murrisk, Galway Docks and the Irish Hunger Memorial in New York by Dalemedia, beautiful black and white portraits of the Flannery-Ginnely family in the 1890s, the early days of photography. Fr. Mike Murphy also provided photographs of the Holy Thursday and Good Friday Ceremonies for the Parish web site. These are just some of the photographs from March with new ones added every day, 365-days a year.
Articles on George Harrison, the western region of St Vincent de Paul, taking a holiday in Tenerife, the fluoridation of drinking water, and rearing children also appeared in March. Indeed a lot was crammed in during March because of the early Easter - with lots of takers for e-cards for Mothers' Day, Patrick's Day and Easter. These can be emailed directly to friends and loved ones from the Castlebar web site. Electronics also came to the rescue of those away from home providing the opportunity to watch the Castlebar Patrick's Day Parade live on the webcam as it passed by.
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>> CASTLEBAR.NEWS: http://www.castlebar.ie/news/
>> BULLETIN BOARD: http://www.castlebar.ie/board/wwwboard.htm
>> NOSTALGIA BOARD: http://www.castlebar.ie/photos/old/photobb.htm
>> GUEST BOOK: http://www.castlebar.ie/guestbook/db2/default.asp
>> BUSINESS DIRECTORY: http://www.castlebar.ie/yeller/yeller/_db2/default.asp?mode=main
>> CASTLEBAR LINKS: http://www.castlebar.ie/links/
>> SELL OR BUY: http://www.castlebar.ie/classified/default.asp
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Copyright 2002 The Castlebar Server Project Ltd.
http://www.castlebar.ie
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