A roughly rewritten press release on Electricnews.net indicated that Local Ireland was about to launch a big PR campaign in the US to have Local Ireland taken seriously. Obviously the combined might of Eircom and Nua had failed drastically in Ireland. After all these years, Gerry McGovern of Nua, the self-proclaimed Internet philosopher has copped on that the internet is a global event. Or as the press release puts it "I don't think there is a viable business that looks only at the on-line Irish population as its primary target market." And the name of the site again?

The problem with Local Ireland is bascially that it is based on a false premise. The people who came up with it did not seem to understand how online services work and completely ignored the fact that the online services they were trying to imitate (AOL, Compuserve et al) were subscription based.

Eircom bought 90% of Local Ireland but what they really seemed to be after was a minority shareholding in Nua. Of course they must have been rubbing their hands with glee when they thought that they were going to lock up the Irish internet market in the same way they had been screwing the Irish telephone user for years. After all, Local Ireland had all the imagination of a telephone directory - that limited viewpoint appealed to their minds. Well that and the great scam.

Local Ireland was going to be built on other people´s data. Other people - ie the poor bloody punters would supply the content and Local Ireland would split the revenues from the advertising sold. Has anyone heard on people actually getting advertising revenue splits from Local Ireland? Probably not. The adverts that appear there are generally house adverts - adverts for different parts of Local Ireland. In terms of selling adverts, Local Ireland is unsellable.

The press release also claims that when figures audited by ABC are released later this month, Local Ireland will be in the top five Irish websites. A lot of Irish sites claim to have very high traffic but in reality have no user retention or visibility. This is a critical factor for any business seeking to advertise on any site. Targeted advertising always works better. If the vast majority of Local Ireland´s users are just passing through then the likelihood of them being any kind of decent sales prospect is low.

From what I have seen of LI and the BBS boards, there seems to be a core community of people who hang out there. This core could probably be divided down as many seem to share linguistic patterns and constructs, so much so that it would make you think that people are using multiple identities on the bbses. These boards probably have the most traffic and yet there is no advertising sold on them. Well actually, only a few boards have traffic - the rest seem to be dead.

The access to information about various aspects of each locality takes users down through a set of bare listings while each time displaying a page. It artificially multiplies the number of pages displayed by at least 2.

Antoin O´Lachtnain, the Chief Technical Officer of Nua gets in on the act as well. He is supposed to have said that online services that had rejected LI/Nua´s offers for content management are now finding it difficult to manage their own content. However in reality, Nua´s offers  seemed to be based on NuaPublish - a collection of Freeware/Shareware software with some customisation by Nua. Unfortunately it does not scale well and its Open Source origins are plainly visible when you scratch the surface. Ever wonder why the Windows NT version was so long appearing? Though the open source programs on which NuaPublish seems to be based are fine for low to medium traffic sites, scalability is a major problem. Heavy traffic sites tend to go for either custom or well engineered ready made solutions solutions. Ireland Online uses Vignette Storyserver and Online.ie uses a combination of AOLServer, ArsDigita Community System and an Oracle database backend.

O´Lachtnain claims in the press release that "The market is going in our direction rather than away ... content management systems are getting more complicated." He is wrong. If anything content management systems are getting simpler. Well logically they would have to be - they are designed to make it easy for the user to enter information without having to know HTML or XML.

After years cutting through the Nua FUD and the pronouncement of these soi-disant experts, I have to conclude that these guys really never had a clue about big interactive sites. The only experience with online services that they seemed to have is as users not as SysOps. Sure they could spout the bull to the clueless technology journalists who fawned over their words but when you look at what really goes on behind a highly interactive site, you'll see that it is highly structured, well thought out, heavily automated and well engineered.