I BROKE A SUMMER PROMISE when I purchased another Audible title and then started listening to The Art of Noticing immediately--instead of spending hours under Irish sunshine digging out a new garden. I blame both Rob Walker and Mitch Joel for this transgression.

I've started creating three lists from more than 100 cues offered by Rob to enhance my ability to immerse in the moment and I plan to propose activities to both primary school and college students based on excellent ideas shared in the book. Plus I've started thinking out loud about the ideas Rob Walker shares in his book and through his newsletter.

Listen to "It's Important to Notice the World Around You" on Spreaker.

FACT: Weblogs Inc. witnessed a 10 to 20 percent jump in ad performance (and therefore revenues) when they matched AdSense ad colours to the sites.

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FUN FOR MOBILE has DIY ways to make mobile phone ringtones including:

• MP3, m4a/AAC, wav ringtones
• MMF ringtones
• QCP ringtone?
• Ringtones from CD
• Polyphonic (midi) ringtone

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NOW AVAILABLE --  Year-round Christmas tree lights for stoners and selected Irishblogs. Each head 3 inches in diameter. Head strand is 10 feet in length and consists of 10 heads. This special offer usually ships to Ireland within five days and arrives within a fortnight. Yours for only €20 via Cheech and Chong.com and (caution!) PayPal.

PLANET OF THE BLOGS -- An essential stopping place for anyone interested in the talking points around Ireland: Planet Of The Blogs. It's a self-organising effort scripted by John Breslin, powered by who else? Boards.ie. Recommended for anyone seriously interested in Irishblogs.

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TIM BURTON COLLECTIVE -- Everybody needs the Tim Burton Font Collection.

CREATIVE COMMONS -- The Creative Commons has licensed the work in the Open Media Classroom under a Creative Commons License. We are embedding license details into all the source material that we created for this zone and will use the code below.

UNL -- Just in time for students revising prior to spring examinations, we have 13 time management tips worth considering.

UPI --Margot Wallstrom, the E.U Commisioner for Institutional Relations and Communication, has started blogging. Wallstrom's role evolved last year in a bid to improve the communication between the EU institutions and EU citizens. Her first entries include reference to the weather (tsunami and Brussels rain), thanks to blog friends, and a little snippet about strategy documents. Predictably, she is attracting all sorts of comments about everything except what she blogs about. Does she understand the spam magnet that she has become? Chris Cobb, writing in The Ottawa Citizen is nonplussed. "Without visiting all 37 million sites coughed up by Internet search engines, it is safe to assume that most blogs are not worth the cyberspace they occupy. The bulk are boring or offensive self-indulgences produced by those with axes to grind, prejudice to spew, porn to peddle or without the ability to get past the gatekeepers at newspapers, magazines, book publishers and edited online publications."

LOOPDILOOP -- The iPod--and specifically the ability to shuffle singles inside the iPod--will force significant changes to the music business, writes Feargal McKay. "The way people listen to music is changing. Everyone’s shuffling their music collection on their iPod and are more and more getting in touch with the little-visited corners of their music collection. Having gone to all the bother of dusting off all those old CDs and transferring them to their computer, who can blame them? And now, rather than trading up each year from one new best thing to the next, consumers are spending more time with the old friends with whom they have slipped out of touch and spending less time listening to new music." McKay thinks "the back catalogue bounce is on, but this time, the music industry is unlikely to profit from it".