At €250 per ticket, I did not make it to this year’s IIA Awards – I’m a low-rent kinda gal – but I sat at home cheering on the home-grown talent and checking my personal score card against the results.

It matched up very nicely indeed and I offered up sincere cheers for Michele Neylon of Blacknight, who scored both Best Business Blogger and Internet Marketer awards; Marcus MacInnes, who took home the Best Use of Social Media gong for Pix.ie; and Marie Boran of Silicon Republic for the Journalism award.

But anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to hear I cheered the loudest for the overall winner of the 2008 Net Visionary Award, Pat Phelan:

The person winning this award will have developed a leading and innovative service, platform or product and successfully brought it to the online global marketplace.

That is, of course, totally true of Pat. He’s done amazing things with MAXroam in an alarmingly short timeframe, backed by a well-matched board and a hand-picked staff. But more than that, the Net Visionary Award could actually be named for Pat. He’s an early adopter, a true embracer, and an unrepentant evangelist for all things internet – and carries at least five mobile devices at a time to prove it. He owns more laptops, carries more phones, belongs to more social networks and is invited to more betas than anyone I know.

He’s also a true visionary, able to connect the dots between trends and emerging technologies, able to take big ideas and make them real, and able to see how a new product, protocol or piece of kit will really be used by real people down the line. He also has amazing faith in people, and can often see where they can go withtheir ideas before they do – and most importantly, is willing to help them get there.

I sincerely love and admire Pat Phelan, and I could not be more delighted that he has been recognised with this prestigious award. It couldn’t have happened to a better guy, because there isn’t one.

I spend a reasonable amount of time whining about Facebook for various reasons, but one of the things that really irritates me is that the profile data is so poor.

I haven’t seen you for 20 years – I want to know if and when you got married, if you have kids, what you do and where you’re working, where you live and how you got there. Facebook lacks most of these standard social profiling fields, and it is really, really annoying.

Even more annoying, however, is having to fill in all of this information for the people you reconnect with after decades. I don’t mind people asking – I’m curious about them too – but I do mind answering with the same information over and over again.

So here’s my answer to that problem. Feel free to rip it off, although you probably want to change the bit about other people’s boyfriends.

Come one, come all, to the greatest show on Earth: the 2008 US election. We’re quietly getting excited about an Obama win over here on Gilabbey Street. Me and Election Projection Stats Junkie Nerd Boy are gearing up for a long night of election returns on the fourth of November, and you are cordially invited to geek out with us and color in happy little blue states on your very own electoral map.

There will be Obama Family Chili, Baked Alaska, stars and stripes cupcakes, beer, wine and plenty of fuel for late night revelers. Obviously, you’re free to go home well before the California results start to roll in after 5 AM, but we’ll be up all night. At that point I’ll be weeping with unbridled joy or lighting my passport on fire, but either way it looks like it will be quite a night.

Assuming we can gather up at least half a dozen people for a couple of hours that evening, we’ll add party games like Pundit Bingo, Who Wants to Be an American Citizen, and an electoral vote sweepstakes. You are welcome to bring your pyjamas, and we’ll bundle you and your teddy into a taxi when you’ve had your fill of election night fun.

RSVP in the comments below, and sincerely, whoever you are, we’d love to have some company on the night.

PS: I will be taking the Tuesday and Wednesday off. Because after eight long years of this horseshit, I deserve it.

Yesterday, the guys at Contrast launched Qwitter, a simple little app that sends you an email when one of your Twitter followers drops you.

This does not sound like the stuff of which social network meltdowns are made. But Qwitter was met with some frankly histrionic opinions along the lines of:

Qwitter… is likely to break relationships, sometimes before they’ve had an opportunity to prosper.

Speaking for those of us sitting at the Big Kids Table, this seems a little silly. Because if there is one thing Twitter is not good at, it’s demonstrating who does or does not like you.

Here are some reasons I may un-follow someone I like plenty:

• Dead Air: I prune periodically. If I check your stream and you have not tweeted in a week because unbeknownst to me you’re on holiday, in hospital or dead, I’ll unfollow.
• Noise Convergence: I am a fan of John Williams, despite the fact he’s a noisy fecker. However, he also has 30 people on his list that I have on mine. When I follow him, I get all the conversations between him and all those other people, and my Twitter stream triples in volume.
• RSS Preference: I have subbed to a handful of people’s Twitter streams in my RSS reader. For people who throw out a lot of links, are in wildly different time zones than me, or who Twitter with interesting people not on my list, this is a better exploratory venue for me.
• Interest Mismatch: You may be a fascinating friend in person but tweet predominantly about Rails or your new Foo startup. I hate Rails and I’m never going to use Foo, so let’s just have lunch.

I thought Eoghan McCabe’s response to the Qwitter teapot tempest was right on the money. Were there an 02 award for Blog Comment of the Month, I would nominate it.

I add and drop people all the time on Twitter. I assume people add and drop me all the time, too, but since I don’t keep an ego-vigilant eye on my follower count, I really have no idea. I did, however, let people know that if they wanted to drop me, I wasn’t going to have a hissy fit about it now that I’ll get a notice.

Nor, for the record, am I going to send them email to ask them why, or expect some kind of explanation to turn up in my Inbox.

Seriously, who has time for that level of neurosis?

Update: Since I was unable to grace Eoghan McCabe with an award, I sent him flowers instead, with the following card:

Thursday and Friday found me with a face more clogged than a Roto-Rooter drain and a head inverted over the loo so often I thought I was turning into a bat. The thing about being self-employed is that when you’re sick, you’re not just sick – you’re screwed. When you’re a one man band, there ain’t no other drummers, and yet clients have a perfectly reasonable expectation that the show will go on and deadlines will be met.

Luckily, I live with a man who can not only go to the chemist, but can crank out XHTML and CSS with the best of them. I pawned off one whole project onto him, and to take care of the rest, reached into the Rockstar Universe and more or less pled for my life. Guillermo Moreno, David Fleming and Frank Prendergast all gallantly came to the rescue on very short notice with tight turn arounds, and collectively saved my grateful ass.

These guys are superheroes, and you should hire them if you can. (If you can’t, try crying. It worked for me.)

A new site for a growing online market: WiseWomen.ie is aimed at women 40 and over who still love beauty tips, celebrity gossip and a good natter over a dry gin martini but have outgrown the many sites devouted to raising small children and which skinny jeans look best on your size 2 arse. Marvellous, marvellous stuff.

Barcamp is returning to the real capital city – the People’s Republic of Cork – on the 1st of November. The event is being held at Webworks, a truly fabulous building, and there’s a lot of great discussion going on regarding panels and sessions and loads of people planning to come down already. Doors will open at 9:15 and events kick off at 10, and I’ll probably be shooting my mouth off about something or other.

Pat Phelan and Alexia Golez are organising a pre-event dinner on Friday, October 31st at the fabulous Bangkok93 (aka A Taste of Thailand) on Bridge Street. Seats are limited to 25 and you should budget about €25 per head for this event. RSVP over here while the RSVPing is good!

A student attending Barcamp had a nice – and given the economy, timely – idea for a topic and I am accordingly attempting to organise a panel on career paths to new media. I first had to look up what the hell new media is, so I’m perfectly prepared to simply moderate, but I have a nice structure in mind. I’m looking for four or five people across the widest possible range of experience, so if you’re working in new media and got there via a traditional or non-traditional path, please contact me – I’d love to talk to you.

Finally, also on Friday night, the gang from the Irish Webmasters Forum is planning a meetup, which should probably be more aptly titled a drinkup. This may or may not merge into the Noodle Nerds dinner and post-meal drinking but I’m sure it will all shake out accordingly.

I’ll update this post with more Barcamp-related events as they roll out, but feel free to steal the graphics and spread the word. (And if you need graphics for an event or talk, just drop me an email.)

I ran across an interesting service last week that made me sit up and say “wow.” It’s go&pay, an ecommerce tie-in that essentially enables offline payments for online purchases. Simply checkout online, print out your barcoded order and take it to your local Irish post office, cash in hand. They’ll scan it in, take your dosh, and your goods get shipped out from the merchant as per normal.

Granted, I live in a cave, but I’d never heard of this before. They seem to have only a small number of Irish outlets currently, but I predict that as long as the acquisition costs are manageable for retailers, this is one of those stellar ideas that will kick ass on the long tail, for a couple of reasons:

• The internet is in for the win in a recession. Your particular business may fail, sure, but ecommerce transactions will continue to climb year on year.
• An ecommerce economy limited to credit card holders only is, by definition, limited. To maximise sales, you have to open payments as wide as possible.
• In a recession, more people have serious difficulty managing their credit. Cash-enabled systems, especially for price points under the €100 mark, will do more business in a poor economy.
• You may slag off the postal service’s poor delivery of actual post, but there is no more trusted retailer than An Post for payments in Ireland. BillPay just plain works, and has trained consumers well in this kind of transaction.

For all of these reasons, I’m also very hot on 3V, which is up this year for the Net Visionary Innovation Award. (Voting closes on the 17th of October.) 3V is a pre-pay debit card you can top up with a voucher bought at stores like Centra, SPAR and Londis. It is specifically designed for online purchases, and its sheer accessibility has opened up online shopping to an enormous market of the credit poor, the credit averse and the “wtf is credit?” younger shoppers.

And while those of us who are long time users take it for granted because it Just Feckin’ Works, let’s not forget that 3V is in fact terribly innovative:

• 3V uses a top-up system exactly like Pay-As-You-Go mobiles, so it’s familiar and easy to use for 3V’s exact target demographic.
• The PIN code to activate your credit is sent via SMS to your mobile phone, again pitching this service to exactly the right market.
• Your topped up 3V debit card is treated exactly like a standard, bank issued VISA debit or credit card by online merchants, meaning you can use it anywhere that takes VISA.
• Pre-pay eliminates interest rates from credit card purchases and identity theft from online purchases, delivering a benefit to a market segment that may be vulnerable to both.

I’m not affiliated with 3V in any way, but I think this is exactly the right time in the history of the Irish economy to give kudos to a successful, innovative product that has had real impact in Irish ecommerce, and I invite you to drop by the Net Visionary Awards voting form and cast your vote for 3V.

While you’re there, of course, you could also drop in your votes for Pat Phelan or Deb Hadley for Best Business Blogger,  and Twitterfone.com for Mobile Internet Innovation, but since I am affiliated with both Pat and Deb, I prefer for be a little less transparent in my pimping there.

In any case, go forth and vote – and good luck on the night to all the short listees. Have a grand evening!

Spicendipity.com won the Best Ecommerce Award at the 2008 Irish Web Awards. Unfortunately this site is no longer online, but you can read about the award and the evening here.

At three o’clock this morning, the 2008 Irish Web Awards finally wrapped up after a great night. I was absolutely, insanely, utterly delighted that both Spicendipity and Twitterfone were shortlisted across three categories and that both went home with gongs.

I was also deeply flattered that Deb Hadley asked me to go up with her to collect her Best Ecommerce Site award, and that Pat Phelan, who couldn’t be there, asked me to collect anything for Twitterfone if it won.

Twitterfone was up for both Most Beautiful and Best New Web App, and for Best New Web App I was all prepared to explain and praise the collaboration between the three Twitterfone partners who spread out design, coding and integration between them. Luckily, that award was scooped by Poll Daddy, and I was saved from having to make a stodgy speech.

For Most Beautiful, though, it was a little more personal as that bit of Twitterfone was sorted out between just myself and Pat, and so when it ended up winning my remarks were, shall we say, less formal. I promised Pat I’d recount the event for him, and so here it is but I don’t have to as Alexia kindly provided video:

Someone later said that if you knew Pat, that little speech invoked him perfectly, so I was glad about that as he really should have been there.

Obviously, nobody expects to actually win these things, and so caught on the trot like everyone else, I forgot to thank all the right people. For Spicendipty, huge amounts of credit go to Katherine Nolan, who I work with on all ecommerce projects because she is the best hacker developer I know of the cart system we’ve been using for more than 10 years and can defy the laws of physics if required. For Twitterfone, the design implementation was done by an internal team at partner Dial2Do, who did a bang up job and in addition to making the damn thing work, also made it look exactly like the screens I sent over, which hardly ever happens.

I was delighted for all of the winners but cheered my head off for Maryrose Lyons and Ken Stanley, who won Most Accessible for Kanchi; Ken McGuire who picked up the podcasting gong for Playlist Mix; for Walter Higgins who spent the rest of the night looking rather dazed to have the Most Innovative gong in his hand; and for Macrus MacInnes, who took home a very well deserved Best Practice award for Pix.ie.

Finally, a huge thanks to all of the sponsors (thanks, Beaut.ie and Intertrade Ireland!), to MC extraordinaire Rick O’Shea,  and an especially huge thanks to Damien Mulley, champion of the Irish internet, who organised this massive event like the complete pro he is.

Fab night :)