I thought it would be fun to get some Twitter and bloggy-type people together to go to the Street Performance World Championships in Fitzgerald’s Park. It’s free and looks like a nice day out if the weather holds. Since the park is only an eight-minute walk from our house and there’s plenty of parking here on weekends, I’m nominating our front doorstep as the meeting place.

Come by yourself, come with the kids, come with the dogs, come with a hangover, come with an umbrella!

This plan is simplicity itself. Turn up at 18 Gilabbey Street, Cork, at 12 noon on Saturday, 13 June. Have a pee if you need one (not on the doorstep.) Walk to the park in a conga line, enjoy the entertainment, take photos, tweet if you want to, and piss off to the pub afterwards if you’re so inclined.

A few caveats. One: I know nothing about this event other than that it is on and sounds fun. Talk to @spwc. Two: All the pubs in that neighbourhood are dire; we’ll be walking 8 minutes back down the road to Thirsty’s or the one next door with a garden if it’s nice. Three: If it’s raining, this will be re-scheduled for Sunday in the hope of better weather. Four: There probably won’t actually be a conga line.

If you’re planning to come along, it would be helpful if you popped your intentions into the comment box here so that we know to wait for you if we need to. Also if the forecast calls for Saturday downpours, I’ll be able to email folks to let them know. Thanks :)

When something bills itself in 2009 as “Ireland’s first online only event” – which is an epic pile of spinning PR bullshit – you know you’re off to a great start. And when it’s promoted with a video as completely and totally hilarious as this one, you know this “dazzling selling experience” is going to be too good to miss.

And so it proved to be with NetExpo’s  Search Event 2009. I could try to explain to you the complete and utter trainwreck this turkey turned out to be when it opened today, but I genuinely don’t think I could do it justice and a picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. Click for larger images:

That’s the “Main Hall” – you have to click the tiny text for Hall A or Hall B to visit the exhibition halls:

This is Hall B. You can’t actually click any of those exhibition booths – which is just as well because how much would you not want to be the tiny ones at the back? – you have to click the imperceptible “Show Booths” link at the top:

And that brings us to the “exhibitors.” This is the Blacknight, erm, booth. I don’t think Blacknight is particularly being punished for something; they all more or less look like that.

There are a million crap ideas crappily executed every day, so I’m not sure why I find this one so completely irksome. I think it has something to do with the fact that they’ve illegitimately promoted it as some kind of ground-breaking first for Ireland,when it is in fact the opposite of ground-breaking and what’s more, completely embarassing.

In all seriousness, it’s like these people just discovered the internet the day before yesterday and have stepped straight into a time machine headed for 1997. They’re saying things like “deliver your sales message to customers new and old right into where they work during their regular business hours!” and I think they actually mean it. They have a blog entry titled “Why you should do business online” and I think they mean that, too.

The thing is, this is not the worst idea ever. There is arguably a market for and a value to bringing companies together in a virtual space for time-limited promotional event with a lot of buzz around it. But the execution here is just so, so appalling that I actually called a few exhibitors to find out if they knew it was going to be like this – because I couldn’t believe anyone had signed up for this pile of horsehit.

Predictably, the most common response was “Oh my God. Oh my GOD. OH MY GOD!” followed by the sound of foreheads crashing into keyboards. So I’m guessing no.

Hilariously, under each booth is scrolling text that says If You Would Like To Find Out More About Hosting Your Own Online Expo….Contact Us At…

That would be 1997@compuserve.com, yes?

A quick one on the domestic front:

Darragh Doyle is doing a sponsored skydive to raise money for elder-care charity CARE local. This sounds like great craic and Darragh is, as always, up for anything whacky. I was also impressed by the €800 raised in donations until I realised the jump is this Friday and Darragh has €2,200 more to raise.

Charities are not only hardest hit in a recession, they’re also first hit in a recession. Donors give less money to fewer causes, and programmes and support shrink exactly when most charities’ clients need them most. Unfortunately, it’s the local, work-a-day charities with low profile and small donor bases – like this one – who often have the roughest time of it.

Honestly, it’s not every day a guy offers to jump out of a plane. If you can, it would be nice to throw a donation at Darragh to support his rather heroic (and hilarious) efforts here.

Also, if I’m reading this right, if we raise enough money, Darragh will stop telling really, seriously, painfully bad jokes on Twitter. That alone is worth twenty quid.

Update: He jumped and raised €2,139! Great video here.

I’m delighted to announce a new, two-part training day for small and medium businesses on 12 June in Cork called Putting the Internet to Work. It may sound hokey but this full-day, hands-on seminar is specifically designed to help businesses build online strategies, market effectively, and move forward in what we’ll politely call a new economic climate.

You can download complete details here, but in a nutshell, Martina Skelly and I will be conducting a crash course in digital marketing, covering blogging, social media, and the full Google toolbox from SEO to PPC Adwords campaigns:

Building Business Through Social Media

The Social Media seminar runs from 10 AM to 1 PM and covers:

• The Whys and How-Tos of blogging for small and medium businesses;
• Understanding and leveraging social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook;
• Tools and metrics for quantifying results from blog and social network campaigns.

Putting Google to Work for Your Business

The Google Tools seminar runs from 2 PM to 5 PM and covers:

• Safe and effective SEO strategies to improve natural search engine results and rankings in Google;
• Using Google AdWords to run cost-effective PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns;
• Utilizing Google Analytics to pull it all together, monitor results, and calculate ROI.

We’ve tried to keep costs low while also keeping seminar sizes small: registration is limited to just eight people in each session. You can register for the full day for €150 or choose either half-day session for €80.

We’d like to make this day available to everyone who’d like to attend, so if you need a bursary, just let me know and we’ll do our very best to get you there.

WHO: People marketing small and medium businesses
WHAT: SEO, PPC, blogging and social media [full details]
WHERE: Lancaster Lodge, Western Road, Cork
WHEN: Friday, 12 June 2009, 10 AM – 5 PM
HOW: Registration is now open!

The first of a few completed sites I’m late adding to my portfolio. Activate Ireland was a slightly unusual project in that this was an existing site with existing logo, content and layout that just needed to be ported to WordPress and given a new container – a facelift rather than major structural work, if you will. I’m mad keen on the stripes, the flowering growth motif, and the always popular and hilariously named Vag Rounded font.

I’m a big believer in the power and potential of newsletters, but the truth is that few of them are done well. That probably explains why the only newsletter I recommend to other designers and avidly look forward to each month is MyFonts News. It’s an excellent newsletter built on a very simple premise: interview one rocking typographer, fill the newsletter with fontastic eyecandy, and provide download links for absolutely everything.

It’s basically free porn for font freaks. Yeah baby.

This month, however, I was doubly delighted as the featured type designer is Ray Larabie. It’s very hard to pin-point where design trends emerge from, but I’m pretty confident that back in the mid-90s, Larabie single-handedly gave birth to a web design fad simply by releasing a stream of vintage-inspired fonts for free download. Windows came with crappy fonts, Adobe still wanted about a million bucks per typeface weight, hardly anyone was designing downloadable type, and suddenly retro websites were all the rage.

And so, Ray Larabie’s fonts have accompanied me through a web design journey of almost 15 years.  Back then, Euphorigenic was my all time favourite font,  though Mufferaw was used heavily in my blog graphics. Several years later, Echelon made an appearance on our wedding invitations. Nueropol X and Teen have made more than one appearance in a logo under my hand, but these day, Blue Highway is one of my favourite identity typefaces and I’m just waiting for the right project for Sexsmith.

Leafing through the Larbaie fonts is a walk down memory lane for me, with different typefaces bringing back memories of people, projects, and places specific to the period when a particular typeface was in heavy rotation – much the same way, I guess, perfume or food or wine does those things for other people.

I have used many, may fonts through the years, from expensive classics out of major type founderies to quirky free fonts hand drawn by hobbyists. But of the 241 fonts that make up my primary library, Larabie’s appear more than any other single type designer – and quite often, they’re the fonts I hit first.

So thanks, Ray, for all the fonts through all the years – and for all the memories, too.

I came back from FOWD London feeling, shall we say, less than fabulous. It took a good 48 hours for me to realise that the slightly sick feeling parked in my abdomen was probably not just post-presentation nerves – though to be fair the hacking, aching and fever were also big tip-offs.

Having just returned from the international travel capital of Europe courtesy of a viral petri dish recirculating air at 30,000 feet, there was comedy aplenty in our house about H1N1 Influenza. In fact, early that week I had a coughing fit at the corner shop and joked to my husband that there was no more deserving recipient of my viral load than the complete and utter cow who runs our local store.

Buying from this shop is not like retail as most humans understand it. Every item purchased is treated like you are personally pulling food directly from the mouths of Ethiopian children, cash be dammed. Packets of tea, milk and bread are snatched from your hand and only given back grudgingly. Every biscuit I leave with is a moral victory.

Anyway, this all became much less amusing when it started to look like I really might have the charmingly named Swine Flu. The were so many creased brows and concerned tuts that I began to wonder if London had been relocated to a suburb of Mexico City and I had merely missed the good weather. In my more fervish moments, I dreamed it had, and apparently began telling people about elborate plans to open a summer resort in Islington.

It’s now almost two weeks later, though, and my career as a weapon of mass bio-terrorism appears to be drawing to a close.  I am much better, and have a new found appreciation for the ability to breathe and the wonders of being able stand up for a whole 10 minutes. I can also stay awake for an entire three hours at a stretch. And to top it all off,  I officially do not have swine flu.

The bad news is, neither does the woman from the corner shop.

One of the many reasons I have been quiet on this blog for the past few weeks is that despite having any number of things to say, whenever I sat down to blog, the only thing that wanted to come out of my mouth was variations on OH MY GOD I HAVE TO PRESENT AT FOWD PLZ KILL ME NOW.

For those of you not familar with FOWD, it is a big deal. Despite never having heard of FOWD until a few months ago, that fact that FOWD is a big deal was made crystal clear to me by 300 people all saying “Oh my God, you’re presenting at FOWD? That’s a really big deal!”

Though nervous about this gig, I was excited about my topic and happy with my presentation. I didn’t know if the audience was going to be happy with it, but I knew it was what I wanted to say.

Granted, a talk called Stalinist Web Design is never going to be the easiest sell, but I was totally prepared to win, lose or draw on my own merits. What I wasn’t prepared for was getting completely and utterly thrown by failing technology when my presentation refused to advance the split screen (Slide view for the audience, Notes view for the speaker) after the first slide.

This is, apparently, how the universe punishes web designers who refuse to use Macs.

One the plus side, the endless interval between slide one and slide two did mean I got to hear several hundred people sing Happy Birthday to me, which was deeply embarassing but also delightful.

On the minus side, it also meant that when technology was finally beaten back into submission, there were no longer any notes on my visual view. No doubt someone more polished at this than I am would have made a more graceful recovery, but at that moment in time I was so grateful that I had an old fashioned, dead tree printed copy of my notes that I might very well have cried had I not been busy trying very hard not to vomit.

And so for Episode #308 of Do As I Say, Not As I Do, I actually read my presentation directly off the 13 pieces of paper in my hand.

For those of you not familar with the cardinal rules of presenting, they are:

• Never read off your slides;
• Never read directly from your notes – use them as prompts;
• Never blow your nose whilst you are mic’d.

Luckily, I blew my nose beforehand.

Anyway, this turned out to be one of those presentations people mostly either loved or loathed. (The fact more people hated Microsoft totally doesn’t count – that’s like shooting fish in a barrel.) I like people with strong opinions, so I’m as accepting of “was arrogant” as I am happy with “was fabulous.”

Mostly, I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad Carsonified invited me, glad I turned 37 in London, glad I got to meet a ton of genuinely nice and interesting people, and glad I got to speak at FOWD.

And really glad I didn’t vomit.