Barcamp Cork is on, baby, and it’s the 14th of November. I’ll be there giving a talk on Five Things Every Startup Should Know. I also highly recommend Paul Sweeney’s Connection 2.0: Communicating with Customers After the Web, mostly because I made him do it. (If you run an app or deliver a product or service, it’s essential.) Sign up here.

The night before Barcamp, Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork! It’s a great, casual night for women involved in tech – from bloggers to programmers – to get to meet each other. We’ll be at Gourmet Burger Bistro on Bridge Street, and dinner is €18 per person for starters, dinner with vegetarian options and dessert with tea or coffee. Sign up here.

I’ll be trekking up to Dublin for Business Camp Dublin and presenting a variation on Five Things. John will also be coming and will be presenting on (I think) commercial revenue streams for non-profits. It should be a fun event and Eimear the Wonder Dog will be in tow. (No autographs, please.)

When Martha Rotter invited me to Dublin to speak at MIX essentials, I was delighted. Mostly because she wanted me to do Stalinist Web Design again, and I’m looking forward to the chance for a do-over with this presentation to heal my psychic wounds from FOWD.

Also, since Microsoft fired me about 12 years ago, I’m secretly thrilled every time they buy me lunch or invite me to something. I’m even more thrilled when they graciously offer to put me up at The Morgan because the Hilton Dublin is a no smoking hotel. (I’m in no way a prima donna and I don’t need my M&Ms colour sorted or anything, but I do need an ashtray.)

MIX is on the 24th of June and registration is free. I’m very excited Leeanne Lowe [t] is coming down from Belfast to speak as well; her talk on Guerilla Web Strategy looks great and I’m looking forward to meeting her. And to getting a chance to catch up with some Dublin people, too – if you’re around for drinks or dinner either night, let me know!

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!

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.

The end of April will find me in London, speaking at Future of Web Design.  Nobody is more surprised I was invited than I am, but more to the point: nobody could possibly be more terrified.

I’m not usually nervous about speaking in public; I do it pretty often, at all kinds of events. However, having thrown a huge strop about the state of the “Future of” conference series, I’m putting myself under a lot of pressure not to completely bomb this one. After mulling it over for a few months, however, I have finally concluded that the best way to pull this off and avoid vomiting all over my (very tasteful) Ferragamos is to just go ahead and be my normal foul-mouthed, acerbic self.

Thus, I will be presenting Throwing Client Collaboration Out the Window: The Stalinist Web Design Model.

Web designers and agencies of all sizes almost universally promote themselves as agreeable team players in a collaborative partnership. But what happens when you throw that practice out the window and adopt a process that isn’t a collaborative creation, a model where you don’t give the client choices, and a project management style where you constantly say No to the customer? Sabrina Dent argues that the clients are just as happy, the end users are better off, and the design and build takes less time with fewer tears.

I may never work again, but at least I’ll have something to talk about.

I am delighted to announce that plans have been formalised and the 2nd Annual Ladies Tea Party and Knitting Circle will be held at the Cork Airport Hotel. We will be swanning about one of their spiffy private apartments prior to the Blog Awards, which will hopefully be a nice setting and mean more mixing than last year.

The ticket price of €17 per person covers everything – venue, food, alcohol, and soft drinks – thanks to help from these lovely people:

Sponsor: Curious Wines
Booze for this event is lovingly sponsored by online wine retailer Curious Wines, who apparently heartily approves of ladies tippling (or toppling) into their teacups.

Sponsor: Campaign Monitor
The fine email marketing software folks at Campaign monitor have very kindly sponsored food for this event, and made managing the registrations pure bliss.

Donor: iFoods.tv
Brownies for this event are being hand made by Niall Harbison of IFoods.tv, so you'll get to say a handsome famous chef has personally baked for you.

Donor: Piosa Cake
Jo from Pisoa Cake is - oh joy! - bringing beautiful, yummy, fluffy cupcakes. Please confine your drool to your own cupcakes only.

Obviously, the title of this event is complete and utter farce. Having said that, Marian has suggested that anyone interested in knitting or crochet bring some work and we can have a bit of a stitch ‘n bitch whilst we’re there.

Registration is limited to 30 people. You need to complete a registration form for each person attending, and it’s first come, first served.

Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 21 February from 4 – 7 PM
Where: Cork Airport Hotel, Apartment 201 (NOT room 201)
What: Food, drink, occasional knitting, general merriment
How much: €17 per person.
Registration: NOW OPEN. CLOSED. Full.

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.)

So I’ve been drafted in to speak at PodCamp Ireland – Krishna De rang me up this morning to point out that if I am going to be there anyway, I might as well open my mouth and do something. I was a little surprised because I assumed that something called “PodCamp” was all about, well, podcasting – a subject about which I know next to nothing – but apparently it covers all kinds of social media. Who knew?

Anyway, Krishna suggested that I do something around design for blogs and websites, but to be honest, I can’t. I suck at talking about design. There are a lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day I just find design very difficult to be articulate about.

So instead, after a quick Twitter poll for topics, I’m going to be presenting on How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.) I have more than a month to put this presentation together, but I’m pretty sure it will break down into the specifics of conversational marketing, generating press and PR, and paid advertising.

I’ve been doing a couple of these informal presentations, so I’m also pondering getting a bit more organised about presenting materials and having downloadable slides and handouts available after each one, just so they’re more accessible to people who missed the gig or want the notes.

Realistically, that probably means a redesign. God help me.

Photo ©TheConsumerist

I’ve signed up for Creative Camp 08 in Kilkenny this year, just to top off Blog Week (because, you know, I won’t be busy enough for those nine days.)

I’m presenting with a brilliant group of women on a panel called Grabbing the Blogsphere by the Balls. Normally I am resistant to all-girl panels, but since this one is addressing issues like, well, all girl panels, I thought it would be worth a whirl.

We’re still hashing that one out, but I think it’s going to be a roundtable looking at things like poor female turnout at tech events, representation of female speakers, credibility and blogging, and women bloggers in general.

Which, obviously, got me thinking about gender and blogging, and since I’m going to be there anyway, I decided to offer up a talk called How To Blog Like a Boy. As it says in the description:

Women come to blogging from a different socialisation, communication and linguistic background than male bloggers, and enter a slightly different ecosystem with distinct advantages and disadvantages. “How to Blog Like a Boy” looks at how women can free their voices, raise their blog profiles, and position themselves as a bloggers of authority in Ireland.

There is actually a lot of interesting research around socialisation (women are raised with a disproportionately high emphasis on niceness) and lingusitics (we’re masters of the hedge statement) that I think are reflected in interesting ways in how we blog, and have consequences for how we’re perceived.

So no, it isn’t really how to blog like a boy. It’s a look at (among other things) the predominantly female characteristics of language and interaction that are not doing us any favours in the blogsphere (or the rest of our lives) and how to shake them out of our writing and communication.

And yes, kittens will be killed.

On the plus side, no tea will be served, so people of all genders are welcome to attend.

Conn over at Edgecast is organising a meetup of Irish language bloggers in the lobby of the Alexander at 4PM on Saturday March 1st. See here for info and Irish language banner.

The phototastic RedMum is organising a photoblogger meetup for the afternoon of March 1st. I’m unclear if this is a photo-taking tour or a pub crawl, but I’m sure all will be revealed.

The scrumptious yet Humble Housewife is organising a food bloggers and fans brunch for the morning after the night before at the equally scrumptious Ely CHQ.

The gracious Ina O’Murchu and myself are organising a Ladies Tea Party at Market Bar before the awards. Warning: may include small parts, martinis and olives.

I’ll update this list as more events are announced, and of course if you’d like someone to make you a promotional graphic for your event, you only need to ask!