I’m back from Galway and the Irish Blog Awards 2010 with absolutely no voice whatsoever, a lovely award, a girly swag bag of happiness, and a huge smile on my face.

The carefully made plan for this weekend was to travel up to Galway on Friday to be well-rested on Saturday, a plan that when horribly wrong when I woke up at 6:00 am with awful shoulder pain, two eyes glued shut by the conjunctivitis I picked up in hospital, and a suspicious croak in my throat. Six hours was the most sleep I’ve had since dislocating my shoulder but so, so far from enough. I entertained idle and exhausted fantasies of cancelling the Ladies Tea Party all morning, but instead opted to drink double espressos whilst desperately wishing I was 28 and still taking speed.

At 3 PM everything got massively better when Ciara Crossan and I stepped into the Linda Evangelista Suite at the g hotel to setup for the Tea Party and almost died. It is squeal-inducingly stunning and the staff did an amazing job setting up for us even as Ciara and I exploded the suite into a temporary workshop of bags, tissues paper and boxes. Des Byrne from L’Onglex dropped off 40 bottles of nail varnish remover, Ruth Crean dropped off 40 adorable pocket mirrors, Curious Wines dropped off two cases of gorgeous wine I selected especially for the pretty labels, and by 4 PM we were just about ready.

For the record, everything at the g is gorgeous, from the rooms to the views to the food to the manager. We actually had to convince GM Damien O’Riordan that every single attendee was very well versed in pouring her own wine and picking up her own brownies and that the hotel did not need to staff this party with a butler. The service is that good and that friendly and that amazing.

By 4:30 the suite was overrun with women oohing and ahhing over furniture, beds and bathtubs and enjoying an atmosphere that could best be described as frolicking. The DIY Nail Bar was a huge hit, with women dragging extra chairs into the world’s plushest bathroom to varnish their nails and posing for photos in the incredible bathtub. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of chatter, and a lot of glasses raised on the private deck overlooking the beautiful water view. Alas it was over all too soon, as it always is, and at exactly 7:01 PM we drained the very last bottle of wine, collected our swag bags and piled into 10 taxis to head to the Irish Blog Awards.

For the past three years my focus around the IBAs has been on the Tea Party, which is excellent as it keeps me from fretting over nominations. Normally when various award short lists come out and I am lucky enough to be on them, I look at everyone who is nominated in my category, figure that as I’m in it there’s at least a non-null chance I might win, and gather a few coherent thoughts about what I might say if that happened. This year, I looked at the list for Best Business Blog, looked at my sparse posts for the year, and promptly ignored the fact I’d been short listed because there was less than zero chance I’d win.

Which means I was genuinely shocked and literally speechless when I did. Traditionally, this is the point at which you say “nobody was more surprised than me” but in fact a great number of people were equally surprised; I’m the first to admit it is an odd and unlikely win. I think I said on stage that last year I only wrote 24 blog entries; the number was in fact a whopping 40, but I tend not to count the site release posts.

I’m as confused and baffled as the next nominee, but also delighted. I won my very first award in Ireland at the IBAs in 2008, when I took home the glassware for Best Designed Blog. Since then I’ve picked up other gongs from various other award events, but none mean as much to me as the two Irish Blog Awards on my shelf. This is the community I care most about; it’s the people I love to work with and who’s opinions and endorsement mean the most to me. The fact I’ve got one for making a well-designed blog and one for the content that goes into it means the world to me, so thanks to all of you for reading and commenting, to the judges for voting, to Red Cardinal for sponsoring, and to John Handelaar for holding me up in the moment when I actually thought I might pass out from shock.

I sincerely apologise to Curious Wines, Contrast, Simply Zesty, and Sugru for winning. And no, you can’t have it back.

I cheered at huge volume for Pat Phelan, Sinead Cochrane, Maman Poulet, Red Mum, Panti and Beaut.ie, all of whom are most worthy winners in their categories and very deserving of their gongs. Huge cheers also to Damien Mulley, Rick O’Shea, Rymus and the video team and volunteers who make the IBAs the class event they are each year. It is a huge undertaking to pull off an event of this scale and each of them deserve all of the kudos in the universe.

5 AM and my bed seemed to arrive very early indeed, although not as early as our 9:30 wake-up call on Sunday. I dragged myself into the shower, opened my mouth to sing a few lines of something, and… nothing. Literally no sound came out. The suspicious croak from Friday and failing voice from Saturday has descended to full-on laryngitis and I cannot speak at all, although I do a very fine imitation of a chihuahua that’s been stepped on when I try. Never in your life have you heard a more pathetic “arf” noise. Were I able to laugh, I’m sure I’d find it hilarious.

Weekend scorecard: one fractured shoulder, one lost voice, one chest infection, two red eyes, 24 empty bottles of wine, 9 hours of sleep, one award and one fantastic day.

I’d happily, happily do it all again.

Here’s a free tip: if you are on a low-carb diet, do not not not drink alcohol at the Irish Web Awards. You will get three times as drunk twice as fast, especially if this is the first booze you’ve had since June. After one drink, your feet will disconnect from your body, and after two drinks, you won’t be able to feel your face. Arguably, however, these are signs of a great night out, which this year’s IWAs definitely was.

Highlights of the evening for me:

• My incredible genius of a husband winning Best New Web Application or Service for KildareStreet.com. This site represents well over 400 hours of entirely unpaid volunteer coding and development to make Irish government more accessible to voters, and was done for no reason other than that it is desperately needed. It means the absolute world to me, because I love him, to have this work and dedication recognised, and I am so grateful to the judges. Thank you for making me cry.
• My favourite client Michael Kane winning Best Ecommerce Site for Curious Wines. He gave a lovely speech that very nearly got him divorced, and then bought us all a bottle of champagne – trust me, you really, really want a wine merchant for a client. He was over the moon, and I was utterly delighted for him. (And me!)
• My client Aidan O’Callahan at Amit.ie making the short list for Best Technology Site. To be honest, I built him his website awhile back and he asked for a blog, so I added one and never read it because I suck. Well, bloody hell if he hasn’t turned out to be a first class tech blogger – I am so impressed and proud of him.

The low point is that I again failed to thank Katherine Nolan for her hard work on Curious Wines. (Did I mention I suck?) We work together on all of the ecommerce sites I take on, and she is a GODDESS. If you get a chance to send her a congrats on twitter, it would be nice because these awards are genuinely more her foo than my foo at work.

Also, it broke my heart to find out that Marcus MacInnes, whom I love from the bottom of my cynical little soul, is leaving Ireland for London. I demand he return regularly to stay connected to the Irish web community, and if he doesn’t, we need to take away his passport and pelt him with potatoes.

On the plus side,  I did get see a ton of my favourite people, meet a ton of new @twitter folk, listen to the Greater Dublin Gay Men’s Glee Club sing my requests in the smoking lounge, and eat a mighty fine cupcake or two.

My sincere thanks once again to all of the judges, all of the sponsors, to Fran at Made In Hollywood for the fun swag, to Colm Lyon at RealEx for not swinging for me, to Rick O’Shea for doing his usual first-class job, to Mrs Pat Phelan for babysitting, and to Mulley for making it all happen year after year in enormous style. Thanks lads.

I am very, very happy and really, really need a nap now.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was gearing up for a last minute, 72-hour run at the TechCrunch 50 application. It wasn’t for a client – Katherine and I have been working on  a web app project for a little while now. There was never any intention to run it in stealth mode, but TC50 requires that you stay under wraps, so we’ve been waiting to find out if we made the cut.

As it turns out, we didn’t, which wasn’t entirely unexpected – we’re taking an existing model and applying it in a cool new way but we’re not re-inventing fire or anything. However, we did get an invitation to the Demo Pit.  Not every one of the 1,000+ applicants makes the demo pool – there are only 100 exhibitors in addition to the 50 on-stage TC50 finalists – so we’re pretty happy about that.

We are also completely undecided about going.

Here’s the deal – we’re at the point now where we need to raise seed capital of €20 – 25K minimum in order to:

• Move Project X off of gaffer tape and bailing wire and onto a formal framework
• Develop the distributable modules that mean sales
• Pay for serious hardware when we open for public beta

I’ll be very straight and say: we do not have the $3,000 exhibition fee. We also do not have the €2,500/$3,500 it will cost to get both of us there, hole us up in San Francisco, and rent the kit we’d need on the ground there.

In fact, neither of us has enough money to pay our ESB bills right now, so really – we’re Brokey McBrokeyPants here. Trying to find this money would mean… I don’t even know what. A home equity loan, a bank robbery, or something else fairly serious like that.

On the other hand, I am 100% passionate about this project. More than 50 companies have come through my door in the last two years, and while I’ve been keen on any number of them, not one has made me say “I want a piece of that.” This one did, and if DemoPit is what the project needs, then that’s what we’ll do.

Somehow.

So here’s what I want to know:

• Would you do this?
• If you’ve done DemoPit in previous years, was it worth it?
• Did you raise funds as a direct result?
• What did you get out of it other than cash?

We need to decide fairly quickly because there are a lot of logistics involved in getting two tubby ladies and a fully functioning web app to San Francisco in a mere six weeks.

So advise me please, interpipes. Thank you.

For someone who likes films, I see surprisingly few of them because I am, conversely, not a big fan of cinemas. But I was a big fan of Moviestar.ie, the Irish version of Netflix. Moviestar provided a great service, had a great website, and as a bonus, provided me with several nice DVD players and bottles of champagne via their sponsorship of various awards I was lucky enough to take home.

Then I got an email in January announcing that they had been subsumed by Screenclick, and that I was now going to get “even better service and wider choice of movies on DVD.” What I actually got was no movies. At all. For six months.

Apparently, the postal address I provided to Moviestar (the one I, you know, live at) and that worked through my entire relationship with them simply didn’t work when Screenclick dispatched films. I went through this with customer support several times in April to no avail, and then in June films suddenly started arriving again.

The magical, successful apparition of movies in my mail slot and several emails nagging me to update my rental queue prompted me to finally log into the Screenclick.com website for the first time ever last night. Ten minutes later, Hollywood-horror-flick howls of rage and frustration were heard ’round the world. And they were not emanating from my DVD player.

Screenclick is broadly fine if you can type the name of a film you want to rent into the search box. For anything else, it’s useless. If you want to actually browse films, for example, you’re screwed:

• DVDs are listed by category and displayed alphabetically. Want to find a TV series to rent? You better like 24, because it takes up the first three pages of television listings.
• The “Watch Trailer” feature for individual film selections delivers audio only. Presumably this would be useful if I wanted to rent the podcast version.
• If I liked Juno, I want suggestions of more films like Juno. Telling me that someone who rented Juno also rented Die Hard 2 just makes me want to start taking hostages.

I strongly suspect the people behind Screenclick are just popping down to the warehouse to pick up whatever they want to watch, because anyone attempting to actually use this site would have killed themselves or fixed it by now. (Here’s a tip: if your customers resort to checking Wikipedia listings of Academy Award winners just to come up with titles to add to their subscription queues, your user interface is really, really broken.)

And the real pisser:

Screenclick (formerly DVDrentals) was established in 2001 when we realised Ireland could really use a service which was more convenient and less expensive than traditional video stores.

Thanks. We had that. You bought it, ate it, and killed its young.

I hope the Moviestar guys made piles of cash. Because they have to be spinning in it. And buying their films from Play.com.

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!

Back from the Irish Blog Awards, and as the song says, “Oh what a night.”

Major props to the Cork Airport Hotel, which in addition to being stellar hosts for the IBAs, did a stupendous job for the Ladies Tea Party. The apartment was stunning, the catering was abundant and beautifully presented, and the Tea Party was a great vibe with tons of women, much mingling, and abundant consumption of gorgeous cupcakes and copoius amounts of organic wine.

(The official count was that we started with five cases and ended up with four bottles left over. That turned out to be slightly inaccurate but we did do a hell of a good job.)

As for the Awards themselves, I did not win in my category – Michele Neylon scooped Best Business Blog. Despite knowing I was a most unlikely contender, I was extremely grumpy about this and could briefly be heard threatening to burn one of the polystyrene Blacknight horse heads in effigy or possibly put it in his bed. This shameful, booze fuelled mini-strop stopped the moment Suzy was named for Best Current Affairs Blog and then again for the Grand Prix – I was so delighted for her, I cried. An entirely noble and well-deserved victory, that one.

I knew more people this year than I did last year, so there were fewer revelations, but in the tradition of last year’s Awards, I hereby submit the following 2009 Unofficial Blog Awards:

• Best Badges: Will Knott, for “Ledgebag.” Absolutely legend.
• Hottest Husband: Gingerpixel. Woah, mama. You go girl.
• Hottest Missus: Walter Higgins. (Seriously, have you seen Mrs Walter?)
• Most Aptly Named: The Sexy Pedestrian who is indeed smokin’. (And frankly, you wouldn’t chuck Mr. Sexy Pedestrian out either.)
• Most Adorable: Elfinamsterdam, who to my great surprise, actually is the size of an elf. I thought she just gave out random gifts or something.
• Best Swag: CuriousWines, who did swapable badges that were so popular, people were stealing them out of other people’s booty bags.
• Best Tune: John Handelaar, who spun How Sweet it Is with Marvin Gaye covering his own song in German. (If you ask @handelaar, he’ll probably share it.)
• Sorest Loser: Joe Scanlon, who was not happy to be defeated in Inflatable Twister.
• Best Dressed: Ciara Crossan. Because the bride is always the best dressed woman in the room. Hilarious.
• Biggest Sucker Dote: Niall Harbison, who bought the afterpartiers in Room 201 a bottle of Absolute from the hotel bar. For €80.

Many of these people, and many more, ended up in Apartment 201 for the impromptu afterparty, which carried on until I finally chucked everyone out at 5:30 in the morning.

I smell like a pub floor before the smoking ban, my headache is undefeated, there are not enough cups of tea on all the world right now, and hilariously I have 12 people coming for a full-on Sunday lunch in 2 hours, but I would not have changed a thing. This night was EPIC. Thanks as always, Damien and crew.

PS: Remember, people – what happens at the after party, stays at the after party. And no, I do not have your clothes / phone / shoe / camera / shit – call hotel reception, ye langers.

I lied. I completely cared if we won, which is good, because we did – CuriousWines.ie took home a gong for Best Commercial Website at the 2009 Digital Media Awards, beating out major national brands like Toyota Ireland, Three and Argus Car Hire. It was a stunning moment, and indeed, I was stunned and delighted.

I went with Michael Kane, who practically knocked me out with a right hook that turned into a giddy hug when his company name was called out. The Curious guys are over the moon, and fair play to them – their heart and souls are in this business and they deserve every success. They earn it, every day.

It was an interesting evening in other regards, too. I’m not overkeen on agencies as a general rule, and spending the night packed into a room with new media kids and multinational corporates is not really my idea of a good time. These people travel in packs (like wolves) and it’s more like going to 20 office parties all in the same room, none of which you’ve actually been invited to.

That said, Jermain Williams and the guys from Dialogue were great craic (and won, for Podge and Rog), Nick McGivney from Adland Ireland was an unexpected find and an utter delight, and AislingMcMahon from Strata3 was increadibly friendly and nice (and looked particularly fresh and lovely for a woman who’d been in heels since 6 AM.)

And of course, you can’t pull together three people and a pint in Dublin without Conor Lynch showing up. I keep telling him he should rename his company Shmoozer.ie because he does this with more grace and more class than anyone I know. Whenever I meet him these days, I just offer to hand him my knickers and skip to the fag, because he’s that good. I’m entirely unclear what he wants vis a vis Connector but whatever it is, I’m confident he gets it.

The absolute highlight of my evening, however, was going back to my hotel room just in time to hear the couple next door scoring. She was giving it the full throttle, porn star soundtrack treatment, and was either having a really good night or getting paid by the hour. Hers was the orgasm heard ’round the world, or at least throughout the hotel, and it was quite something.

Then it was his turn. I was completely prepared for the standard Uh uh uh or possibly UhhHUUUgh or even, you know, Go Munster! What I was not prepared for, however, was:

Arf arf arf! Arf arf arf! AAAAAAAARF!

And this, kids, is why you should be respectful of your neighbours and not have loud, raucous sex in hotels. Unless, of course, you want the internet to know that you bark like a seal.

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.