WordCamp Ireland 2010 wrapped up this afternoon, and at exactly 4PM as the last punter walked out of the amazing Set Theatre, I melted into an incredibly pleasant state of complete and total relaxation. Doing this again may be worth it just for that sleep deprived, adreniline fuled, frantic-rush induced state of Nirvana.

WordCamp was, in a word, fun. I’ve posted a quick thank you post over on the blog, but I also have some more random thoughts as I sit here enjoying my swanky hotel room for one last night before going back to the real world.

We could not have pulled this off without the amazing staff at Langton’s. Everyone raved about the hotel. Nothing was too much trouble. You don’t know how many people are coming to dinner? Not a problem. You need two sets for the stage? Not a problem. You need snacks we don’t stock for the kids, and you need them right fucking now? Also not a problem because we will get in a car and DRIVE TO THE SUPERMARKET FOR YOU.

Failure of snack planning aside, much ado was made about the fact that this was a family-friendly conference with child care. I’m not sure anyone who attended had ever been to a conference with child care before. I’m not sure Katherine and I had ever been to one either, but it never occurred to us to do anything else. And, honestly, it was easy. I’ll write more about it later but basically: two babysitters, €60 worth of kid tat from World of Crap, an activity schedule and you’re away.

Everyone should do this – the kids were not disruptive, they were not noisy, and every single child (including our favourite escape artist) was cooperative and very well behaved.

Kids aside, there were two distinct camps of attendees at WordCamp. People who came from a BarCamp sort of background had, in general, a great time. The venue was big and plush, speakers were both impressive and totally accessible, and if not every camper could fit into every session they wanted to attend, well there were a zillion other sessions and coffee in the ballroom.

The tiny percentage of people who came from the Vegas – Le Web – NextGen circuit were less happy. There were not always enough seats, these folks didn’t seem to circulate well in the frequent coffee and meal sessions, and they generally seemed undewhelmed. On the other hand, I expect people from that sort of background to be able to do the math on their  ticket price and adjust accordingly. SXSW is $395. MIX is $1400. Le Web is €1,200. WordCamp is €50.

Is WordCamp Le Web? No. But it’s not €1,200 either.

The speakers who were scheduled for the Conservatory were champions. We had two days of glorious sunny weather – in March, in Ireland – and it killed this glass-topped room for projectors and as a workable venue. Loads of speakers switched to a white-board presentation style effortlessly and far more smoothly than I would have been able to, and I admire every single one of them (and apologise and promise to sort that for the next WordCamp Ireland.)

I gave a talk – luckily not in the Conservatory – on using WordPress as the base for your social networking world domination plan, and it was solidly mediocre. In all honesty, given the fact that I had had five hours of sleep in the preceding 72, I was tremendously pleased with myself for doing even that well. It was not my best performance, but doing it was by far the biggest effort I have ever made to get on stage and stay cognisant for 45 minutes, and it felt nothing short of triumphant to pull it off at all.

Katherine did rather better, having had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep since Thursday, and I was delighted for her that her presentation was so well received. Neither one of us, however, is ever speaking at a camp we are also organising ever again. It is simply too much to take on.

And because it will take us more than a year to recover, we’ve also decided that the WordCamp Irelands we organise will be every-other-year events. It’s not feasible, given the time commitment, for us to do this every year, but we have already opened the calendars and flicked forward a few pages to look at when we might do WordCamp 2012.

Edit: Fuck it, we’re up for 2011. It’s on!

And yes, there will be more sandwiches.

Photo Credit: Donncha O Caoimh

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

I sincerely think that is everything you need to know about social media in four tweets.

Alternatively, you could just watch @shutterstock shill on Twitter for an object lesson in what not to do.

(I did try to illuminate the path for them, just because it pains me so to watch these companies vomit all over their expensive branded shoes. Not surprisingly, the PR muffin or graduate intern or highly paid Social Media Expert™ or whoever they have working that account totally did not get it.)

Late this evening I found the above at the top of my Twitter page – a tweet from Bernie Goldbach, my esteemed partner in expatriate crime and @topgold on Twitter.

Now, 19 minutes is a very long time in the land of the fail whale, but the man has a toddler and a full-time job and needs his sleep. So I clicked over to @Scobleizer to double-check Scoble had indeed already achieved Twitter Nirvana – and saw that he had exactly 99,999 followers.

“Oh,” I thought. “Twitter has capped follow counts at the five digit ceiling. What a good idea.” And because it is a good idea (for all kinds of reasons) I clicked Follow just to test that there was indeed a newly implemented count cap.

And there wasn’t. And I became Robert Scoble’s 100,000th follower.

That was moderately amusing for about 30 seconds. What was far more amusing is that in the 30 seconds following this:

…I picked up 100 followers.

I’m sure these followers will depart shortly, for the same reasons I’m sure I’ll eventually un-follow the mighty Scoble (see FAQ). But it was interesting to observe first hand the flood effect of a high-profile Twitterer merely mentioning a @name – particularly now, when the concept of buying Twitter followers has so many people debating the raw value of pure numbers.

For what it’s worth, I’d advise any client who asked to flush the “Twitter procurement fee” directly down the toilet and consider it money well spent in preserving their credibility.

As for my own 30 seconds of Twitter fame, I’m happy to have these new people following me – it’s always nice to see numbers go up – but I’m not going to be mailing Scoble a cheque any time soon.

The FAQ (yes, already):

1/ OMG, you weren’t following Scoble?!

No. I like Scoble just fine, but Twitter is a social space for me and I limit the number of people I follow to 125. I can’t actually track and converse with more than that – an issue Scoble himself has addressed. I generally follow people I know and people with heavy design streams. When I feel the need for a dose of Scoble, I go read his blog.

2/ Holy SHIT you use the web interface for Twitter?!

Yes. I have tried and used a ton of Twitter apps, but the problem is that they all work. They conveniently push all my tweets to me in near real-time, and I don’t want that. I prefer pull over push for Twitter because it allows me to step into the stream when I have the time and attention for it. Realistically that is several times a day – just not all day.

3/ Do you get anything for being the 100,000th?

I wouldn’t have thought so, no. Since I wasn’t raised in a barn and am not a member of Generation Entitlement, I didn’t ask. If anyone is wondering, however, I would quite like a pony.

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 :)

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.

So the fabulous Katherine and I are leaving clients, partners, children and dogs behind for a Ladies’ Holiday in Italy, where we’ll be hanging out in Pisa and Florence for five glorious days, doing not much of anything at all except possibly peering at a keeling over tower and booking tickets to the Uffizi to avoid the queues. Since my previously planned Prague jaunt got cancelled, this will be my first holiday in four years.

I am actually gagging to get on a Ryanair flight, it’s that desperate.

Obviously when you’re in Florence, you don’t give a damn where you’re staying because it’s Florence and it’s all stunning, but we got a great deal on the four star Hotel Monna Lisa and there is a possibility I may die of gorgeous before I even step foot in the place. I’ve no idea if there’s WiFi, but it doesn’t matter because even if there is, I seriously don’t want to hear from you.

So I’m leaving on Friday the 5th and returning on Wednesday the 10th at 19:20 – alas, too late to catch the last train back to Cork. Thus I will be spending the night in Dublin at The Maldron in Parnell Square. Thus if you would like to meet up that evening for a drink, I am at your disposal from approximately 8:30 PM.

I can rarely be arsed to go to Dublin, so it would be nice to see the people I rarely get to see outside of conferences. I’m not fussed about where as long as it’s nearby and there’s the possibility of a bar snack since I won’t have eaten. Let me know where, when and who in the comments and I’ll be there!

Damien Mulley tipped me off to the Maldron’s current deal (thanks for all the suggestions, Twitteroos!) and may also be in town that night, so I suggest we apply the wisdom of crowds and simply demand en masse that he come out and play.

Above is a slideshow that acted as an introduction and conversation prompter for a panel discussion at Barcamp Cork, entitled It Beats the Dole: Career Paths in New Media. The panel was designed for Bernie Goldbach’s students from the Tipperary Institute, who will at some point in the next few years be venturing out into the big wide world seeking jobs doing… something.

So I thought it would be useful to pull together a panel of people working in diverse jobs in “new media” and look at what we do and how we got there. I was very lucky to get Mairan Murray, John Henry Donovan, Fiona Dixon and Donogh MacCarthy-Morrogh to panel with me and while I could have been a lot more organised about moderating (not my best thing), I think it was a good panel.

Some data points I found interesting, although I imagine the students found them less so:

• When I was putting this panel together, not a single one of the five of us really had a definition for New Media or ever use that terms ourselves. It’s 2008. It’s just… media.
• Two out of five of us had no professional or educational training whatsoever.
• Four out of five of us said that more than 75% of the skills and tools we use in our day-to-day work are self-taught.
• All of us said the most important part of getting a job is having a portfolio, even if it’s just class projects or a fake site or fake video for Acme Widgets. The portfolio outweighs the degree or the qualification by miles.
• For learning independently, all of the web people said Lynda.com.

Earlier in the day, I did another session for students as well, looking at a website they’re developing as part of their course. We looked at developing personas, planning content for a specific audience, and building traffic. The most interesting part was at the end, though, where I passed out PostIt notes to everyone and asked them to write down how much they would charge an actual client for the site they’d produced.

The first year students had the low-ball bids; the third year students had higher bids; the student who graduated last year and is out working in the world and paying bills had the second highest bid; and the teacher with the wife, the kid and the mortgage had a bid that far outstripped any others.

I think that reflects a learning curve about pricing. It really isn’t about how much you think the end product is worth to the client, but how much your time is worth to you.

Overall, it was a great Barcamp, absolutely heaving with fabulous people. The fabulous people part would explain why I spent six hours standing in the hallways gabbing instead of getting my arse into the session rooms to attend, you know, Barcamp sessions.

Oh well, there’s always next year!

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.

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.)