Last month, I travelled up to Dublin to present a talk called “If You Build It, They Won’t Come” at the Dot Conf. Except in the days before the conference, I became obsessed with a meme I first encountered on MetaFilter. So, in a last minute change to the lineup, I spent 25 minutes at an industry conference for web and marketing professionals talking about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Presentation starts at 2:22 because I didn’t edit this video — here’s a direct link:

This presentation is subtitled “The evolving relationship between brands and consumers” and whips through candy bars, Harry Potter, and Jedis before diving into the unexpected online fan base the new My Little Pony franchise found on 4Chan.

As per usual, while I am always happy to share my slides, they’re pretty much useless as I don’t read off them and they contain virtually no text to provide stand-alone narrative. But all of the links for all of the sources and stories for these slides are listed in the first comment there, so feel free to peruse at your leisure.

This presentation went over really well with the 300-strong audience, who were great – responsive and fun – and who made #pony trend on Twitter in Ireland. (Which pretty much made my day, so thanks for that!) Many thanks to Emma Henderson and NCI, who hosted this event in excellent style and were happy to roll with it when I changed what I wanted to speak about at the very last minute.

Although I am neither an 8 year old girl nor a 22 year old straight white male, I am a genuine My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan. All 26 episodes are available as full-length uploads on YouTube, and I’ve watched them all. If you just want to dive in, I would suggest Ep 16, Sonic Rainboom.

Due to time constraints, the Dot Conf audience was spared from the planned sing-a-long, but you should feel free to rock out at home to the Equestria Girls video that premiered on Equestria Daily:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And as a special bonus round for all you secret MLP FIM fans: Equestria Girls Over-Extended 1 Hour Loop!

Update: This post was linked by Equestria Daily, generating a ton of traffic and a ton of comments over there. Thanks to the MLP community for being gracious and kind about this presentation and my errors.

The IBA Belfast Photowalk organised by Davy McDonald kicks off at noon and is a great way to tour Belfast while meeting new people and taking your camera for a spin. Don’t be inimidated – you can shoot using anything from your in-pocket iPhone to your huge DSLR!
Saturday, 19 March, 11:45 am – Belfast City Hall
Info | Signup

Walter Higgens is organising a pre-event meal called Blog Awards Bites with an open table booked for 12 at paul Rankin’s Cayenne. Meal price is £18.50 and you can sign up online; everyone’s welcome!
Saturday, 19 March, 5 pm – Cayenne Restaurant
Info | Signup

The ever-fabulous Ladies Tea Party (where by “tea” we mean “wine, and lots of it”) is all set to go and includes food, drink, dessert and swanky swag bags at £20 per head. Its open to all bloggers, wanna be bloggers and dedicated blog readers and draws a friendly, welcoming crowd!
Saturday, 19 March, 5 pm – Harlem Cafe
Info | Signup

What: The BAGglitz Ladies Tea Party
When: Saturday, 19 March 2011, 5 – 8 PM
Where: The Harlem Cafe, 34 Bedford Street, BT2 7FF
Where: The Piano Bar, Europa Hotel, Belfast
Who: You! A pre-Blog-Awards mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers
Tickets: Now available; limited to 40.

This event is now in its fourth year so I figured it was time to give it a dedicated website. I also figured that the ability to brand an event site for a sponsor would make it easier to attract one, and that it was going to be harder for me to do that this year since I’m not well-networked with any businesses in the north.

In the end, it turned out that I had the perfect client for this party: the recently launched BAGglitz.com is an Irish online retailer of handbag hangers, purse clips and charms with free international shipping so you can send swanky, snazzy, glitzy gifts to your girlfriends anywhere. It’s a great match and now I’m really looking forward to the gift bags! Many thanks to BAGglitz for sponsoring – sponsors make this event happen every year for a fabulous collection of women bloggers.

The Irish Blog Awards are my favourite event on the Irish Internet social calendar, partly because they’re huge fun and partly because the Ladies Tea Party beforehand is always such a friendly, fun warm-up for them. (One bottle of wine per person does tend to do that…) I’m really excited and looking forward to catching up with everyone from last year and meeting loads of new people this year. TEA PARTY YAY!

Note: In previous years, organisation, ticketing and question-answering for this event has taken place here on my blog. This year, please post comments, woots, yays and oh my God what do I wear? over at the Ladies’ Tea Party website. Thank you!

YAY! BarCamp Cork is back, and it looks like Webworks will be hosting a lineup with some great speakers starting at 10 am. I had a blast at last year’s camp, and am very excited for a Saturday spent meeting great people at a fun and informal (un)conference, even if it means I have to be somewhere at the inhuman hour of 10am. (I hope to God Cafe Gusto is bringing the coffee…)

It really is a great event, and dogs, kids, and partners are always welcome.

This year I’ll be doing a Bootcamp Blitz session, which is basically a rapid fire 10 minute Bootcamp of your online business or startup. Everyone who attends the session is a potential victim volunteer, and we’ll try to do 3 sites in a 30-minute session. No idea where it will be in the schedule but if it tickles your fancy, please feel free to come – time will be up on the scheduling board.

And yes, Eimear the Wonderdog will be there :)

Back to work today and just about recovered from the 2010 Irish Web Awards. It was a huge night, in more ways than one — this year something like 450 people packed out the Mansion House in swanky D2 style, complete with tuxedo’d brass band.

These awards have grown tremendously since they started 3 years ago; the first year, I knew absolutely everyone and it was more like an Irish Internet reunion. The second year, I knew maybe half the people and had a ball meeting the other half, even if I had to stay up until 5am to do it. This year, I couldn’t even find the 1/3rd of the people I knew, and basically gave up on reaching that goal at around 1 am. The really sexy, fast and flawless iPad check in system for tickets that John Blackbourne put together worked so well that it made me think we might need an iPhone app next year to geo-locate individuals in the crowd; I’m pretty sure the Irish Web Awards could raise a nice packet for a charity of choice with one of those! (I’d totally buy it, except I’d have to buy an iPhone to use it…)

The production values this year were super-impressive; the venue, the lighting and the band together with the A/V for the shortlisted sites and the granite awards themselves really bumped the Awards up a notch, but the parts that give these awards their unique and fun flavour – Rick O’Shea’s brilliant MCing, the coveted Made in Hollywood props, the totally class cupcakes, this year’s ice cream truck! – were all there in full force to keep the IWAs true to their roots and deliver a great night out.

Damien Mulley, the sponsors, the volunteers and Realex all deserve a standing ovation for showing that you can deliver a class event like this year’s IWAs for €30 a head. There are only four big web awards do’s each year in Ireland, and while the others are much more formal, sit-down dinners, I have yet to eat a black tie chicken meal that was worth the extra €90 in ticket price. Seriously, screw that – this is the way to do it.

I was, obviously, delighted that James Whelan Butchers scored a gong in the Best SME/Small Business Website category. Katherine Nolan and I worked on that site for nearly a year and it was very unfortunate she was unable to be there to enjoy the moment; we took that site live in September after many months of very hard graft, barely making the IWA deadline and I’m glad we were able to get it into this year’s awards.

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.

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

At least, that’s what I’ll be telling my bank manager when I ask him for an overdraft extension…

March 6 -7th I’ll be at WordCamp Ireland, although I’m actually travelling up to Kilkenny on the 2nd to prepare all week – 200 bags do not stuff themselves. There are still something like 30 tickets, so get ‘em while they’re hot.

March 14 – 18th I’ll be in Las Vegas for MIX10, staying next door at The Luxor. I’ll know virtually nobody but the schedule looks great and there are some talks I’m really keen to go to, although nothing is going to keep me out of CSI: The Experience.

March 27th I’ll be getting drunk sipping tea in an extremely posh suite at the g for the Ladies Tea Party before the Irish Blog Awards. I just love Tea Party; it is so friendly and fun and great to meet so many bloggers in a smaller setting. Come along!

March 27th, assuming I have not passed out by 7 PM, I’ll also be at the Irish Blog Awards. It is genuinely a great night out, and hopefully I’ll be cheering for a few clients who make it from the long list to the short list. Go team go!

The event I look forward to most every year is the Irish Blog Awards, although honestly it’s mostly because of the Ladies Tea Party held before hand. And this year, when it was announced that the awards were being held in Galway, I set my heart on one of the swankiest venues in Ireland.

Thanks to help from Maria Moynihan and sponsorship from L’Onglex, I’m delighted to announce that the L’Onglex Ladies Tea Party will be held in a posh, posh suite at the posh, posh g hotel. The date is 27 March from 4 – 7 PM, and this year’s event will include food, drink, tea, cakes and even gift bags!

And frankly, given the amount of changing, primping, and even hair dying that went on at last year’s event, we’ve given in and decided to open a DIY Nail Bar so you can strip off your old colour and prepare to paint the town and your toes red (or Absolutely Alice, or Pompeii Purple, or…). We’ll provide all the varnish, L’Onglex and cotton wool you can eat; just sit down with your fingers and toes and get your glam on.

As in previous years, tickets are €17 and must be pre-booked on the honour system. If you don’t know anyone, don’t worry; the whole point is to meet other women bloggers and make friends before the awards. It’s a great, fun and buzzy afternoon, and you are genuinely welcome.

Here come the girls, baby…

What: The L’Onglex Ladies’ Tea Party
Who: You. A pre-event mixer for Ireland’s women bloggers.
When: Saturday, 27 March from 4 – 7 PM
Where: The absolutely fabulous g hotel
Why: Food, drink, nail painting, general merriment
How: Tickets are €17 per person and are limited to 40.
Registration & Info: NOW OPEN

Please ask questions here or follow @LadiesTeaParty on Twitter :)

Katherine Nolan and I are delighted to announce that WordCamp Ireland, Ireland’s first conference for WordPress,  is officially launched. We’ve spent a mad few days talking to venues, sponsors and speakers and all systems are go: we’ll be taking over Langton’s Hotel in Kilkenny on March 6th and 7th, 2010 along with 35 speakers, 200 attendees and a metric tonne of swag.

It is going to be a great conference with both excellent speakers and loads of social activities so you don’t sort of get stranded in a corner (we hate that) and is specifically family-friendly so you can bring the whole gang. The venue is also handicap accessible and utterly amazing – we are so excited it’s all come together like this.

This site was a snap to do because Katherine and I work pretty much flawlessly together. I did the pretty, she did the clever, and we’re in total agreement about everything to do with conference organising. It’s like marriage, only perfect :)

PS: Follow @WordCampIRL on Twitter for updates, or see the blog.