I’m delighted to announce that the 2011 Ladies’ Tea Party is a go! We’ve secured a sponsor and a venue and we are ready to make a serious dent in Belfast’s wine supply in the hours before the Irish Blog Awards!

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!

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.

The shortlists for the Irish Web Awards were announced this afternoon and traditionally, I’m quite excited – it’s a wonderful feeling to see projects I hold in great affection all grown up and doing the clients proud, and often there are one or two from my portfolio on the list. On this particular evening, however, I’m a little shocked because there are not one or two but rather twelve:

Best New Web App or Service – Sponsored by Red Cardinal

• Mindhives.com

Best Social Media Campaign – Sponsored by Cybercom

• WeddingDates.ie/WifeCarrying/

Best Government & Council Website – Sponsored by Exigent Networks

• Cycling in Dublin

Best Ecommerce Website - Sponsored by OnlineAdvertising.ie

• Curious Wines

Best SME/Small Business Website – Sponsored by Pivotal Communications

• SavieCard
• Curious Wines
• WeddingDates.ie
• James Whelan Butchers

Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by RedFly Online

• WeddingDates.ie
• Curious Wines
• SavieCard
• VSL Jewelry

Two of these sites are not even in my portfolio yet – the clients have been happily out of the gate for a while but Katherine and I are still tweaking them, and as the saying goes, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Still, I suppose they’re launched now…

Several of these nominations have little to do with me now (after all clients should be able to run their own sites) but it matters not in the slightest – these sites and these clients are my little web babies and I’m terribly, terribly proud of them when they do well like this.

If none of them manage to bring home an award, however, I’m disowning the lot.

[ image credit ]

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!