I do not, for the record, believe in celebrity. Maybe because I grew up in NYC surrounded by famous people, it’s a pretty meaningless concept to me. I can tell you that Tom Cruise rents movies like everyone else, that Isabella Rosellini eats at restaurants like everyone else, and that Cher goes to the grocery store like everyone else, too.

As a result, I am probably hard to impress. The people I admire, I admire because of what they have to say or what they’ve done, not because of who they are. I mean, even the most amazing people are just people – mostly people who wish you’d buy them a beer.

After all, everyone poops.

But if the internet excels at anything, it’s making celebrity out of molehills. It is very, very easy to get sucked into your own PR, and to start believing everything you read about yourself. I’ve watched, and continue to watch, many people trip over their own internet egos in spectacular fashion and it is, frankly, embarrassing.

A little over a year ago, when I noticed my online profile escalating rather sharply, I made some fairly rash decisions about how to manage my internet ego. This is what I decided to do:

• Stop Reading Web Stats: While it’s nice that when I write a blog post, a big bunch of people turn up to read it, that’s just weird for me. I started blogging when there were like 300 blogs online, total. I blogged before there was blogging software; I hacked a guest book script to do it. I still write for an audience of 50, and that’s how many lovely people I like to pretend are reading.
• Turn Off Twitter Notifications: Lots of interesting people turn up in my @replies or are re-tweeted by the small, trusted circle I already follow, and I find them organically. I don’t need the ego pat of knowing when someone new finds my Twitter account.
• Turn Off Google Alerts: Likewise, I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name. Often what’s said is wrong, offensive, or just so weird it’s more harmful than helpful. When I want fucking moronic, I read 4chan.
• Say No to Blog Interviews: Like newspapers and magazines, one has no control over what comes out on the other side, but I’m sad to say that in my experience bloggers are more problematic. Often the result enrages me. Very rarely does it make me happy.

I feel compelled to point out that the Smashing thing angered me not because of anything Lee Munroe did, but because of editorial choices on the part of Smashing. Not a single site of mine (and Lee sent in several) made it to the showcase part of an article called Showcase of Web Design in Ireland. Either I’m good enough to make the cut, including the showcase, or I’m not. Keeping my words but cutting my work smacks of tokenism, and I’m done with that.

Granted, I am sensitive to this issue because the context in which I am most likely to be mentioned is as a “Top Female Web Designer.” The web is awash with female web designers; I do not understand the compulsion to gather us together and stick us in a special little ghetto. I don’t want to be praised for my gender; I want to be respected for my work on its own merits.

Having said that, I’m perfectly cognisant of my abilities. I punch solidly in my weight class, but I am not a top-tier web designer. I create very nice, very usable sites for great people at nifty companies at an accessible price, and that is good enough for me.

No matter what Google Alerts may try to tell me.

I often joke that Twitter is my only source of news these days, but there is some news I’m simply unprepared to hear. I was absolutely horrified today to learn of the death of Debbie Metrustry, known up and down the Irish internet as @debbiemet.

In our first interactions, I didn’t know her last name was Metrustry and thus the source of her username. In my mental shorthand for people, she was Debbie Well Met, because absolutely everyone who had the pleasure of meeting her loved her. I’m not kidding about that. I know people say it all the time of those who have passed on, but in the snarky, gossipy, tight-knit world that is the Irish internet, I don’t know a single person who didn’t spontaneously smile and have a good word to offer whenever her name was mentioned.

Death is a cheater, but in her case seems particularly perverse. Debbie was young; sure, there was the occasional complaint about arthritic bones, but she was overflowing with enthusiasm and purpose. We all give lip service to the idea that “you only have one life” but Debbie had, in the last two years, really grabbed hold of that reality and made drastic changes to turn her life into what she wanted it to be. She was working through a career transition, was  newly dedicating herself to running, she had started a major move from Dublin, and she’d just bought land for her dream eco-house in Tipperary.

In many regards, she was just (re)starting her life; it seems cruel beyond belief that she will not live out the dreams she was building while the rest of us are left here, free to carry on in our own lives with efforts that seem so weak compared to her heroic mountain moving.

I was looking forward to seeing her again in three weeks, and at the moment I still cannot believe I will not.  I’m quite sure we’re scheduled for lunch in March and quite sure she’ll pop up in my Twitter DMs any moment now. Anything else is incomprehensible; when she’s not there, I know I will think of her as just away, dancing until dawn.

I have called the funeral home but there is still not a date, time, or specific information about services for her and details are below. Regardless of those arrangements, I’ve checked in with a few mutual friends and there will be a BTW (Blogger, Twitter, Whatever) meetup in her honour, most likely on the day of her services. I’ll post more information when it’s available but for the moment, like so many others, I simply cannot believe we’re making plans around the funeral of this woman.

Because really, she’s supposed to be here, dancing into her future.

Funeral Arrangements:
Viewings: Sunday and Monday until 8 PM
Kirwans, 21-23 Fairview Strand, Dublin 3 [map]
Service: Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 at 2 PM
Glasnevin Crematorium Chapel [map]
Burial immediately following

BTW Meetup:

Tuesday, 16 February 5 PM onwards
Le Cirk, 32 Dame Street [web]
Buses from Glasnevin: 140 [map]
Please RSVP at BTW [here] or add your name here.

Here’s a really common scenario:

You get a new client and they have a great product but no brand. Let’s say they make, I dunno, cow print toys or clothing or something, so you futz around for a while and decide to call the company Cowlabunga. (Just roll with me here.) You get to work and develop strong visuals for print and web and awesome messaging for use everywhere. The client loves everything, and then – after having stared at this shit for 60 hours – they have a crisis of faith.

Normally, these crises are some combination of the following:

1. They get hung up on the pronunciation. Is it cow-la-bunga or cool-a-bunga? Will people get confused? Frankly, it doesn’t matter – you say potato, I say patatoe, but everybody is clear about what vegetable we’re discussing. Is Vimeo pronounced vi-may-oh or vi-me-oh? I have no idea and care even less; I can spell it, find it, and host my videos on it, so whatever – it works.

2. They get literal with the logo. People who are new at starting or leading companies are universally obsessed by their own logo. And the telecom guy always wants a phone, the real estate guy always wants a house and everyone in anything to do with discounts always wants to dick around with currency symbols.

Even in 1971, Nike’s designer knew you don’t do that. Your logo does not need to be literal to be clear. Nobody thinks McDonald’s sells arches, and nobody thinks Nike sells swooshes.

A logo need not – and often arguably should not – be representative of the specific product the company sells or the specific service it delivers. That is not the job of a logo. Thinking that the logo is what defines a brand or is even the most important part of the brand experience means that someone has no understanding of what branding is and probably should not be trusted to market a company.

3. They get hung up on the logo. Once the logo is agreed, clients tend to think it’s cast in stone. It shouldn’t be, because you absolutely can play with it. Google does. The BBC does. The New Museum of Contemporary Art does, too, rendering the words NEW and MUSEUM in a consistent type face and sticking whatever they want between them.

The static logo is dead, and thank God for that because if I have to fuck up one more website, flyer or poster because some sponsor’s logo MUST have a 30mm white surround, I’m going to start taking hostages. Your logo is a tool, not a monolith; it’s there to be used, not preserved as a sacred cow.

I would suggest, however, that you not call your company Cowlabunga. It sounds like a foot disease.

My mother will, at the drop of a hat, tell you the story of how as a child, I very nearly didn’t get into my competitive fee-paying primary school because I stubbornly refused to put the blue peg in the red hole during what passes as an interview for three year olds. While my mother likes to see this as a testimony to my non-conformance and independent spirit, the fact is that I simply could not do it then and would very likely struggle to do it today at 37. My particular instances of Dyslexia and  Dyscalculia are pretty mild, although a lot of this Wikipedia entry applies to me, particularly:

• An inability to read a sequence of numbers, or transposing them when repeated, such as turning 56 into 65.
• Problems with differentiating between left and right.
• Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analogue clocks.

I was 13 before I knew that calm and clam were two different words. Sixteen was an interesting year in that for the first time I was excelling in a math class (geometry) but was still struggling to read the clock on the wall. And I still remember London’s The Big Number Change in vivid gory detail because at 22, it very nearly drove me over the edge.

Despite the fact that up until last year, I thought Tommy Collison was one of the Collision brothers, this is all generally a less cumbersome problem as an adult then it was when I was in school. Spell check, spreadsheets, calculators and a husband who doesn’t mind saying “Your other left” 27 times a day make life vastly easier. There are really only two things that regularly frustrate me in the real world: dialling long telephone numbers and sending even short text messages, both of which are a slow and arduous processes.

The internet, however, drives me insane on a near daily basis. Here are three things I commonly encounter that are often rendered badly on websites.

Exhibit 1: Logins

The fact these boxes are presented out of order makes it three times as hard for me to log into my bank, because I have to count off the numbers in my PIN on my fingers three times – quite often out loud, which rather defeats the security reason for re-arranging them in the first place. Bank of America, on the other hand, has a login system that entirely avoids this issue, with a pictographic site key that works well.

Exhibit 2: Telephone Numbers

There are worse offenders out there but still, there is no chance – zero – that I could dial that Swedish Swiss number. While Europe does not have the standard (212) 555-1212 format that the US and Canada have, some breakdown of the number is always possible, even if the decision on where to split it is entirely arbitrary. The German number is much more useful, except I don’t speak German (or Swedish, for that matter.)

Exhibit 3: Booking Calendars

This calendar system BREAKS MY BRAIN. As far as I’m concerned, I’m now departing Prague three days before I arrive. Trying to book tickets on Aer Lingus literally made me shriek with rage last week. Things that are presented side by side should match up. (I don’t know why; they just should.) Otherwise, vertically arranging calendars that have offset dates is vastly clearer, every time.

I’m a firm believer that good design makes a better experience for everyone. If your login directions are so complex that a low-literacy user can’t use your system, it sucks for everyone. If your calendar is so confusing that a mildly dyslexic person can’t book anything, it sucks for everyone. If your navigation is so convoluted that a blind person using a screen reader can’t browse your website, it sucks for everyone. In other words, solving 90% of the web’s user interface problems are not about “special” design, they’re just about good design.

And Christ knows, Aer Lingus could use some of that.

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.

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?

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 saved from the pressure of having to come up with a blog post today by the fact that I’ve very cleverly already written one – a guest post over at Joe Scanlon’s place called Five Things You Should Know About Online Marketing for Broke Start-Ups.

Technically, it went up five days ago. I didn’t notice because I spent all of last week distracted by a jaw-droppingly overwhelming work load and being convinced I was going to die of cancer. (I’m not, as it turns out, so that’s a bonus.)

Anyway, when Joe approached me to do a Five Things, he suggested something about design and I said I’d get back to him with something else. I love design – I love seeing it, I love reading about it, I love hearing about it and I love doing it, but I am completely inarticulate when it comes to writing or talking about it.

I can talk about internet marketing all day, though.  I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, and having a great time – mostly thanks to my personal AdWords guru, Dave at Redfly, who in addition to being outrageously good looking, has been very generous with his time in sorting out my dyslexic thrashings through the terribly confusing AdWords user interface.

I totally love him, and the AdWords dashboard is officially my new crack pipe.

While taking a few minutes last night to search for yet more Unmitigated Tears of Joy Obama Political Porn, my attention was momentarily diverted when, on the front page of CNN, I saw an article that mentioned Twitter.

I’m always happy when Twitter gets the big press, but I was doubly delighted to click through and see Eoghan McCabe and the Contrast crew’s nefarious Qwitter mentioned – not once, but twice in this article about Twitter, its application in the corporate world, and the hellspawn of spinoff applications it has launched.

To my enormous dismay, there was no mention of Twitterfone, but I’m sure that was just a tragic oversight on the journalist’s part.

Anyway, getting ink on CNN.com is no small thing,  so it’s nice the boys have something to raise a glass to at their open get-together this evening. If you go, smack them with a newspaper or something and say congratulations for me.

(Previously: Qwitter is for Friends)