Archive for the 'BlogAwards' Category

The Irish Blog Awards 2008 - The Aftermath

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

Great night, great crowd, A whole hearted success and our congratulations go out Damien for another cracking night. Maman Poulet has produced a beautiful page of the winners that far exceeds my humble HTML skills so swing over there for the authoritative list.

This was the year when the real world took over from the geeks with people like GrannyMar and HeadRambles sweeping all before them. In fact the only techno geek to feature was Robin Blandford under the best technology blog moniker for his ByteSurgery blog.

Myself and Pat Phelan raced each other to get the results out on twitter and live blogged them (feeling a little quaint all the while!). I think the organisers might do this themselves in the future with prepared post that reveals itself as the annoucements are made. I was trying to type and chase links while the same time failing horribly to work out the name of the best irish blog.

There is a tagged record of the night in pictures on pix.ie.

A top night, my congratulations to all the winners!

Posted in 2008, BlogAwards, pix.ie | 4 Comments »

Geek Week in Dublin

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Its all happening this week on the conference front in Dublin.

From Tuesday through Friday we have the Irish Web Technology Conference hosted at the Cineworld Complex on Parnell Street. Fergus Burns and Conor O’Neill will be presenting and I would suggest you also try and catch Paddy Holohan of Newbay. Paddy has made more money from software in the last twenty years than is probably legal :-). If you are really stuck, you could kill and hour with this guy.

The IWTC unfortunately clashes with two other great events I want to attend this week as well. XCellerate 2008 is a tabled as “Bringing Silicon Valley to Ireland” but seems to heavily focussed on an (impressive) lineup of irish presenters including Brian Caulfield, Chris Horn, Bernie Cullinane and Shay Garvey.

Its only a half day affair so in theory you could nip across to The Ballsbridge Court (aka the Berkeley Court) for the morning if you wanted to catch up on what appears to be a ISA conference from 5 years ago, dug up and dusted off.

The real clash comes with the ISA Conference next day which has some great speakers but the worst website I have ever seen (did I say website, web page! more like). Guy Kawasaki, the ex Apple Evangelist, A-list blogger and sometimes VC at Garage Ventures is paired with Anthony Williams the co-author of Wikinomics. These are world class speakers and its a real coup for the ISA to get them to come to Ireland. The ISA Conference is hosted at the O’Reilly Institute, UCD in Belfield.

Then to cap it all off on Saturday we have the Irish Blog Awards, organised by Irelands most prolific blogger, Damien Mulley for the third year in a row. This will held at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin (just behind Trinity). Entrance fee is €10 and a good night is guranteed for all.

Don’t even get me started on BlogTalk 2008 which kicks off on Sunday in Cork.

Prices are as follows:

  • IWTC : Four Days, 41 speakers : €245 but €189 if you pre-register online
  • XCellerate 2008 : Half Day, €100 or 450 bundle which gives you access to the ISA Conference
  • ISA Conference : Members €250, Non members €300, Incubation Centre Member €200
  • BlogAwards : €10 on the door

I think the keepers are the IWTC for the scope of its presenters, the ISA conference for Guy and Anthony and the BlogAwards because Damien sensibly organised it not to clash with anyone else.

Posted in BlogAwards, ISA, IWTC, XCellerate2008 | 1 Comment »