A lot of events…

The biggest date for most people in the Irish blogosphere in the coming weeks won’t be Mother’s Day. It will, of course, be the Irish Blog Awards held on March 1st in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Before that, under the umbrella of IWTC, will be the inaugural Ireland Geek Girl Dinner, organised by Martha Rotter and sponsored by Microsoft. This event isn’t totally exclusive, as men can attend, but only when invited by one of the geek girls. Since Paul Walsh had been begging for an invite for a while now, I finally took pity on him and invited him!

The end of the week sees the 2008 Irish Blog Awards ceremony taking place at the Alexander Hotel. Once again, Damien Mulley has put in a phenomenal amount of work in organising this event. Unlike some of the other technology awards ceremonies on this island, it’s a more informal event, costing only €10 entry, which is donated to charity. The shortlists have now been announced and the hard-working judges have slogged their way through reviewing all these blogs in order to find the winners in each category.

On the same day as the ceremony, several different meetups have been arranged, as people take the opportunity to catch up with those travelling in from round the country. Firstly, we have Red Mum’s Photo Meet, where they are welcoming people of all skill levels for a simple non-themed photo walk – should see some great shots out of this!

Just after this is the Ladies Tea Party, organised by designer extraordinaire Sabrina Dent. If you’re not into tea, then don’t worry – Microsoft Ireland have kindly offered to sponsor some nibbles on the day and I think a lot of us will be swigging back Martinis!

Sabrina was also responsible for the wonderful logos in use for the Photo Meet, Gourmet Brunch and Tea Party:

On the day after the Blog Awards, Deborah is organising a Gourmet Brunch for those left around Dublin.

A few others will be heading directly back to Cork for WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008, including a bloggers dinner that is currently being organised by Alexia Golez / Tom Raftery. However, I reckon that I’ll be taking a rest on the Day after the Blog Awards!

The following weekend sees the latest incarnation of the BarCamp phenomenon in Ireland. CreativeCamp in Kilkenny Castle on Sat 8th March. I’ll be attending, along with my Husband, George. He, along with several of his colleagues, will be representing Blacknight, who have been sponsors of all the Irish BarCamp style events so far. Their MD, Michele Neylon, was even kind enough to purchase the domain barcamp.ie when I bugged him about it, so that all future Irish camps can have their own sub-domain there.

I’m also delighted to see that the CreativeCamp organisers have ditched the traditional wiki format completely. It never worked on the previous camps, and I’ve bitched about it at length before. They have a lovely sign-up system, where people can input the details of the talks / panels that they want to organise and it transfers to the speakers page here The exact same applies to the registration and attendees pages.

I’ve signed up to be on one of the panels, entitled: Women & Technology – grabbing the blogosphere by the balls – a panel discussion facilitated by Krishna De on women & technology (as titled above).The panel includes Elly Parker, Sabrina Dent, Martha Rotter & Alexia Golez. I guess I should really start prepping for this to make sure I have something coherent to talk about!