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!

Firstly, I won’t be going as I’ll be on honeymoon.

With BarCamp Galway less than a month away, the usual blogstorm has broken out about how to make BarCamp better, how to break the cliqué-ness of it, how to avoid wikis, make sign up easier, all the usual stuff that we’ve heard at each one since the original…

Damien has a good post up with a bunch of comments, and I’m reposting one of my comments below. I have some ideas that I think would help the process, I have a framework for putting them into place, but I need a coder to volunteer some time to make it happen. Will any of you take my up on my challenge??

Oh yeah, and regarding wikis - I had an idea for BC Dublin that never got implemented…

Michele Neylon from Blacknight purchased www.barcamp.ie on my advice ages ago. Any future BarCamps in the island of Ireland should contact him and request usage of their sub-domain (BK will most likely look after the hosting as part of their sponsorship, they’ve been good to all the previous Barcamps) - i.e. galway.barcamp.ie

On that sub-domain have the ‘What is BarCamp’ and a sign-up form as the main page. Have sub-pages for ‘location, direction and accommodation’, blog, attendees and talk lists. Make it clear and easily navigable.

Is there anyone out there who is complaining about the wiki usage that would be willing to donate a few hours of coding time to developing a basic sign-up page that would then spit out the list of attendees onto another page?

This would also mean that you would get the same info about each attendee in the same format. It would give the ability to send a couple of reminder emails nearer to the time and/or inform attendees about any changes, rather than trying to advise them via wikis and multiple blogs.

Right then, so who’s going to stop their moaning and actually do something to fix this??

Update: Visual version of the proposal here. Get your comments and suggestions in before iit’s too late!

As I’ve said in a few other posts, I was attending meetings in the Phoenix area of Arizona last week. Although we were in solid meetings all day from 8am - 5pm (and sometimes later), I was still able to get out and about seeing old friends and shopping.

I have a huge amount of thoughts and observations on AZ, but I can’t be bothered to type them all, so I’m going to do something that Mum has been bugging me to do for ages, and throw together a podcast, it should be up later this week.
Talking of Mum, I called her when I landed back in Heathrow - with the 7-hour time difference and her having ‘thrown out’ her back last week, I just never got a chance to talk to her while I was away. Practically the first words out of her mouth were “I got two nominations, and you only got one!”. She was, of course, talking about the Irish Blog Awards, the shortlists for which had been announced while I was flying back over the Atlantic.

It seems that someone out there likes what I do, as I’ve been nominated in the Best Newcomer category, while Mum managed to rake in nominations for both Best Podcaster and best Podcast (for ‘The Favour‘ - her FIRST EVER podcast!). Voting is now on until Friday 16th Feb and then the top 5 (?) in each category go forward before the panel of judges.

So go forth and vote for ellybabes for Best Newcomer!

There’s a lot of strong competition in the category, but I’d love to even make it to the final five on the shortlist and have an excuse to go to the awards ceremony…

And while you’re there, you may as well pop in a vote for oldbones in the Best Podcast and Best Podcaster cetegories!

I seem to have not really suffered with Jetlag this time, which is unusual for me, but I’m very glad that I didn’t, as the next few weeks will be very busy - there’s only 17 weeks until ‘the wedding’ apparently and I still have to squeeze in work trips to Israel and Vietnam before then, nevermind planning the whole wedding thing!!!

This is a copy of a post that I just loaded up over at the BarCamp Dublin blog. Remember to head over and subscribe to the RSS to keep up to date with our updates.

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Following the success of the first two Irish BarCamps in Cork and Waterford, we are pleased to announce that BarCamp Dublin will be held in the Digital Hub on Saturday 21^st April 2007.

BarCamp is a technology-focused, ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around what they spend their days and nights toiling away on.

It is an informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions.

BarCamp is free. However, we strongly encourage attendees to sign up so we can gauge how many will attend and plan accordingly. Signing up can be done by adding your name to the Wiki at http://barcamp.org/BarCampIreland3 or by e-mailing to info@barcampdublin.com

More information on our sponsors will be released soon.

The organizational team for this event is as follows:

Elly Parker http://blog.ellybabes.com

Joe Drumgoole http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/

Paul Walsh http://segala.com/blog/

Eoghan McCabe http://www.eoghanmccabe.com/naive-by-design/

More information can be found via the BarCamp Dublin blog @ http://www.barcampdublin.com

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On a personal note, I’d like to thank both Tom Raftery and John Breslin. I’m in Arizona this week and have been in long meetings all day, so I missed the whole discussion and requests asking them to consider postponing BarCamp Cork and BarCamp Galway, respectively. I’m delighted to see the spirit of collaboration between the Irish bloggers!

I have to apologise as well, we have been planning this for a few weeks now, but had decided to hold off on releasing any solid details until we had managed to confirm our venue and date. The organizing team is hoping to have a meeting next week, so hopefully we will have some more details for you then. Thanks to everyone for their help so far.

I’ve been meaning to load up my presentation that I gave at BarCamp a few weeks ago, but it kept slipping my mind. I had a decent turnout, made harder that I was running against one of the more popular panel session!

My session really did pose more questions than it answered, and one of the suggestions made during it was that we ask Simon McGarr to take over the topic at a future BarCamp (hopefully more about that soon!). It’s a fascinating topic that is really only rearing it’s head now.

A related article showed up on Gizmodo yesterday about how to crack a Windows password - while it’s something that can be used for wrong-doing, it’s something that we need to be able to do in the case of the death of a partner….

PowerPoint is available here.

Now that the secret of the Pecha Kucha session is out in the wild (or ‘Pikachu’ as Laura kept referring to it!), I thought I’d post up a few notes and links to the sites I talked about. Everyone else that spoke used del.icio.us for their links, and although I tried using it at one point; I much preferred the Google Bookmark interface. For all the del.icio.us users, it was as simple as sticking their userID into a lovely interface website, or a random userID instead as the hilarious Will was coerced into doing! I wanted to speak to a few sites, so I loaded up about 18 tabs on my browser and gave a high-speed explanation of each (and hopefully i didn’t run too far over time…). I haven’t seen any video of this session yet, so here’s a run-down of some of the sites I recommended that day…
Google Reader

When it comes to RSS, I used to be a NewsGator aficionado, but it really started wigging me out last year - I would keep marking posts as read and the page would refresh and they would still be there, mixed in with the new ones. I decided to make the switch to Google Reader based on recommendations made in several blogs that I read. It couldn’t have been easier, I was given full instructions in how to extract my feeds as a list and imported them into Google Reader - 5 mins later I was up and running. As we often hear from Scoble, you soon get used to pressing ‘J’ to move to the next item and ‘K’ to move back to the previous (and ‘R’ is refresh!). I can scan through my feeds much quicker and it’s a lovely clean interface to boot.

Page2RSS

Continuing on the RSS theme, while Google Reader is excellent at finding any feed available on a webpage, it’s of no use if there is no feed available. That’s where Page2RSS comes in - it will monitor any page for updates and then deliver them direct to your RSS reader. Furthermore, if you use Firefox, then you can create a toolbar button to make it into a one-click process (well, one click to create the RSS feed and another to add it to Google Reader in my case!). Recently it came in useful for me to track the changes to the BarCamp SouthEast wiki.

VideoJug

I posted a review of VideoJug previously, and i have to say that my opinion hasn’t really changed. I still mainly use the site to find recipes, and I’m often to be found in the kitchen with the laptop wirelessly connected as I review a video ‘one last time’ before beginning to cook! The recipes are mainly simple and rarely use hard-to-find ingredients, so they’re perfect for store-cupboard cooking (as I like to refer to the night before I go shopping!). My favourite recipe so far? Has to be Pan-Fried Tuna!

Box.net

I’ve been trying to get all my information online this year, so that I can access it from any computer - I ended up with half my information on my work laptop and the rest on the main PC at home. I was looking for an online document storage and collaboration solution, and while Google Docs and Spreadsheets is good for basic Word and Excel documents it doesn’t cover my needs regarding PDF’s, JPG’s, PowerPoint, etc… Box.net doesn’t give me in-line editing and collaboration, but it does allow me to store my life online and access it from anywhere, so it’s half the battle won! and not to mention that you can have up to 1GB of storage for free…
BookMooch

BookMooch has to be one of my all time favourite sites. I’m an avid reader and I can’t afford to support my book habit, so secondhand shops and Amazon used to feed it slightly cheaper instead! But BookMooch allows you to trade your old books and request other people’s second hand ones in exchange for points. Points are gained for listing books, sending them to other people and leaving feedback amongst other things. You can then spend these points on requesting books that you desire from other members - the only thing it ever costs you is the postage of sending your books out. I worked out how much I had ’spent’ on books from there recently and it worked out that for every book I was receiving, it was costing me about €3.00 - not bad!
Beaut.ie

If you haven’t discovered the delicious mix of wisdom and wit that’s being dispensed on the subject of beauty by the two beautiful babes of beaut.ie then you need to head over there quickly! Sisters Aphrodite and Kirstie along with their ever-growing band of guest writers post about everything beauty related and answer their readers questions whilst questing for the next great beauty bargain. They’ve burst onto the Irish blog scene in a big way over the last few months and have even managed to persuade two of their readers to go test-drive a colonic hydrotherapy procedure! Rumours abound that I may be doing a guest post or two for them in the near future…
Google Customised HomePage

Finally, I left the longest for last: A lot of people don’t realise that if you have a Google Account, then you can customise your Google homepage with lots of cool widgets - as you can see below, on mine I currently have a ton of stuff that I access frequently:

Sticky Note - I’m a list maker, that’s for sure. I can’t start work on anything until I’ve made a list of what needs to be done. Unfortunately, lists end up everywhere, so using Sticky Note means that i can access my personal to-do list from anywhere.

To-Do List - Used in conjunction with Sticky Note, I use this is to keep longer term tasks handily listed.

Bookmarks - this is just a quick link into my Google Bookmarks, after all this time I’m finally trying to pare down my 700+ favourites that I’ve been carrying around for years and make them accessible online.

TinyURL Creator - if you haven’t found TinyURL yet, then head over there and watch them work their magic!

Toggle Search Bar - Handy widget that toggles the main Google search bar on and off at the top of the page - usually toggled to ‘off’ on my page, as I use the built-in Google search in Firefox.

Google Analytics - Handy little snapshot that lets me see ‘at-a-glance’ my Google Analytics stats for the day so far.

Dictionary.com - A nice little widget allowing you to query a word on the dictionary.com site.

Currency Converter - Living in Ireland as I do, I regularly shop on the internet and buy things from around the world - this is how I check that they really are cheaper, that I’m not just imagining it!

The Google 15 - there is a myth that most new Google employees put on at least 15lb in weight over their first year, due to all the free food and drinks that they get at work. I don’t work there, but I’ve certainly put on my own version of that weight over the past 2 years! This widget tracks your weight on a daily basis, showing you a running average and your goal weight.

Google Calculator - I was never able to convert from oz to g, km to miles or any American weight measure to any UK weight measure - this does it for me!

Google Docs & Spreadsheets - Displays any documents I have stored in Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Date & Time - that has to be self-explanatory, surely?

ColorJunction & Geography Zone - a couple of little game widgets for when I have a sec to spare! and finally…

Weather - I like to track weather in several cities at a time, especially since I work as part of a virtual team - it’s always nice to be able to chat to someone without first having to ask, “So what’s the weather like there today?” - it’s much more interesting to be able to say “Ooohhh, I see you’re having a heat-wave at the moment, wish I was there!”

If you don’t like to have things as cluttered as I do, you can create multiple tabs on your homepage and store things as you please.

That’s the end of my review of my ‘can’t live without’ websites from last year - so let me know -

Damien has a great article in the Tribune this weekend about BarCamp, the new tech bubble and VC. Go read it!

BarCamp SouthEast is taking place in Waterford on Saturday 20th January. If you want to attend, then please sign up on the wiki, or send your name to barcampsoutheast at gmail dot com. You can also follow the planning on the blog. We’ll be heading down on the Saturday morning and staying in the Ramada that night - plans are currently being made for dinner and drinks afterward.

The last BarCamp was a ball of fun and as far as I know, everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves. My talk seemed to be well received, so I’ve agreed to do another one, entitled ‘Death and Divorce in the Digital World’.

Now to avoid confusion, I’m not talking about death of avatars in Second Life or similar - Sabrina Dent is the Second Life expert and she will be talking again to “Second Life and Virtual World opportunities” - her talk was excellent the last time and a lot of people were sorry to have missed it!

My interest area this time is leading a session on how we deal with death of a partner or a divorce in this technological age - how do we decide on how the shared digital information that a couple have accumulated is distributed or shared?

In the case of the sudden death of a partner, how do you access their e-mail accounts and stored online information? What do you do in the case of certain services that are registered in their name, such as Video on demand services?

Alternatively, if a divorce is messy and one partner chooses to lock their ex-partner out of some online information (e.g. a shared e-mail account), how do you go about either preventing or resolving this?

This is really all the planning I have done this far, I’m going to need to flesh this out a bit more in the next few weeks and prep some slides to go with it - here’s hoping it will go down as well as the last one!

Just a quick post to say a massive “Thanks” to Conor, Walter and Damien for organising a phenomenal BarCamp down in Cork on Saturday… All the blog press since the even seems to be very positive, and I can’t wait to get another one of these events organised, hopefully in Dublin next time.

Thanks to George and Donncha for recording my presentation, George got the first portion, and Donncha the second half on his cool macbook - not sure what the sound quality is like, but give it a go…

Getting Granny Podcasting (or: Encouraging web usage in non-technical people) presented by Elly Parker at BarCamp Ireland on 30th September 2006 in WebWorks, Cork, Ireland.

And finally, I can’t forget the real star of the show, grannymar. To listen to some of her podcasts (which I think are great, but then I’m biased hit the jump here….

Tags: BarCampIreland BarCampIreland1 BarCamp

Session 4 and listening to Bernie Goldbach talk about how he dropped 35,000 on a failed startup. George is off finding out how to get Venture Capital, I’m now trying to find out how he would keep it once he got it!!!

He makes some very interesting points:

• You need to watch for the ‘red lights’ and know when to back away from things;
• Don’t fund things out of your own pocket;
• Use an experienced business manager that can advise you well;
• Broadband is an essential piece of infrastructure for a technology company (falls under ‘Location, Location, Location!)

Tags: BarCampIreland BarCampIreland1 BarCamp