Blogging the Election – *breathe out*

Well that was fun.

Red Mum took some fantastic photos. I really like this one of the four of us organisers:

Blogging the Election organisers

Sorry to the vegetarians for the lack of food for you guys. I’ll take full blame for that. It won’t happen next time. BTW, thanks to Wrappido who did the food and beverages. They gave us a massive discount and were very professional. Much cheaper than O’Briens. You’d think after showing Brody’s vid we’d get cheap sambos! I’d heartily recommend Wrappido if you need catering for events around Dublin. I might use them for the blog awards actually.

Good to talk to some new faces as well as familiar faces from BarCamp and the Blog Awards.

Kevin the Disillusioned Trendy still needs a haircut. Now that he’s a PD it should be a far more severe haircut really. BTW lads, congrats on joining the PDs and pissing off so many people. Everything you do is carefully considered and this I’m sure is no different. Well done on making a choice.

The more I know Elly the more insaner she seems. Her future hubby on the phone telling me “No Jaegerbombs” was cute. And there wasn’t because the pub had no jaegermeister.

Richard Delevan, thank you for taking time out of a busy schedule to start the whole thing off. Appreciated.

Damien Blake is dead on and fair play to you for coming all the way from Letterkenny after traveling all the way to Cork the weekend before too. Thank you too to Ciaran Cuffe and Dominic Hannigan. Very much appreciated guys. Thanks for taking a saturday off for us bloggers. We need more politicians that see blogging and bloggers as worth setting aside time for, even a small amount. It’s not that blogs are going to be the be-all and end-all of everything, they’re not, but they’ll be part of politics and so many other thingsfrom now on. It’s a shame that some politicians would only come if they got on the platform but the rules were there, you had to blog and so some politicans wouldn’t come and be in the audience.

We definitely need more women politicians who blog and hopefully we can pressure people into doing it. Hopefully some of the advisors might change their mind and stop saying that blogging is a waste of time.

Guido is a professional shit stirrer. And none of us were surprised when he took out his Irish passport. Seriously man, well done, you’ve changed the media landscape. Your talk was very educational and personally I found it inspiring. Gave me a few ideas for sure. Guy News. Love it!

Simon McGarr’s talk on libel sufficiently scared the shit out of most people. Are we all safer now that we know to be very safe we should turn off the computers, cut the cables, melt the keyboards, lock ourselves in a concrete bunker and cower in the corner? I think Simon’s section drew more questions than anything else. He should have handed out cards. It might be nice to have a follow-up with a Q+A session or something like that.

Thanks to Antoin for the FOI talk and valid examples. Hopefully we’ll see more bloggers use FOI.

Shame more people couldn’t come along. We’re a good few hundred euros in the red but hopefully we’ll have another event before the election and carry over the costs into that. That is if people want another event.

Big well done to Mick, Suzy and Cian who I was glad to assist to get this going. Cian was the shining star at this and it was nice to see notme running about the place making sure everything was going well. Someone should nominate him for some blog award or something…

6 Responses to “Blogging the Election – *breathe out*”

  1. Twenty Major says:

    Will there be a podcast of Simon’s talk?

  2. elly parker says:

    Insane? Me? Never!!!

    Great conference and you deserve a big pat on the back along with Cian, Suzy and Mick!

  3. Kevin says:

    Disillusioned Trendy? I like it! So much so that I might actually become trendy, in order to valididate it.

    In any case, congratulations to all involved. At Cian’s age, I certainly won’t have the courage, nevermind motivation, to organise such an event. Fair play there, and to everyone else of course. And as far as finances go, what’s the story?

  4. Cian says:

    twenty, keep checking either bernie at podcasting.ie or the conference page at irishelection for the podcast. it should be up some time in the coming days.

    Damien. thanks for the kind words, it was a pleasure to work with such wonderful bloggers and people.
    C

  5. […] [Edit: I blatantly cogged Damien’s fine piece of blogging work because it summed up my sentiments on the day exactly. Thanks to everyone who came, who spoke, who sponsored. We appreciate it and we very nearly ran into the black ink! Damien asks below and I too am curious, is there an interest in a BlogCon2?] Well that was fun. […]

  6. Simon McGarr says:

    To be honest, you’d get a more succinct and focused version of the talk if you read the Digital Rights Ireland libel pamphlet, on which I based my talk. I had a small hand in it and it does give a decent overview of defamation, from the perspective of online publishing.

    I didn’t intend to scare people. But I do think that for people to make real choices about what they want to publish they need to know the rules and risks that apply.

    Urging people to be fearless, without telling them what might happen to them as a consequence is not something I’d feel was fair.