Damien Mulley

See this boards.ie thread.

That’s a new record for sure. Wonder what brought all those people here? 🙂

Awards launched for Irish bloggers and Recognition for
Irish bloggers.

Edit: 210 votes so far today!

Further Edit: I appear on the Ireland Digital Podcast (No. 17) with Alex and Steve. We start off on blogs and go into IrelandOffline territory and regulation. Yes, it gets boring, but then we get back on topic.

I just did a press interview there and was asked who was the first blogger in Ireland. It’d be good to research who this was. I don’t know who it was but I did mention that Ireland had one of the first websites in the world thanks to Peter Flynn of UCC so Irish people were getting their point across online since the very start. So who was our first blogger or the first website which allowed comments on a page (and not via a guest book)?

Draft 2. Thanks to all for the public and private feedback.

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2fm DJ Rick O’Shea is to host Ireland’s first ever Blogging Awards. The radio show host will act as MC for the awards bash, billed as the inaugural celebration of Ireland’s online blogging community. O’Shea began his own online weblog in 2005, and volunteered his MC services as one of Ireland’s most high-profile bloggers. Ireland’s blog community has mushroomed in 2005 with over 1000 people now sharing their views and opinions on anything that interests them.

Event organiser Damien Mulley commented on the event “While the Irish blogging community is small right now, the community outputs a considerable amount of work that is consistently of very high quality. With this in mind we decided that having an awards event now would be a way of showing the newest members of the Irish Blogging Community the blogs that our community is most proud of. The awards will be our quality mark.”

Rick O’Shea commented “It’s an honour to be asked to host what we all know will be the first of many nights to honour people who blog”

Blog Facts:
* There are currently 27 Million blogs online.
* A new blog is created every second.
* The total number of blogs double about every 5 months.
* 13% of all blogs are updated at least on a weekly basis.

What is a blog, what is blogging?

Blogging allows anyone to publish and distribute their opinion online about any topic via their own website or a free blogging service. Blogs are like a modern day version of a printing press with the user having full control of the message but additionally blogs allow anyone to comment on the opinons generated by a blogger. This instantly creates a conversation between people from all over the globe.

Well known bloggers:
Jeremy Thompson from Sky News – http://jeremythompson.typepad.com/my_weblog/
Inventor of the Web Tim Berners Lee – http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
Author Neil Gaiman – http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/
Rosie O’Donnell – http://www.rosie.com/

Irish Bloggers include
Labour Deputy Leader – http://lizmcmanus.blogspot.com/
Journalist Sarah Carey – http://www.sarahcarey.ie/
Columnist Richard Develan – http://richarddelevan.blogspot.com

Business Benefits to blogs.

Many companies now monitor blogs to gauge peoples opinions on their products or competitors products. Large and small companies are now also encouraging employees to blog and engage in public discussions via blogs. General Motors, Sun and Microsoft have all created spaces for their employees to blog and to interact with and gauge the opinions of existing and potential new customers.

Amazon are now linking directly to the blogs of authors so their fans can interact with their heros with the chance of more merchandise being purchased

The newest beta version of Internet Explorer was helped a great deal by the Microsoft Engineers engaging with the public and soliciting feedback via a dedicated blog for IE7.

IE7 and why blogging is about to get even bigger:
IE7 now also allows direct subscriptions to blogs and will automatically download and display the latest material from a subscribed blog. With an 80% market share it is predicted that the audience for blogging is going to explode in 2006.

More details about the Blog Awards can be found on the http://www.awards.ie website.

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This is the draft press release for the blog awards. I will be releasing this in its final form in the morning. Opinions appreciated.

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The first ever Irish Blogging Awards take place at 7pm, on March 11th in Buswells Hotel, Dublin and will be hosted by 2fm DJ Rick O’Shea. The awards were created to recognize a new but growing community of Irish Bloggers who discuss and write online about anything which they have an interest in.

Event organiser Damien Mulley commented on the event “While with just over 1000 people blogging in Ireland at the moment, the community is small, there is a considerable throughput and the quality is quite high. With this in mind we decided that having an awards now would be a way of showing the newest members of the Irish Blogging Community the blogs that our community is most proud of. The awards will be our quality mark.”

Rick O’Shea commented “05 was the year I started blogging and it’s an honour to be asked to host what we all know will be the first of many nights to honour people who spend more time on the ‘net than with actual members of their own species…”

There are currently 19.6 Million blogs and the total number doubles about every 5 months as people continue to discover and use them to communicate with other people online.13% of all blogs are updated at least on a weekly basis.

What is a blog, what is blogging?

Blogging allows anyone to publish and distribute their opinion online about any topic via their own website or a free blogging service. Blogs are like a modern day version of a printing press with the user having full control of the message but additionally blogs allow anyone to comment on the opinons generated by a blogger instantly creating a conversation between people from all over the globe.

Readers of blogs can also subscribe to them via browsers such as firefox. This removes the work of visiting a blog site on a daily basis to check for new content. Instead the new content is sent to the user the minute the site is updated.

Business Benefits to blogs.

Many companies now monitor blogs to gauge peoples opinions on their products or competitors products. Large and small companies are now also encouraging employees to blog and engage in public discussions via blogs. General Motors, Sun and Microsoft have all created spaces for their employees to blog and to interact with and gauge the opinions of existing and potential new customers. The newest beta version of Internet Explorer was helped a great deal by the Microsoft Engineers engaging with the public and soliciting feedback via a dedicated blog for IE7.

IE7 and why blogging is about to get even bigger
IE7 now also allows direct subscriptions to blogs and will automatically download and display the latest material from a subscribed blog. With an 80% market share it is predicted that the audience for blogging is going to explode in 2006.

More details about the Blog Awards can be found on the http://www.awards.ie website.

Vote for your favourite Irish Blogs now. I’m giving those that read this blog a sneak peak. I’ll be making an announcement after midnight on the Irish Blog Awards site. First I must write a few posts on sponsorships and the like. Have had 3 offers so far to sponsor the overall thing which was quite impressive. Must also put that press release together and release it to the press in the morning.

Big thanks to all my sponsors and to the folks of IrishBlogs for making the voting script and Jason Roe for integrating it into my blog.

Roger and the lads at Irishblogs.ie have now created CorkBlogs.com and I’m quite impressed with the amount of bloggers that hail from the rebel county. Didn’t know there were so many. We should have our own meetup some time.

Hey TCAL lads and lassies! Any chance of a weekly best of? Blog format is ok, screencast or vidcast could be better again. Might not be the easiest thing to do but I bet the software will be out there to do it fairly soon.

Jeff Jarvis recently taked about creating a new model for conferences to which Robert Scoble shared his experiences. Jeff as usual has given some great advice and Robert added to that and clarified some of the matters. Previously I mentioned the idea of having unconferences in Ireland and now I’m asking the bloggers out there to share some of their advice from organising conferences in Ireland. Anything that Jeff and Robert have not covered? Fergal and Tom, you both have experience with events like these, got any advice?