Damien Mulley

Well that was fun.

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

Sponsorship slots of EUR250 have now opened up for Blogging the Election. We’re still in the red for the conference and some unplanned costs are the reason but are part and parcel of events. The ERU500 slots are too rich for some companies so we’ve created new EUR250 slots.

What do you get for this?

Your company name will be mentioned at the start and end of the event in the thank yous. Your logo will be on the screens behind the podium during the intervals between speakers and your company name and logo will be mentioned on the IrishElection.com website.

A EUR500 slot will get you the above plus you’ll be the sponsor of a section and this will be pointed out before the section starts. Of course we also have the EUR2000 venue sponsorship slot still available.

Thank you to Sensorpro, Digiweb and Technofutures who have sponsored the event so far. It’s very much appreciated!

Brilliant.

Digiweb are offering free blog hosting for anyone that registers and comes along to the Blogging the Election event on Saturday in Dublin. We’re still looking for sponsors for this event so give me a shout if you want to be a sponsor.