Damien Mulley

Damn you success! It seems there might be a LOT more people coming to the awards than initially expected so can anyone that wants to go register their attendance as soon as possible. I’ll be booking a new location judging by these numbers by end of week. Yikes. Not like I had enough to stress me!

So yes, I’m not that child who, as it happens, was also called Oliver. There have been a few posts, most recently Simon’s suggesting that there should be a whip-around of some sort for me. No need. My hotel stay is now being paid for by Microsoft Ireland and I am hugely grateful. A big thank you to Clare Dillon for making the no-strings attached offer. But have I told you how I’d prefer all my readers to use Internet Explorer to view my site and … 😉 Nope, Microsoft just like us bloggers so they have asked for nothing in return, like many other people who have kindly offered to paypal me money and so forth. Thank you everyone.

Just to be clear, my transparency post was not me with cap in hand, more me just being upfront with costs and what it takes to run an event like this. I have talked to other people who look like they are going to run some other interesting award events and hopefully my post helped them out.

Thanks for all the offers of financial assitance but I should be ok. However the best thing to do to help me is just tell as many friends of yours about the event and if you personally know people in the press, try and encourage them to do a story on blogging. You could also try and get more people to blog especially if you think their voice would bring something new and different to the community.

Speaking of sponsors, I’m toying with the idea that I’ll only accept sponsorship next year from companies that have a blog or employees that blog. That’ll make things interesting. 😉

The Richard and Fiona show. A love song.

I knew I’d infect someone else with the blogging/song mashups.

Nice one Steven.

TechCrunch talks about the new Rojo idea known as Feedshare. Basically you stick some code on your page and it advertises a blog and an ad. In turn your blog will be advertised on someoneelse’s blog. So for every block of ads you show (2 in a block) your ad will be displayed on another website. Rojo makes money from the second ad. I like the fact that the ad also has a direct link to your feed so you can subscribe to it.

It’s a good idea but I wonder will it get eclipsed by a service that just allows you to display one ad and you get an ad in return (we are back in the bubble with companies giving you something for free) or one ad and a share in the second ad?

This could be done for the Irish Bloggersphere. Simple javascript you stick on your sidebar that randomly chooses a blog from a list on IrishBlogs or Planet of the Blogs. If you wanted to be ultra-generous you could specify in the code to weight towards new blogs where new is defined as being less than 2 months old.

The person that builds this blog network would have access to a lot of Irish blogs then and would have the opportunity to then offer revenue share on ads in the future. So have the reciprocal ads to start with and then when people trust you enough you could give them the opportunity to display a second ad which they’d revenue share in.

Another lazyweb idea from Damien. Someone steal this idea.