Damien Mulley

Sooo, the blog awards are almost here and voting ends in 24 hours time. I’ll lock the voting system then and sort out the shortlists. Some are going to be very very close. I’d like to go through the costs behind the event now and at the end of this post I’m asking for suggestions on some things.

• The room is costing me €220 ex vat and I hope the fiver fee I’m charging as an entrance fee will cover that.
• All prizes are sponsored and all sponsors are paying €50 per category except for Blacknight who are sponsoring a 2gb iPod Nano for the Best Blog prize. Blacknight are also hosting this site for free.
• The Awards.ie domain cost €40 ex vat.
• Spolitchild did the logo for free.
• Rick O’Shea is doing the MC gig for free which is fantastic for someone of his calibre.
• Bitbuzz as well as sponsoring a category are also sponsoring Internet Access.
• o2 are sponsoring some i-mode phones as spotprizes and for a draw for voters.
• Bifsniff are giving me a t-shirt with one of their surreal cartoons as a spotprize.
• A cool guy named John Greene is donating two bottles of wine as spot prizes.

I am not getting anything extra from any of the sponsors. I will apparently have one PR company buy me lunch though. I’m a fan of the Mermaid Café by the way. 🙂 I’m paying for two nights in the Hotel myself and the train/plane. I must also get some trophies made this weekend, which for now will come out of my pocket. I have no issues paying these costs myself.

What I want to ask though is that I got a good few enquiries from companies and PR people wanting to sponsor the overall event this year. As in they wanted “Irish Blog Awards – Sponsored by Widget Limited” but I turned them down as I thought it unfair to the category sponsors and that they’d be overshadowed. Plus almost all costs were covered. So, next year do you think it would be ok to have an overall sponsor as well as category sponsors?

And now for the most important question: Should I personally profit from this next year? I’m sure I can ask much more for category sponsorship and overall sponsorship and with that comes a bigger venue, maybe better prizes and I want to pay the MC next year (and I’d hope it’d be Rick) but even then I’m thinking there would be money left over. Should I expense my hotel stay and trip and put any spare cash into my wallet? Or what should I do?

I am already profiting from it in a way as my traffic to my site has jumped and I seem to be getting to know PR people a bit more and may work with them on other blog related events. So I will be clear in that I am making something already from it. Anyway, I want the community to decide on this as this is your event and without you I wouldn’t be doing this and having so much fun. And to note, whatever you suggest I will honour it because I really don’t give that much of a damn about money. So, over to you…

20 Ideas for a Great Podcast. Some good suggestions there and some common sense ones that I would have overlooked.

Bohemian Rhapsody, Lost style. Weird Al doing his thin. Funny enough but not as fantastic as it could have been.

Cool performance Art pictures.

The movies of Mitchell Rose. Check out the ballet between a guy and a big digger. Quite a fun short film.

Via Michele is the Mike Davidson guide to getting an expired domain name. Very helpful. I’m still trying to get mulley.com and damien.com

Just announced on the Blog Awards site that o2 gave me some i-mode phones for the awards.

A few ways to be a winner:

You have a chance to win an i-mode phone if you have voted in the blog awards. This surely is an additional incentive for your readers to vote for you now. Stick the pic above on your blog and state “Vote for me and you might win this i-mode phone”. I want to see over 1000 people to have voted by Friday evening, we’re nearly at 900. Pimp yourself more 🙂

Additionally if you turn up on the night you also have the chance to win one of two i-mode phones as well as other spot prizes such as bottles of wine and hopefully other goodies including a Bifsniff T-Shirt.

T-Mobile now has all-Ireland roaming rates. Are they cheaper than the providers here, doesn’t this mean we can just buy their service off them?

Virgin offers TV on your mobile (in the UK) but this surely means you now have to buy a TV license for the phone?

Irony alert. Jonathan doesn’t have comments so I can’t help him with hisBT issue.

Via Claire comes news that Tom Raftery is doing a whole lotta podleader interviews and Microsoft are sponsoring the first few of them. Go Tom!

John Handelaar is also kicking ass and developing his Fax Your TD project now called Vocalvoter. You rock dude!

800 people have voted in the Irish blog awards so far. Let’s try and get it to 1000 by Thursday and 1200 by Friday! I will be deeply disappointed to see the short lists come out because in all honesty there are way more than 5 fantastic blogs per category. As a community we should be really proud of these blogs because they kick the fucking ass of so much out there. For a country with a shitty Internet infrastructure and ripoff telecoms prices we’re doing pretty well online. Strange how we had one of the first websites ever yet haven’t progressed as fast as the rest of the world.