Damien Mulley

The Moviestar Irish Web Awards are on October 11th. Registration is now open.

There’s even an unofficial Facebook event page thing for it. Already!

It should be a laugh. If the usual gathering and community building at the Blog Awards gets replicated again at this then without talking it up too much, it should be fantastic. Everyone is welcome too. You don’t need to be nominated, you don’t need a website or a blog. 30 euros in. Rick O’Shea is your wonderful MC for the event too.

We still need a few more judges for the Web Awards. Why not sign up? Email contact awards.ie, if your site/work has been nominated then you can’t judge any category at all. Sorry!

Michele’s kicked off something interesting with his blog post about the IIA’s Blog putting in nofollow or rather using the wordpress default on their blogs for comments.

(For the non techies who are the majority on this blog: the nofollow attribute in links left in comments on a blog means Google and other search engines won’t give these links any weight because they came from your site. See some people/bots had been leaving 1000s of comments on blogs before which linked to certain sites and it resulted those sites getting artificial boosts in Google rankings)

The IIA have since changed that around. Michele himself talks about his moderation policy and how he nukes any soft sell comments. If you have a moderation policy of doing that then removing nofollow makes sense I would guess.

No, not that kinda Link:

Photo owned by metaxin (cc)

However, the way I see it, links without nofollow should be ones that you endorse and they’re not links in comments. I leave plenty of comments through that I do not agree with. I’ll do the same for links but I don’t vote with my site for those links. My own moderation policy is I’ll allow most stuff through soft sell or not (though not all) with the idea being the stupid and bad linking of an individual just makes them look like tits.

When you have IIA in their training classes advocating leaving comments on blogs to boost your Google rankings, maybe nofollow is actually a good idea?

Also wouldn’t spam engines target your blog more if it removes nofollows?

It would be nice though for WordPresss to allow you to have that control. Maybe they’ll bring it out. Meanwhile there’s a Dofollow wordpress plugin for it.

Update: This is what happens when you allow dofollow. The spammers make lists.

Via Alexia

Creative Camp, Nordyland, Saturday Sept 6th 2008.

Never been to Nordyland. This should be interesting. I marked myself down as not doing a talk but I do have one I’d like to try out after thinking about it more. I won’t say what the talk is but I hope it’s entertaining. For me. Maybe the audience will like it too but getting a reaction is the goal. One hint: It involves air travel. I won’t say anymore.

Photo owned by kyz (cc)

I’m reminded of this and stereotypes for some reason:

So you have an idea for a film, then what? Well. Crewger might be able to help.

Crewger helps bring people together to create films. Simple idea and apparently very much needed in Ireland. The more official blurb states:

Crewger is an organisation dedicated to the advancement of the Irish film community by facilitating the production, promotion and exhibition of original content by film-makers of all ages and backgrounds working in Ireland today.

While there are discussion forums out there, there’s nothing much webified about the Film Industry in Ireland. Crewger offers a nice way of finding crews for films with their search facility and building a community and forging links. In short Crewger is a social object for film in Ireland.

You can also check out the Crewger Twitter account to get news updates. Please help promote Crewger on your blog and website. Don’t forget you can submit your app or website or company to be on the Tuesday Push too.