Archive for 'Blogging'
Another Bandon Blogger
Posted on May 27, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Blogging, Business.
There ain’t many of us so it’s great to see another Bandon Blog start. This time it’s the good people in Kilbrogan House B&B. Already a bunch of good posts. The one about Starbucks is particularly interesting. Check it out!
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Ooh, very cool competition
Posted on February 16, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Business.
John Prendergast from Aonach just let me know about a competition a friend of his is running. It’s pretty damned impressive: Glengarriff Lodge near Bantry in West Cork is giving away a
Luxury Self Catering weekend worth €1175 to one lucky blogger who mentions it! The location looks gorgeous and the Lodge is interesting because the aim was to be both luxurious and eco-friendly/sustainable.
The concept might be of interest to Irish Bloggers who have a deep interest in sustainability like Tom Atkins or Rebecca Hillman.
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Know anyone in the Whiskey Industry here?
Posted on January 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food, Ireland.
Kate Hopkins from the legendary food blog Accidental Hedonist is visiting Ireland from Feb 15th to the 22nd and is looking for contact names. Head on over to her blog and let her know.
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Irish Blog Awards Nominations Now Open
Posted on January 2, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
You can now vote over on the blog awards site for your favourite blogs and posts in a bunch of different categories. Sad to see that some of my fave bloggers like Sweary pretty much stopped in 2007 but glad to see some great new voices out there. In my nominations I tried to pick as many new people as possible. Here’s hoping 2008 will see even more great writing.
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Love food blogs? You’ll adore Gastronom.ie
Posted on December 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Food.
I have to apologise to Damien for not blogging this until now. He has put together one of those simple, beautifully executed ideas called Gastronom.ie. It collects all of the food writing from a set of Irish bloggers into one place. So if you are sick of bouncing around from blog to blog to blog and you really aren’t into this whole geeky RSS idea, then you’ll become addicted to this site.
It looks lovely and the development was done by the brilliant John Blackbourn who I would recommend to anyone who needs web development or design done. He has LouderVoice as very happy customers too.
Some of us are having a wee non-serious argument about wordplay on ie domains. Some think that only geeks get them and that a mainstream audience will always pronounce the dot. How would you say the following?
I’ll be honest, I never spotted the first wordplay but I did see it in the second two. You?
In any case, get yourself over to Gastronom.ie and check out some top class food writing.
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Oh and votes please
Posted on August 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Wordpress.
For the new blog theme. Like or no like? Like but would prefer a Cork specific image in the header? Don’t like cos it looks like mud?
And while I’m here, we launched blognation Ireland on Monday. It is part of a fast growing global tech news network called blognation and it covers Web 2.0 and Mobile in Ireland. So if you are a techie or in a start-up and you read this blog but not Argolon (you nutter), check out the new site.
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SOHO SOLO Ireland
Posted on July 25, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Business, Cork.
I gave a talk today about blogging to the West Cork Soho Solo Networking Meeting in Clonakilty. I previous gave the same one to the East Cork group. It was very well received and I hope we see a few new blogs coming from them. If you are not aware of Soho Solo, it is a very worthwhile project. As their site says:
The aims of the project are to identify Small Office Home Office Workers(Soho Solos) in the South West of Ireland, to encourage others to relocate or return to the region, to promote Small Office Home Office Working and to offer support to these “new” entrepreneurs.
If you fit that description, I would highly recommend you contact them as they offer great support for what can be a very solitary endeavour.
Three of the attendees today already had blogs. I didn’t get the details of the third but you should definitely have a look at:
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Give Donncha the vote in the PhotoBlog Awards
Posted on June 21, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
The fabulous Donncha is not just a new dad, the creator of Wordpress MU and from Cork, he is also a great photographer. Head on over to this site to give him the vote.
Between this and telling everyone at Soho Solo to setup their blogs on wordpress.com, he owes me at least a bottle of babycham.
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Think you can review something in 140 characters or less?
Posted on June 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Reviews, Technology, Tweets.
Then LouderTweets are for you.
After a few late nights we’re now ready to let you send reviews from Twitter to LouderVoice. We’re calling them LouderTweets and they are 140 character mini-reviews you can send using Web, SMS or IM via Twitter to LouderVoice.
So far we’ve had reviews of chocolate, couscous, a conference, a lawnmower and many others. Make your Tweets Louder!
An important point is that you don’t have to be a LouderVoice member to send LouderTweets but you should join if you want to rate, bookmark and build/share useful collections of reviews and mini-reviews.
And how do you send LouderTweets as a Twitter user? It’s very simple:
- Add the Twitter “review” user as a friend here
- Wait until you get a confirmation that you have been added back as a friend
- Post reviews using this format on Twitter: @review RATING ITEM. REVIEW
- Example: @review 4 The Apprentice UK. A stonkingly good series that has thrown up plenty of surprises
- That format is very specific otherwise we won’t pick up the review. Rating is in the range 1-5. Full-stop/Period mandatory.
- Shortly afterwards that review can be found by searching on www.loudervoice.com (in an open community microformat called hreview)
You can see an example here:
Tweet: http://twitter.com/oldchapel/statuses/101344802
LouderVoice: http://www.loudervoice.com/search?q=tesco+chocolate
As with all tweets, you can send your review tweet using whatever tool you like: web-page, Google GTalk, SMS, Tweetr etc
Let us know what you think.
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New Bandon Blog.
Posted on May 18, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Blogging.
Just discovered that the bandon.ie folks now have a blog. Excellent!
Of course they should have used Wordpress.com from the fair Donncha of Blarney instead of Blogger but we won’t hold that against them 
Subscribed.
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Greatest Wordpress Theme Ever!
Posted on April 29, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
If you are not a geek, stop reading now. Factory Joe (aka Chris Messina) did a Tweet earlier pointing to a theme for Wordpress. I just checked it out. I am so in awe of this person.
It is a Commodore 64 Command Line Interface to a blog.
Try typing last, next, current, help or cat
Someone somewhere please please do a ZX Spectrum version of this.
UPDATE 1: Ach, just realised Chris must have seen it on Boing Boing.
1 Comment
Wondering how to reading lots of web-sites quickly and what RSS is?
Posted on April 24, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology.
If you are one of my many non-technical readers you may have heard me and others mention things like RSS and words like “subscribe” and you may have wondered what it is all about. Well the lovely people over at The Common Craft Show have put together a great 3.5 minute video called “RSS in Plain English” which explains it all. If you check more than one or two sites/blogs per day to see if they have any updates then you need to watch this video and save yourself hassle.
NOTE: If the video/audio stutters a lot just pause it, wait a minute and then start again.
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The ArseEnd Moves to Cork!
Posted on April 17, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
The Swearing Gentleman has just been offered a job in Cork so it looks like South Galway’s loss is the PROC’s gain with the imminent arrival of The Swearing Lady, TSG and Mini Me. The ladies of Montenotte will be scandalised.
Time to break out the Babycham and Marietta.
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Six Years a-Bloggin today!
Posted on April 17, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Personal.
17th April 2001, I got an account on this thing I probably heard about on Slashdot called Blogger. I just saw it as an easier way of keeping my personal homepage (which I think I started in 1996 on Indigo) up-to-date.
How wrong I was. The second blog post was 7th August 2001.
For the first 4 years, the blog mainly consisted of baby announcements of my friends and my job situation. In 2005 I finally started doing it very regularly, moved to a Wordpress blog and now look at me. In the next 4 weeks I’ll be launching a business built on blogging.
I can’t claim to have foreseen the profound impact that blogging would have in many areas. As with most things I get involved in, it just “seemed like a good idea at the time”. I’ve been very lucky over the years that many of those ideas turned out to be genuinely good.
I’ve gone from one reader (Catherine) to several hundred per day. Thanks to all of you for stopping by and leaving comments. I hope I’ve written the odd useful thing and made you smile once or twice.
I encourage anyone who has ever felt like expressing an opinion to more than their mates down the pub to give blogging a try. It takes less than a minute to get a blog over at wordpress.com and writing blog-posts is easier than sending an email. If it turns out you have no long-term interest, well you’ve probably wasted less time than your daily commute.
Here’s to another six years of conoroneill.com
Cheers!
4 Comments
Quicker than I thought
Posted on April 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Technology, Tweets.
I’ve set-up a new blog which consists entirely of daily digests of my tweets. So rather than seeing every tweet as a separate feed item, this groups them together into more manageable chunks. You can get to it either via www.conoroneill.com/twitter or www.conoroneill.name
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Some bloggy stats
Posted on April 5, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Business.
My sense of my readership based on the comments is that the majority are non-technical non-bloggers so I thought I’d post some stats on blogging in gerneral as it is unlikely you read Dave Sifry’s blog. Dave is CEO of Technorati, the main blog search engine and the company responsible for things like the tags you see at the end of my posts and microformats, the technology we’re building our business, LouderVoice on. So statto geeks, here’s a summary of what the blogosphere looks like right now according to Dave:
- 70 million weblogs
- About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
- 1.4 new blogs every second
- 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
- Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
- 1.5 million posts per day, or…
- 17 posts per second
- Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
- 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
- Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
- English second at 33%
- Chinese third at 8%
- Italian fourth at 3%
- Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
- English the most even in postings around-the-clock
- Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
- 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
- 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February
Well I bloody thought it was interesting. Off to my bed.
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Irish Sally Garden Blog
Posted on March 14, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Ireland.
Rebecca (of the superb Irish Craftworker’s Good Life Blog) and her husband Dan have launched a new blog today dedicated to sustainable living. Well worth checking out over at the Irish Sally Garden Blog. I’m subscribed.
UPDATE: Official Launch Post now up.
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Never accept an award drunk
Posted on March 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Drink, Food.
Damn I need to lose weight.
Check it out on Ryan’s Irish Blog Awards Photostream.
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Tribune article on Awards
Posted on March 5, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
Richard Develan’s article on the Irish Blog Awards from the front page of the Business Section of The Sunday Tribune is here. Thanks for the mention Richard.
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Finally something to add to my Scouting trophies
Posted on March 5, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging.
I still have the shakes and I don’t think it’s all drink related. Truly, madly, deeply stunned to win Best Blog Post at the awards last night. Thanks a million times over to all of you who voted for me. It was a bloody brilliant night overall and the highlight was Bernie refusing to take the “Best Contribution to the Irish Bloggersphere” award and giving it to Damien instead. A well deserved standing ovation ensued.
Damien manages to have that killer combination of idealism and pragmatism which enables him to come up with a constant stream of great ideas and then execute on them. Where most of us think “wouldn’t it be great if someone did X” , Damien just thinks “let’s do it”. Thanks Damien.
I was thrilled to meet tons of people whose blogs I read daily. In particular I loved running into Sweary, FeeBee and Roos. Sweary is just an awesome blogger and both FeeBee and Roos write what I consider to be extremely important blogs with the ability to profoundly impact peoples lives in a positive way by demystifying what they are going through. I’m genuinely disappointed that none of them got an award last night.
On the subject of Sweary, I hope I didn’t bore the arse of TSG as I was polluted by the time I headed over to talk to them. I was very happy to hear that Tom out-danced me after I went to bed as I’m having flashbacks to some of my moves and they were not pretty.
Apologies to anyone who I talked drunken nonsense to, I’m nothing like that in real life 
Well done to all the winners and all those who were shortlisted. Damn that was a good night even if I was in bed by midnight……I think.
