Inside View from Ireland: Notes from Table 32

WHILE AT THE Net Visionary Awards in Dublin, my notes of the evening include some interesting things worth tucking away for future cross-reference. Along with Stacey (shown at left) and Tanja, we'll have a podcast that encapsulates the evening from our Tipperary perspective.

The measure of blogs. Although half of the table reads weblogs, only a third of those seated at Table 32 actually have their own blog. Those seated around me said that blogs show the human side of a company. An Irish recruitment company confided that blogs make wonderful recruiting tools but few of the company's principals wrote or commented on blogs. Everyone seemed to know that blogs help companies, their people and their products become more findable--even though that might demean the status of the search engine optimiser. No one at the table had heard the voices of podcasting.ie before the evening. I doubt an evening's interaction will change that anytime soon.

Technorati shows the frequency of conversation about the Irish Net Visionary Awards in this chart:

Ten years ago, the IIA was banging its drum with the message th at no company could afford to be without a website. The same imperative does not reverberate from leading lights wired to the Irish internet about blogs. I believe the corporate blog has become a necessity and all progressive companies have newsfeeds now.

To some extent, the cameraphone images shot by people during the evening are newsfeeds because if they're upstreamed to Zoomr or Flickr, they're subscribable as newsfeeds. And if they inherit captions and comments, they add faces to the names and that's good.

Old school Powerpoint. Several seated around me wonder why the evening included a Powerpoint show when many in the audience were using standard tools to create videos from the same static content. Powerpoints belong in boardrooms to inform audiences. After wine, audiences want videos to entertain them.

Random photos allowed. Random recordings abhored. While many people will pose for the still camera image, fewer want to oblige a video camera. And fewer still want their voices recorded because they have no idea what they sound like after a few drinks surrounded by the din of the crowd. I wonder what they would say if told the earpieces worn by several city centre bouncers are actually mics to the posse inside the late night clubs? We carry Sony digital dictaphones that often (inadvertently) switch on and record an entire evening through the fabric of an inner coat pocket. Nobody seems comfortable with unseen digital recordings, even though they're often standing in the camera's eye of overhead video recording systems. When it's upclose at arm's length, it becomes unsettling. This kind of revulsion needs to be acknowledged by the citizen journalists who come well-equipped to swarm and record occasions just by milling around as part of a crowd. It's a common tactic associated with tabloid journalists but now also a technique practised by third level students across Ireland who are immersed in a new wave of participative citizenship where casual conversation often seeps into mainstream reportage. Some fragments of that citizenship experience come through their earbuds, using iPods, Walkman phones, Nokia podcast players or Discmans. Just a little side note about numbers announced last month by Apple. Its fiscal year results show that Apple had sold more than 39m iPods during its fiscal year 2006. On the average day, Apple sold over 106,000 iPods. One was in a purse at Table 32.

Old Guard Parried. Limited seating during the event meant that many senior Irish internet personalities did not attend the 2006 Net Visionaries Awards. That's probably fair play when considering the need for fresh faces and new blood. Nonetheless, it was interesting to mingle in an industry setting and to recognise fewer than 20 people who I knew before entering the main ballroom.

Who are connectors? I left Killiney without knowing who are the connectors in the 2006 Net Visionary audience. Once I eliminated those at the head table, I could not determine whether a personality like Damien Mulley was working the room. I found several filters, a generous dosage of fanatics and firecrackers, and several facilitators who could be rebadged as connectors. Ireland has too few connectors.

See the photos. Read Bruce Schneier and reflect on the death of casual conversation.