.. when the light goes on.

Photo owned by Dimitry B (cc)

Over the past couple of weeks, work has flattening me and I’m usually down for the count on getting home. But I’m back. Lots to do and nothing to see here.

Let’s talk about one – election.ie. She’s been on hiatus too.

Truth be told, I had a brush with news recently. And for as much as the idea of constantly reading and writing is second nature to me, the experience changed my opinion on where election.ie should go. In some subtle ways thematically and in other ways structurally and editorially.

In wanting to carve out election.ie’s own voice, I fell into a trap of wanting to publish rather than looking at balls of the subject and prodding it a little. I need to get the mantra of not trying to get everything right and just concentrate on a few of the right things. I want to fully bake the election.ie idea and build out a refresh before our next General Election.

The way the British General Election has been covered online also changed my views. Channel 4 news did an excellent job on Twitter, Grandma Beeb was ever dependable on stats and well, Sky were just Sky but with the best iPhone app and HD to check out Adam Boulton’s engorged pores.

So, election.ie will be back soon. I’ll post some of my pol stuff here in the meantime. More to come.

Every single one of the winners deserved their awards. I especially enjoyed seeing Pat, Jim, Redmum and Suzy win.

Best speech of the night award goes to Eolai and Panti jointly.

Yes, the winners get a bit of glass, a sting and a few minutes to say thanks but the attendees are the real winners.

Every year around this time, I have this problem. It’s a debillitating condition. Like that gassy belly wind one gets from fine German wheatbeer or the red-face, chokey cough with tears a girl gets in polite company. Sometimes embarrassing, always compulsive.

It’s the compulsion to be honest. To be meta about where are about where blogging is in Ireland. To navel gaze the navel gazers.

You see, Irish Blog Awards, the national shitfit existed *before* The Frontline. Online, we had the shitstirring post. This year, Twenty held one when he hosted Una’s post. Agree with Una’s thesis or not, the comments were punches left and right sometimes more about past transgressions rather than the topic at hand. There are myriad other posts that have offered us the same opportunity. The opportunity to pile-drive before meeting (or more particularly, missing in transit about the function room) other bloggers that we spike anonymously off. I’m as guilty as the next girl at times.

In some ways, though, the reason I write these posts is that I hope in some naïve way, they’ll help burn off the bullshit and create some kind of forum for people to realise their similarities instead of giving people the chance to pinpoint places to sharpshoot their victims. Online sharpshooting followed by that strict Irish traditional of social niceties and the bitchy convo later. Le sigh.

So, this year because I know we’re still teens in heat, I’ll give the shit-stirring post a miss.

Yours,
Alexia

To participate you need a phone with Internet access and a camera and a Twitter account. Form a team with some mates and elect a captain to communicate back to the @dublintweasure account. The rest is up to you.

Follow the @dublintweasure account for all the details. The Twitter hashtag is #tweasurehunt. Have fun!

Can we trumpet a little more about peercasting too? It’s something we forget or take for granted when we write. I believe Una either missed or discarded this in original post.

And the buhbye blog thing – blogs are oh-so-confining, if I could I’d rename this place – a repository of swirled ideas. Enough navel-meta bull, back to sketching out theorems using pixels.

Kirstie and Aphrodite from Beaut.ie will be in Cork tomorrow to sign copies of their new book, the Beaut.ie Guide to Gorgeous at Easons tomorrow at 1pm. The Beaut.ie girls always write with verve and joy, so any chance to meet them in person is a treat. More details on the Beaut.ie blog.

Disclaimer: I have to ban myself from their blog at times, such is my addiction to buying cosmetics.

(Logo shamelessy robbed!)

Evidence, that I should buy high-waisted trousers and be the new Craig Doyle. Yes, I know it’s the Cenotaph.

London was awesome. Post on Interesting on the way. Let me distract you with my pics.

I’m picky about pizza. Pizza must not have meat, mushrooms, pineapples, onions or other weird accompaniments. Pizza base must not be thick, hard or mattressy. Dayglo puree-style passata is to be passed on as is the peculiar habit of adding non-trad sauces like BBQ etc.

We tasted the pizza as the Whoseview team gave us a tour of their site. Whoseview is a community-driven reviews site. Almost like a social network, one can sign up and start sharing their recommendations on restaurants, hotels, shops etc. At present reviews are mostly based in and around Dublin. They have plans to push out to other spots around Ireland and into the UK.

Reviewers can see recommendations of places based on their preferences. Oh and like Pigsback, there are reward points – like earning a G Card, for instance.

Back to the pizza. Like wine tasters crackers and water were at hand to clean out  our palettes. My favourite pizza was number 4. I suspected it was Bistro Bianconi. And I was vindicated. Definitely my favourite pizza.

While the tasting evening wasn’t exactly scientific, Bistro Bianconi came out on top. Second was Dominos of Rathmines, third was Four Star in Ranelagh, fourth was Hell, fifth was Apache of Pearse and in last spot was Godfathers of Leeson Street.

Yay for Bianconi! I’ve been raving about them for years now. You can order your pizza with garlic oil for extra zing. They’ve won a clutch of awards as Irish pizza champions and have represented Ireland at the World Championships again and again.

They do meal deals now – nyom.

Whoseview are also looking for your favourite pint of Guinness in Dublin to mark the 250th anniversary the stout on their Board’s forum. Up for grabs is a spot on their pub crawl to investigate the top 5!

I spent the weekend at the RDS stalking anyone that’d look at me twice. The exciting thing at the counts is how immersive the experience is. It swallows you whole. Racing between tallies. Watching the watchers. Eagle-eying the counters. Getting jumped on by shithead photographers that’d as easily set a granny on fire as they’d knock you down. Seeing losing candidates look like they’ve eaten broken glass. I’ll be posting some thoughts over at Election.ie.

Many thanks to everyone that dropped by the Count Day Liveblog over the weekend. You made the Liveblog work. Your texts, pictures, comments, live updates – every scrap of information meant that we were mostly on the ball and way ahead of mainstream media in turnaround times. Special thanks go to Cian, Suzy, Mark and Damien.

Been thinking about the role of community manager. There are so few people that do it professionally in Ireland. Speaking to someone recently, we agreed that it seems like there are so few capable folks out there.

On seconds thoughts, looking at the attributes that community managers have – we all do it in a way.  A community manager is an advocate for that everyman in a project. His greatest skill should be listening and then preempting the slow bureaucratic machine of a company. Feeding back into the machine and being a catalyst for change in that same organisation. If constant change be chaos, then the community manager is its soul.

He thinks about new ways to talk an audience that is abseiling from one social nook to that cranny. He cuts the time to wait for customers and the cost of support. He has fun with the tool. He’s humanises the organisation.

I’d like to think we’re all kinda community managers of something. Nowadays on the web, everyone has a project. We’re playing with tools and building treehouses – blogs like Liveblog.ie and IrishElection. Being active in a community means trying to instill an ethos of sharing, openness and humanity. A community manager does this, but with a business bent.

Before you quit you job, to professionally whore Facebook groups, there’s more…  You have to be subtle. Knowing how to use tools isn’t enough. Being a professional whore that links to everything and anything isn’t enough. Being that Johnny Social Connector isn’t enough. Were I hiring someone as community manager for an online project, I’d like them to have an independent voice, but more importantly, strong moral fabric that’s part of their DNA. Were I starting a project as a community manager, it would be one of the first lines I draw.

How important is following ethics when balancing a community management role? Where do you draw the line?

A CampCamp might have talks on:

• Ways to abuse Social Media
• How to talk to the Yoof like they are “You People”
• How to use Moodle/Django/Ruby on Rails/…
• How to organise camps
• Best way to coordinate Post-It colours
• How to attract the same old faces
• How to use jargon and busy status updates to confuse the masses

So the Duke, from 8pm. See you there! Drop a comment if you wanna come along!

So, Lily has moved house tagged me into reflections of a blogger. Rarely do I meme but…

Reflections of a blogger? To me the blogging is a textual voice. In the end, we’re sharing ideas, opinions and little glimmers of memories. Words, their mode of their transmission, are the important things one ought to treasure. And in order to blog, one ought to love words. Passionately play with them, throw darts at them, bounce them off walls and curve them around corners.

For the root of my love of words, I look to people that inspire me. Every single one of us have influencers in our lives. People we look to for inspiration. The second of May will mark the ninety-six birthday of my late grandmother. As a Gentile family, of course we’d call her Nana. She stands alone as one of the primary influencers in my life. Growing up I would spend every every weekend and Summer at her house.

Contrary to popular belief, living with grandparents was amazing. They’d both tell tall tales. His of the petrolheaded logisitics of the Free State. Yes, he was there the day of the first jet landing at Shannon airport. Hers of local hijinx, political schism during the War of Independence and giants that scoop inquisitive girls into trees to boil them. My grandparents had an unusual relationship to say the least. Never in my lifetime, did I ever hear them call each other by their own firstnames. It was always Himself or Mrs K. For all of their differences, they shared a passionate love of reading.

Grandad was a paper hound. The Evening Press and Irish Press were furiously digested every day. And perhaps a reread, just in case something had changed. The going at Goodwood required a kitchen-tabled steward. And oh, he was careful never to buy a Blueshirt paper.

For Nana, morning and evenings were book-ended with prayer. She’d keep book upon book of prayers. A couple of bibles too. Between Silk Cut puffs and lungfuls of Ventolin, she’d pick apart her prayer books to pull out pamphlets to every obscure saint imaginable. She’d pray for the sick, for the healthy, for dead, for causes, for family and for anyone she felt needed a little grace. Once prayer was done, she’d be free to arise or sleep. More likely, she’d be free to read.

The long days were Agatha Christie, Dick Francis and maybe Dean Koontz. She was a cross-genre pulp queen. Alex Hailey sat beside Catherine Cookson. Jackie Collins with her loose morals did not have a chance. Behind the heavy-blanketed mahogany bed in a cabinet of dark, exotic wood was the ultimate library cocktail party. Would Poirot, ever the sharply-dressed observationist gel with the architypal Francis hero, hard-nosed and possibly a little beaten-up?

Once a week, the local mobile library would visit. Nana’s house was curiously lodged on a steep decline from the main road. So when the bulky bus of books parked outside, half of the fun would trying to climb aboard without toppling over domino-like. Interestingly, most the books in the library were covered with loose clear plastic. Perhaps a bureaucratic bot estimated that flights in and out of library constituted a significant rain risk? We carry out a complete post-mortem on last weeks selections with the driver before picking a tall stack of fresh, mac-wearing hardbacks.

At her house, I read Villette. I met Dickens, Homer, Le Guin, Cooper and Carroll. I followed the adventures of the girls of Trebizon. Never a Blyton, I could pass up. Reading was never pressed, it was ever-present. We’d bookmark the hours with stand-up spoon pots of tea. Every second of that was an idyll. I’d sit and read in relative silence with her in a heartbeat.

Haughty ideals and preciousness of blogging aside, if one does not love words they ought to shut shop. In truth, there is no definite way to blog. It’s a verb, a doing thing. One commits words to page. And we’re back to precious words again. Loving  them. Loving the art of cleaving clear words clear from the mind or the act of reading them. Enjoying how neatly we tin ideas in them, ready for an expectant eye. Love words, love your blog voice and more importantly, have fun.

Qik from outside The Stag’s Head, Dublin.

• Political Party Based In Dublin
• Importer Of Building Materials And Based In Dublin

Any cool ones hitting your blog lately?

Taken at the Guinness Storehouse on St. Patrick’s Day. Moving most of my photo posts over to lofieye. Yes, She’s grumpy but a fair ship all the same.

Very impressed with all the contributions that people made to the Budget liveblog yesterday. It made for great reading. I noticed the numbers peak at 159 watchers. Did you notice it get any higher?

Adrian tweeted something interesting in the last week:

Bizcamps are grand, but starting to get the feeling that some folks spend all their time going to *camps and not actually creating anything

It’s not necessarily the comment about creation I’m interested in, that’s something for another post. And there will be one. Rather the same old faces quip.

I’m noticing it more and more. I organised Tweetups in the past and they all rocked. It was great to get people together. Hopefully, the building blocks of friendships were carved out and names-faces matching went into overdrive. That’s a good thing. Meeting someone in the flesh gives context to words splattered on a screen.

Patrick Bateman wants to meet yew!

More and more I’ve noticed that there’s a feeling of out-and-out one-dimensional networking going on. Not the “let’s swap ideas and maybe do business” or the “wow, that’s you” – more that scene from American Psycho. You know the card-swapping one?

Thinking aloud here – but that kind of networking feels greasy to me. Are we bags of meat all queued up? I may be 100% wrong here, but I kinda hope there’s a grain of authenticity in conversations.

Networking is great. Meeting people for the first time is fantastic. Putting your assumptions to the test when meeting someone for the first time is fun too. “I thought you’d be shorter”. Et cetera, et cetera.

Maybe Ireland is just too small, making the roll of attendees to events sometimes look incestuous. Meets in the UK attract different crowds – Flickrers, Twitterers and Bloggers. Some events attract all three, but the diet of attendees is much more varied. Add blowin attendees on short-trips doing business too. Faces are more likely to change in a city with more events on simultaneously and more outside blood, right?

Where to go?

Perhaps, the pro-networkers have indeed inherited the Earth. Just for now. Bloggers getting together to talk blogging or Twitterers to talk Twittering, really isn’t compelling anymore. What’s new here? We understand the medium, the conventions, the flow and social dings. There’s nothing new here, other than a little ego basting. Eating our own shit really isn’t interesting.

There’s no real solution I can give. I have the pointy foam finger. I would like to see less cheap-suited and booted sorts. Couldn’t they just wear jeans and relax a little? Learn a little from their fellow Man? Maybe listen instead of talk?

I’m doing my bit and going to stop going to so many events unless they challenge me or I have something to Show and Tell. Meeting for meetings sake is cold and vaccous. In the meantime, I’ll be building out my friendships. Meaningful things.

Here’s the eBay page. There’s plenty of time to lob in a quick bid!