I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves, confusing the growth of the Internet with it growing up, but I also believe we’re doing some amazing things..

Reminds me of this comment from Euan Semple:

There is something else going on here that is to early for an ism but that is really interesting. It is about small people loosely joined. It is small and personal in essence but powerful in combination. It is not about people being insignificant but about being unassuming.It is not about being individualistic but about being loosely joined.

If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand it’s because I like my friends, not because I like your brand.

- Mike Arauz

You could join me at the “Zest4Kidz Love-In” on Tuesday 24th November in the Laughter Lounge. It’s going to be a night of comedy, music and a chance to find out about opportunities to get involved volunteering for Zest4Kidz.

Tickets cost €25 and that includes a free cocktail on arrival for anyone who gets there before 7.30pm.

Bookings can be made by email or by picking up the phone – 01 206 3872.  And you can keep an eye on their site for the full line-up.

In case you didn’t know, Zest4Kidz is one of my favourite charities.  They bring light into little lives through play. They run projects helping children in three main areas:

• Child Soldiers in Africa
• Children in slums and on streets in India
• Children in Prisons and in Orphanages in Eastern Europe

They find children who have had difficult lives and spend time with them to show them someone cares and that they are not alone. While in these places they make a full needs audit of the orphanage/shelter and help meet ongoing needs for the children.

Next time you’re wondering what to do with the week’s leave you’re obliged to take, why not consider volunteering with Zest4Kidz?   More information on this important work.

Here’s footage of the Christmas Stocking trip to Belarus:

We see similar practice with the evolving language of the web – or Computer Mediated Communication. I have always rebelled against e-mail, preferring to use the more (advanced) email. Likewise with online and offline. But strangely, never homepage or insidepage. My proposals are peppered with the original use of the words “home page” and “inside pages” indicating that in this regard I’m back at the very beginning of spelling.

What do you use? Are you consistent? Are you aware?

I’m happy too to see some Brightspark projects included in the showcase of beautiful Irish design in this article.

I love Ray Doyle’s answer to whether education is more important than experience when it comes to design:

I personally feel that in the digital media industry experience is more important than education. I often ask myself would I’ve been a better man, designer, drinker if I had chosen the path of the student and not that of bedroom designer/HTML monkey on minimum wage. I like think to not, well, probably a better drinker.

Read the full article here.

Someone broke the design on the Rose Project – a Brightspark website that won an award at the Irish Web Awards only 3 weeks ago. They got a free resource in to update the site and that someone hasn’t a clue.  Know that what you’re looking at now is NOT what we designed.  It has been damaged.

Exhibit A:

Home page banner featuring white around the logo (which is on grey background), a banner with centred text (should be left aligned, always), and the image doesn’t fill up the black space or at least grade into black. Finished off by the removal of the ‘donate now’ ribbon on top right. Replaced with address details. The primary objective of this site was to encourage donations, not to share telephone and fax numbers.

Exhibit B:

Featuring the chopped up logo on white background again. And the text under ‘help us kit out..’ is actually white text on grey background. It is not your eyesight, and you are not waiting for the page to fully load.

There are probably more examples, but I can’t go on. It makes me so sad to see something so beautiful destroyed overnight.

1.  Cheap Eats

They’re only going 10 months and are this week celebrating their 1,000th post.  That’s a brilliant achievement.  This is a great little site that shares recipes and reviews, and I particularly like the ‘what’s in this week at Aldi and Lidl’ reports.  They always have a competition going on and as a result there’s a vibrant community of followers.

2.  Save A Few Bob

Practical ways to save money in the areas of Personal Finance, Family Spending, Lifestyle, Health & Beauty and Technology. Well known Irish journalists do much of the writing, so the feel is rather like one of the weekend magazine supplements – but all about saving cash.

3.  Dublin Waste

An initiative from Dublin City Council, Dublin Waste is a space where people can advertise items they no longer want and you can get them for free! I remember spotting, a couple of years ago when it first launched, a BMW for swap for something interesting… there are no Beamers on there now but there are plenty of TV’s, items of furniture, baby goods, sporting goods and other random items. To avail of something good on this site, you’ve got to be quick. Arrange transport and soon that item will be yours – for free.

Jumbletown is similar. My only complaint with it (apart from the hideous navigation up top) is the difficulty in removing your item once it’s gone.

What I don’t like about getting started in the MX5 on damp winter mornings:

• It’s cold in the car
• It’s damp and every window is fogged up.  Turn the heat on very hot to adjust the windscreen.  Open and close the side windows to try to remove some of the excess moisture.
• Turn on the engine, and go.  Back window is plastic (car is convertible) so it’s not easy to see through when covered with damp.

Botty toasting magic in Toyota iQ

• Turn on the engine, turn up the heat.  Adjust regulator to make sure it doesn’t get too hot.  Within minutes the car is a balmy warm.
• Push botty down into the heated seat.  Lean back into the seat to rub back off heated upholstery. Really like that.  I feel like a cat.
• Turn on the engine.  (It purrs).  Back window covered in rain drops?  Flick the switch of the back windscreen wiper to ensure clear visiblity as I proceed down my driveway.

It’s a nice way to ease into the day.  The interior of the iQ is one of the most marvellous things about it (after the fuel efficiency, and neat storage in the back).  It’s the bit I find myself talking about the most when I have passengers.  They all marvel at the space in the front.  It is deceptive.  I get to tell them how Toyota modelled the interior on the high end Avensis model, so it’s executive saloon luxury at small car prices.  I also get to tell them how the iQ engineers came up with such a novel way of where to put the air conditioning/heating unit, that in future all Toyota cars will be built this way.  (They put it under the floor… look at your car next time and note how much unnecessary space the heating/air takes up in the front).

By the way, I’m filling the car for €28 which to my mind is great value. I’m getting good mileage on that.  I still have to play chicken with the fuel guage to work out exactly how many miles/km.  But according to Toyota, it should be giving me 4.3litre to the 100km.  You can ogle that statistic and more over here.

And now here’s a sexy interior style shot you can enjoy with your cappachino.  Keep warm and toasty on this first day of winter.  And if you’re driving, be safe on our roads.

Have you considered entering the Webby Awards?

The Webby Awards are the global web awards that have been running for nigh on 14 years now.  They celebrate all that is great about online.  The Oscars of the Web World.  And I think it’s high time that Irish sites got in it.

If you enter before 30 October, it costs $255 to enter a site.  That’s €171.

Cars Ireland – you won the Best Practice Award last weekend.  Did you know there’s an entire category dedicated to you (Automotive) in the Webbys?

Beaut.ie – you could be adding a hint of a blush if you were representing Ireland in the Webbys in the Best Beauty & Cosmetics Category.

The guys at Look & Taste would cook up a storm in the Food & Bev category.  Think of the global exposure to make it to the shortlists guys…

There’s a much wider range of categories than any Irish award ceremony has.  I went to the Awards in 2007 and that was the first year that Online Film & Video and Mobile got their own awards night to handle all the various sections within those.  We have such cool start-ups located all round this island.  I really believe it’s high time we dust off the ‘ah sure we’re Irish we’d never stack up against the Americans’ attitude and give them a run for their money.

Because money is involved.

That’s the main barrier unfortunately, because let’s face it, not many start-ups have a spare €171 lying around.  A couple of years ago I had managed to get a large Irish corporate involved in sending the cream of the Irish to the Webbys.  We were going to ask you to vote for who you think should represent us in New York, and the mobile phone company was going to pay for it.

Sadly the organisers of the Webbys didn’t like it.  No not one bit.  They felt that this would put off potential entrants from independently entering.  So, they blocked us from running this super promotion and instead have seen dribs and drabs of Irish entrants instead of the huge numbers we would have delivered instead.

That aside, get on there now, dust off your reservations and enter the 14th Webby Awards.  If you get shortlisted, I’ll come and cheer you on in NYC!

That’s my conclusion anyway.  Now, here’s how I came to that:

Advantages of Ning:

• You can have your own social network up and running in a couple of minutes.  You can have video panels, forums, members, chat all going on.  And it’s free (if you go for them hosting and having ads on your network).  But the key to success on the web is always content.  Getting a clear message out to the right people about your service is what you want to do.  Ideas and content rule, technology is merely the conduit that facilitates the message.

Disadvantages of Ning:

• Why would you want to create a social network away from Facebook which is where all the people are?  Given that the population of Facebook is the size of Brazil, why would you want to restrict your social network to something the size of the Aran Islands?   One of the many benefits of Facebook is that when new people join your Fan Page, their friends can see when they do.  This can encourage friends to join, which increases your numbers.  If your subject matter is interesting enough, this viral effect can spread fast.  If your social network is on Ning, you are limited to directly inviting people to join.  But there isn’t anything like the numbers browsing Ning like there are on Facebook, so it’s automatically limiting your potential.
• All the elements you get on Ning, you get on Facebook.  Only difference is that it’s easy to style Ning to make it look more gorgeous than the corporate blue and white that is FB.
• What if you went ahead with Ning and then found that your members or your audience just aren’t into it?   Then you’ll look a bit silly with a Ning network and no-one coming to talk to you.  The risk here is that organisations will go out and build wholly inappropriate Ning networks just because someone has made it easy to do so.  The social network for consumers of dishwasher powder anyone?  No I don’t think so.

All of this leads me nicely on to:

My Top 5 Tips For Getting Started With Social Networking

1. Start off with a device for getting your key messages out - a blog can work extremely well.  Or perhaps your message is better communicated through video? In which case, you can easily set up a channel on Youtube and use that to publish your messages.   A content plan is key.  Whether you’re blogging or youtubing, it’s a good idea to work out who your audiences are, then consider what your main themes are.  Then sit down with a calendar and fill in what you’re going to say and when, then stick to it.   Here’s a whole post on blog content planning.
2. Then get to work. Write your blog regularly.  Read other’s blogs.  Comment.  Take part in the conversation, because you can’t really expect people to want to talk to you if you’re not talking to them, now can you?
3. When you’ve got some momentum in your messages (and even some alliteration!), then look at how you’re going to re-package that content and get it out on the social networks.  You can include your blog feed in Facebook and LinkedIn so once you’re regularly blogging, you can be sure that your message is getting republished out there.  Consider Twitter as a way of alerting people that you’ve just done a blog post.
4. Don’t fall into the trap of using Twitter merely as a place to post your links.  While research has found that men are more likely to post links then women (who are more likely to write emotively… yes I know Laura, I absolutely love love love it as well… ), organisations that use Twitter as another form of RSS are failing!  Twitter is conversation. If you’re going to be on it, get chatting.  Follow people.  Take part.  If someone asks a question and you have an answer – be helpful, share your knowledge.  If someone makes a comment about how much they like Wispa’s, and you do too, then say it.  That kind of thing builds rapport.  And the charming thing about Twitter is that it celebrates humanity.  So what if relationships are being formed about 1980’s chocolate bars on an online space?
5. Remember that all of these things require a mindset switch to get it right.  It doesn’t work when you allocate a half hour to Twitter and the first Friday of every month to write your blogs.  Taking part in the conversation online is an ongoing thing and must be regarded as a organisation-wide change in how we do things around here.  There’s no point in having a summer intern do your Twitter for you only to walk away and leave it to languish.  A lot of people I hear have fears about the amount of time it’s going to take.  If you do it right, it shouldn’t be something that you quantify.  It’s just an extension of how you work.

What do you think?  You can post your comment here.  Or you can go off and set up a Ning social network to do the same thing – but all alone, somewhere else…. !