I am delighted to be speaking at an event in my local town, New Ross. The New Ross Chamber of Commerce asked me to give a presentation entitled Growing Your Business Online. It is all part of the Spirirt of Enterprise week, which hosts a huge number of events and should be a great undertaking.

My event includes speakers such as Blaise Brosnan, Tony Kerins, Ronan Brazil and Paula Ronan, so there should be something for everyone. Please come along (though you need to register in advance with the chamber) and get involved. Hopefully, I will see you there.

Voting for the 2007 Net Visionary Awards is now open. You can vote in 14 different categories and it is completely free!

The Net Visionary Awards nominations are now closed and my good friends over at the Irish Internet Association tell me that the volume of nominations was nearly double last year's. The Net Vis Awards are unique in Ireland in that they are free to enter, are voted on by the peers and colleagues in the industry and run by a non-for-profit organisation. Be sure to cast your vote this year.

I know readers of this blog are mainly interested in areas relating to Online Marketing but I want to take a brief time-out and ask that, if you are eligible, you would consider casting your vote for Senator Shane Ross in the forthcoming Seanad Elections. The reasons? Very simple really;

In my role as CEO of the Irish Internet Association we tried hard to lobby Government about our pitiful broadband availability. Despite many calls, emails and letters few politicians took the time to meet with me. Senator Ross was the exception. Not only did he meet with me on a number of occasions but he also had a deep understanding of why this issue is so important to Irish business and society. He displayed a keen insight into both the problems relating to broadband and the solutions to rectify them.

I believe he is one of the small group of earnest political practitioners who genuinely care about the issues, not the sound bytes. If you look at the work he has done in the area of Broadband, including getting a debate in the Seanad on his own motion relating to the issue you will, I hope, agree. I would strongly urge you to vote for him and would be happy to discuss or debate why I am backing his candidacy. He is a doer not a talker.

The IIA National Congress 2007 is being held on May 17 this year. Google, eBay, Bebo, Microsoft, Realex Payments and many more are featuring at this major networking event. The full line-up is available here - last year it was well worth the visit so maybe I will see some of you there.

I am attending Invest Northern Ireland's seminar in Ballymena and the level of speaker and orgainsiation is excellent - some good lessons to be learned for runnning further events. Putting the seminar agenda on the back of your name badge is an innovative idea that I have not encountered before.

I have attended sessions delivered by eBay, Realex and I will be delivering one on behalf of the IIA later on. I also met denise cox of Newsweaver who I have not seen for a while. She has even started to blog, which should be worth checking out. If there are any other bloggers at the event perhaps you would care to comment about your experience of this seminar.

So, just when you thought you had got to grips with the nomenclature; blogs, podcasts and rss feeds. Now you have to deal with widgets and blidgets! I am not even going to try to explain to you what they are. If you are reading this blog post just look to the right of the screen and you will see a widget in a small scroll bar - this is the Irish Internet Association's blog and you can get it here instead of having to visit it there. Once I get my head around all this I will post more but at first glance it looks like a blogger's viral marketing wet dream ...

I read an article recently about radon and it freightened the bejasus out of me. This silent killer really is of concern and so few Irish people seem to know, or care about it. So I did a search for "radon gas ireland". There is an agency dedicated to providing information about this relatlvely unknown threat, called the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland. There is lots of clear information and it is worth a visit.

They list some companies (but only in a PDF unfortuntuely and not as clickable links) and I tried one of these, the Radon Centre, as they are based in Wexford near where I live. I received an easy to use test and after a couple of months they removed the test (a small matchbox sized vial that sits in two places in your home) and our house passed the test! Easy and painless. Get you house tested today is my advice for what it is worth.