I forgot to mention: we’ll be kicking off around 8PM, so feel free to come by at any point from then. We’ll keep the Obama Family Chili warm for whenever you turn up!

Again, we’re at 18 Gilabbey Street, which is at the bottom of College Road, and if you get lost we’re on 021 234 9938.

Above is a slideshow that acted as an introduction and conversation prompter for a panel discussion at Barcamp Cork, entitled It Beats the Dole: Career Paths in New Media. The panel was designed for Bernie Goldbach’s students from the Tipperary Institute, who will at some point in the next few years be venturing out into the big wide world seeking jobs doing… something.

So I thought it would be useful to pull together a panel of people working in diverse jobs in “new media” and look at what we do and how we got there. I was very lucky to get Mairan Murray, John Henry Donovan, Fiona Dixon and Donogh MacCarthy-Morrogh to panel with me and while I could have been a lot more organised about moderating (not my best thing), I think it was a good panel.

Some data points I found interesting, although I imagine the students found them less so:

• When I was putting this panel together, not a single one of the five of us really had a definition for New Media or ever use that terms ourselves. It’s 2008. It’s just… media.
• Two out of five of us had no professional or educational training whatsoever.
• Four out of five of us said that more than 75% of the skills and tools we use in our day-to-day work are self-taught.
• All of us said the most important part of getting a job is having a portfolio, even if it’s just class projects or a fake site or fake video for Acme Widgets. The portfolio outweighs the degree or the qualification by miles.
• For learning independently, all of the web people said Lynda.com.

Earlier in the day, I did another session for students as well, looking at a website they’re developing as part of their course. We looked at developing personas, planning content for a specific audience, and building traffic. The most interesting part was at the end, though, where I passed out PostIt notes to everyone and asked them to write down how much they would charge an actual client for the site they’d produced.

The first year students had the low-ball bids; the third year students had higher bids; the student who graduated last year and is out working in the world and paying bills had the second highest bid; and the teacher with the wife, the kid and the mortgage had a bid that far outstripped any others.

I think that reflects a learning curve about pricing. It really isn’t about how much you think the end product is worth to the client, but how much your time is worth to you.

Overall, it was a great Barcamp, absolutely heaving with fabulous people. The fabulous people part would explain why I spent six hours standing in the hallways gabbing instead of getting my arse into the session rooms to attend, you know, Barcamp sessions.

Oh well, there’s always next year!

Barcamp is returning to the real capital city - the People’s Republic of Cork - on the 1st of November. The event is being held at Webworks, a truly fabulous building, and there’s a lot of great discussion going on regarding panels and sessions and loads of people planning to come down already. Doors will open at 9:15 and events kick off at 10, and I’ll probably be shooting my mouth off about something or other.

Pat Phelan and Alexia Golez are organising a pre-event dinner on Friday, October 31st at the fabulous Bangkok93 (aka A Taste of Thailand) on Bridge Street. Seats are limited to 25 and you should budget about €25 per head for this event. RSVP over here while the RSVPing is good!

A student attending Barcamp had a nice - and given the economy, timely - idea for a topic and I am accordingly attempting to organise a panel on career paths to new media. I first had to look up what the hell new media is, so I’m perfectly prepared to simply moderate, but I have a nice structure in mind. I’m looking for four or five people across the widest possible range of experience, so if you’re working in new media and got there via a traditional or non-traditional path, please contact me - I’d love to talk to you.

Finally, also on Friday night, the gang from the Irish Webmasters Forum is planning a meetup, which should probably be more aptly titled a drinkup. This may or may not merge into the Noodle Nerds dinner and post-meal drinking but I’m sure it will all shake out accordingly.

I’ll update this post with more Barcamp-related events as they roll out, but feel free to steal the graphics and spread the word. (And if you need graphics for an event or talk, just drop me an email.)

Anyone from Cork driving to Kilkenny for Podcamp on Saturday? Our original plan was to go up on Friday via a convoluted circuit of trains, but unfortunately there is now no way I will be able to unchain myself from my desk tomorrow to undertake this all day journey. This means I need to travel up on Saturday.

As I am scheduled to speak (Marketing Strategies for Blogs and Websites: How to Pimp Your Own Ride Without Making the Internet Hate You, if you like that sort of thing) I sort of need to be there. Thus, I am looking for a ride. I am happy to provide petrol funds, and will even provide fresh baked muffins if it will help.

Ideally, I’d like to transport:

• Me, John and Eimear the wonder dog, who is an excellent car traveller and sits curled up at my feet in a foot well for the entire ride as unobjectionably as possible.
• If that’s not possible, John and Eimear can stay at home and have a more local adventure on Saturday, and just a seat for me will be completely appreciated.

If anyone can offer either flavour of lift, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks :)

Sunday night was the screamingly fun Girl Geek Dinner in Cork, and although our numbers dropped from twenty to a mere half dozen, we had a great time. It was more intimate than the (also fun) extravaganzas these meetups often are, and a wonderful chance not just to meet but to really talk and get to know one another.

Martha Rotter, Katherine Nolan, Ciara Crossan, GabrielaAvram, Alana James and I had a lovely meal at Proby’s around the corner from our new house; I brought my paint chips along because lately I have taken to accosting total strangers on the street and asking if they’d like to help me pick paint. We talked about everything from transatlantic moves to TiVo, and at one point during the telly phase of the discussion I confessed a shameful, shameful secret - I am in love with the recent ads from DFS:

I love this ad not because I am in the market for a new sofa (just bought mine, thanks!) but because I love the totally ordinary people rocking out in their livingrooms. Let’s face it: we have all totally done that. And hell, who doesn’t want a bathroom big enough to play baseball in? (Or a hot tub big enough for ten, for that matter…)

Of course, in the UK and Ireland, nobody who isn’t a rock star has a living room that is as spacious as any of the ones shown, let alone one that will fit most of these enormous sofas, but that’s neither here nor there.

In any case, I love the Nickleback tune used on the ad (full video) in the same way I secretly love Hello magazine and other trashy treats. It was a great choice for DFS, because home decorating is a transparently aspirational undertaking, and the Rockstar lyrics tell a transparently aspirational story.

I am, however, more than a bit mortified to discover that I am apparently DFS’s perfect demographic target. Except for the bit where I’d slit my wrists with a rusty nail before buying any of those hideous sofas, of course.

Hurrah! Martha Rotter’s moveable feast know as Ireland Girl Geek Dinners is coming to Cork on the 7th of September, 2008. We’ve booked a table for 20 and we’ll be meeting up at Proby’s Bistro, which has a dire website. Despite this, Proby’s has been the scene for many geeky get together dinners of one sort or another, and the quality of the website does not reflect the quality of the menu.

What is a Girl Geek Dinner and how do you know if you’re invited?

Girl Geek Dinners are a chance for ladies in technology to get together, enjoy some nice food and drinks, and have fun meeting other women in their field.

“Ladies in technology” is a rather wide remit, so as far as I’m concerned if you’re doing anything from coding software in C++ to blogging on a default WordPress template, that includes you.

The table is booked in the private dining room upstairs for 7:30 PM, and there will be a set menu with vegetarian options for €24. Proby’s Bistro is located on French’s Quay, and there’s a map if you need one. So RSVP by leaving a comment at Girl Geek Dinners and we’ll see you there!

While leading an internet-only life has numerous advantages, there are some drawbacks to getting all my news via RTE tweets, Mulley and Twenty Major. While they are all excellent news sources, they occasionally miss out on the most important stories of the year.

I woke up this morning fully intending to blog but having absolutely no idea what to write about. As it turns out, John Collins at the Irish Times has solved this problem for me by doing all the writing himself: there’s a very nice write-up of sabrinadent.com in the Blogspot spot of the Business Section. As I stopped consuming dead trees some time ago, I had no idea until Ina told me.

So if you’re popping by via the Times, dia duit. Please note that I can spell but not pronounce that, so as Mr Collins points out, I am indeed not very Irish. However, as I apparently also have an “irreverent style” and am “unafraid to pin my colours to the mast” perhaps I can be forgiven for this lack.

Speaking of forgiveness, I’d link you to the article online, except the Irish Times will charge you €2 for the pleasure of reading terribly nice things written about me. Normally, of course, I’d bitch about this but that seems downright churlish given the circumstances.

Instead, I’d like to invite you to simply cut out the middle man and give me the two quid instead. After all, I’ve already given them €2 for today’s paper (technically, the paper is only €1.70 but the queue was long and I couldn’t be arsed to wait for my change) so I think we’re all even there.

Is that suitably irreverent?