After slacking off for a shameful uh, two years, I attended my very first Cork Open Coffee on Friday when Bernie Goldbach lied to me to get me to go. I had sort of imagined five spoddy boys and the divine smelling Conor O’Neill huddled round weak cups of tea, but it was actually a jam-packed, vigorous and entirely delightful event where I got to catch up with a ton of people and meet a ton more.

I will be a dedicated city centre attendee from now on, so between Open Coffees and the parade of other fun events scheduled over the next few months, it’s shaping up to be a fun summer here in the People’s Republic. Here’s what’s on my calendar:

• 17 June: A farewell dinner for Tom Raftery at Proby’s Bistro before he leaves for the warmer, spicier climates of Spain.
• 27 or 28 June: Lunch with Deb Hadley (formerly of the Humble Housewife and now of Tast.ie) in Cork at Cafe Paradisio.
• 16 July: The very first Open Coffee BBQ in Ireland will take place in Terryglass Village in Tipperary. There will be casual presentations, and I’m hoping to do a gig with Frank Prendergast provisionally titled How the Hell Do I Hire a Web Designer. Eimear the Wonderdog will also be in attendance.

So if you’ve any interest in food, technology or just some fun events with some really great people, sign your name on the appropriate dotted line and we’ll see you there!

I need, very badly, an accounts assistant.

In short, I need someone to come to my house, plop down on one of our many, many laptops, and enter invoices, payments, receipts and expenses into the spreadsheet supplied by my accountants, then file them carefully in some sort of tabbed monthly notebook thing. If this person could also go through our pile of bills and make me write cheques and then actually drop them in the post as well, I will love them forever. I need someone to do this with more financial accumen and love for spreadsheets than I myself posses.

I’m looking for someone for about 2 hours a week, and I’m probably looking for a SAHM or UCC student who just wants to put Accounting 101 to work for some extra cash. I love telecommuting but for this, I need an actual human - preferably a capable, competent one.

We are currently located in Cork’s city centre off of Shandon Street, and will (hopefully) be re-locating to very near UCC this summer. The upside is that I am the very definition of flexible; I don’t care what day or what time you come and it doesn’t need to be the same day or time each week. Also, the coffee here is very serious and the kettle is always on. The downside is that I smoke and I’m not planning to quit any time terribly soon.

If you know anyone or you yourself are interested in this gig, please send me either an informal CV or just an email to sabrina [at] sabrinadent [dot] com. Thanks!

Pat Phelan, who very kindly bought me dinner last night (and is, by the way, looking positively svelt these days, the bastard) asked a question on his blog today about filtering all those things we’ll broadly call stewardship offers. These are the people and organisations who want to solicit you to be a mentor, give you seats on their boards, or have you as their official or unofficial go-to guy for business and strategy advice. They do not, however, want to pay you.

I have to say that I am the original Girl Who Can’t Say No, so frankly Pat should take whatever I have to offer with regards to this question and chuck it directly out the window. I spend at least as much time doling out advice, contacts and expertise on things I’m not being paid to do as I spend doing things I am being paid to do — sometimes for clients, sometimes just for random people who have been referred in or wandered by. I have a terrible time turning anyone away, and I sincerely enjoy getting to meet, talk to and yell at a wide range of really fabulous people, but recently I’ve begun looking at things through the lifeboat analogy.

You’re on a lifeboat, with the Titanic sinking gracefully in the background. You only have so many people you can fit on the boat. Your family, your closets friends and your business are going to take up most of those seats, and that leaves only so many spots left over. With the handful of seats you have available, you then have to make what are frankly tough choices.

Do you take the strongest passengers, those with the greatest chance of making it, or do you take the weakest survivors, those who need help the most? Do you leave behind the people you think are most likely to make it without you, or do you leave behind the ones most likely to go under anyway? Do you invest your capacity in awesome business models or awesome people? Do you grab the folks nobody has ever heard of because you like them and see something good there, or do you pimp out and jump on board with the ones getting good press, good buzz and something that smells suspiciously like a pending VC offer?

However you decide to triage, the fact is that there will be some people to whom you simply cannot offer a seat. And the reality is that if you try to take on board every poor bastard waving his hand in the water, you’re going to sink. The lifeboat will go down in the form of a divorce, a heart attack or a receivership — and take everyone with it.

Were I Pat Phelan, I’d restrict myself to one of each: one Little Start Up That Could, one Next Big Thing, and one I’m Hitching My Star to This Ride Because It’s Good for Me, Never Mind Them. I don’t believe anyone can really truly nurture more than that unless it is their full time job. But because I’m a sucker, I’d maybe also book a day a month for everyone else who knocked on my door, to meet and talk and then walk away.

And most importantly, I’d start making the mountains come to Mohammed, because if my name’s Pat Phelan, I spend entirely too much time on planes as it is.

The things I get myself into, I tell you.

Anyway, Ellie Parker and I are delighted to announce the upcoming launch of Sass.ie, going live sometime this month. We’re going to be aggregating posts from women bloggers in Ireland to help promote some of these great bloggers into bigger audiences.

But we’re going to build a ton of content around that, too. Our hope is that Sassie will also be a single point of contact for women (I hate the word portal) to find out about networking events like Girl Geek Dinners or to buddy up to attend things like CreativeCamps and Barcamps, as well as being able to access a well-written and well laid out body of information on running and promoting web sites from commerical enterprises to personal blogs.

We’ve actually got grand plans to cram a lot of high-value stuff in there, but right now all you can do is take a quick look, read what’s in the pipeline, and add your name to the alerts list so you’ll get a quick email when the site goes live.

And yes, by Jove, men are very welcome to join in, too!

Back from today’s Creative Camp and staying with my friend Katherine, who has very kindly let me hijack her cable internet. (Open wifi in Kilkenny: not so much.)

I was a bad, bad camper in that I turned up for lunch, did my two gigs and then turned around and went home to relieve the dog sitter. We travel everywhere with Eimear, but I’m just going to start taking her with me to these things so I can, you know, actually attend them.

Anyway, the panel went really well, and I panelled with brilliant women (Ina, Matha, Elly, Krishna moderating) although I’m a glutton for punishment and I like the hardball questions

I really had a great individual session on How to Blog Like a Boy, with a super responsive audience who laughed a lot and seemed engaged. If you’d like to see the presentation, its on Pix.ie. All of the text is in the first comment for each image, so you just need to click through them sequentially to get the actually content.

It was well attended by both men and women and afterwards, when I had adjoined to the smoking room (the great outdoors) a few of the men attending came up to me to say they were not, in fact, currently blogging like boys but felt suitably kicked up the arse now. That was interesting and oddly gratifying.

And for the record: yes, I speak like I blog and my language is just as salty, if not saltier, in person. Ireland has done bad, bad things for my potty mouth.

Last night was really quite the night. If you want the very abbreviated version: Twenty Major is the hot. And I won an award!

Everyone seems to be doing the rounds and shouting out to everyone they talked to at the jam-packed Irish Blog Awards last night. I have no idea how they can do that; I feel like I met absolutely everyone who blogs in Ireland, everyone who’s ever read a blog in Ireland, and everyone who’s ever shagged someone who’s read a blog in Ireland. There were a phenomenal number of people there, and one of the great surprises of the night was that every one of them, with a single exception, was incredibly nice.

The exception is the drunken bastard who kneecapped me with his shitkickers whilst staggering by the bar and didn’t offer so much as a passing “sorry.” Fucker.

I am absolutely chuffed to pieces and so grateful and full of so many things to say, but also so tired. I had four entire hours of sleep last night, and I’m shattered and incomprehensible. I have to go to sleep with my award under my pillow, but I’ll come back tomorrow to dish the dirt!

I sent out an email this morning at about 4:30 AM to 25 of the 27 people I think are signed up for this weekend’s Tea Party. It was a little harder than I thought to fish email addresses from a thread with 65 comments, so I’m completely frantic that I’ve got the numbers wrong and have missed someone. If that’s so, you’re still invited and I am just a moron.

So, after the break, there’s a (not spammable) list of the email addresses I sent reminders to. If you signed up for the Tea Party but did not get a reminder and can’t find your email here, please let me know by adding a comment to this thread because I need to add you to the list! Similarly, if you signed up but can’t come, or you said you couldn’t come and I signed you up anyway, let me know so I can un-twist my knickers.

And if your name is Sheena or Anne-Lousie, I have you down but have no email for you, so please do comment here so I can send you the reminder email and complete your details.

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Conn from Edgecast is organising a last-minute meetup of Irish language bloggers on Saturday, 1 March in advance of the Irish Blog Awards. Get the details here (in Irish, naturally!)

It’s an informal get-together, so just meet up in the lobby of the Alexander Hotel at 4 PM and get your Irish on. Feel free to grab banners in English or Irish - Irish one should now be correct:

Remember, there’s loads going on that weekend. Should be a great time!

Photo Credit: Ronnie44052 [cc]

The internet takes a lot of crap for being all about pornography. My general response to this is that the market gets what the market wants, and it should come as no surprise that naked people like other naked people. I have zero problem with online pornography as an industry, and the proliferation of everything from college call girls to phone sex workers doesn’t bother me in the least. You work it, honey.

What does bother me is whoring by people who are not, in fact, paid sex workers.

You may be surprised to learn that the most recent example of this is near Bantry, not generally known for being a red light district. A local hostelry is running an online contest which you enter by linking to them in your blog with a particular Google keyword phrase. They are, in short, gaming Google. They don’t want your opinion or your love; they want your inbound links to improve their search engine rankings.

I don’t have a problem with the suckers people who “entered” the contest by writing about Glengarriff Lodge. I have a problem with Glengarriff running a competition that is transparent, blatant link whoring:

You write a blog post which links to our homepage using the term Luxury Self Catering. In the same blog post you link to one friend who you think might be interested in the competition.

The thing is, it looks like a neat place and is touting itself as eco-friendly and sustainable. They could get legitimate links and an authentic viral buzz off of that. I can think of at least ten places with high Google rankings that would cover this joint if told about it, deliver better Google results for a very competitive keyword phrase, and not piss off half the blogsphere in the process. Or - hey! - they could actually optimise their site for search engines, with, say, page titles and stuff.

So, I’m with CrankyPants on this one.

The only good thing I can say about the Glengarriff campaign is that while they are prescribing the single phrase you need to link with, they are not telling you what to say. So, I can tell you that I think this Luxury Self Catering campaign at Glengarriff Lodge sucks, and according to the contest rules, that’s okay. Since I’m interested in what Eoghan McCabe thinks about this campaign, I guess I’m officially entered. Fair enough.

The same good thing cannot be said about ebuzzing, who spammed emailed me this morning to let me know they’ve setup shop on the corner of Hollywood and Vine:

ebuzzing allows bloggers to earn good money by writing about things they actually like, and even to define their own price for doing so. They browse ad campaigns posted by advertisers, create content for their blog discussing things that they genuinely wish to highlight and are paid for each article.

This kind of pay-per-post scheme is not new, and as long as the company running the service has a policy in place that requires the paid posts to be flagged as such, which ebuzzing does, I generally don’t have an issue with it. In this particular case, however, there’s one little catch: they have to approve your blog entry before you post it.

We will not censor content nor pass judgement on the quality of an article you’re publishing on your blog. But we have a duty to guarantee our advertisers the consistency and integrity of their campaigns and to see to it that the briefs they issue on ebuzzing are interpreted correctly. So it is incumbent on us to evaluate whether a post is within the framework laid down for the campaign, includes the necessary elements (eg links to advertisers’ site) and conforms to ebuzzing’s general editorial policy.

Call me cynical, but I’m reading that as “we can’t censor what you write on your own blog, but we’re probably only going to pre-approve and pay you for things that our client has asked for, namely positive blog entries.”

I’m not sure which of these two practices is more odious. The only thing I do know is that I have a lot more respect for the people whoring themselves to the almighty dollar than I do for the one’s whoring themselves to the almighty Google.

Just a quick reminder: last call to sign up for the Ladies Tea Party. This is a free, informal get together before the Irish Blog Awards, and dinner is very kindly sponsored by Microsoft Ireland. Signups close on the 22nd, and an email will be circulated with a reminder and details on the 23rd or 24th, one week before the Awards.

So if you’ve been thinking about attending but are feeling shy, get your tea while the pot is hot.