Damien Mulley

So the merchandise for the Blog Awards is looking a bit sparse at the moment. If you work in a company (or have a friend that does) that would like to have their merchandise or samples given out to a few hundred bloggers, give me a shout.

If you want to do video live stream on the night of the Blog Awards using QIK let me know. Qik have created a dedicated channel for us. I’ll also be giving out some cards to avail of the net access there since the Alexander charge for that at a high fee. You ideally need to have a Nokia N95 to do the live video streaming.

Oh yes, there are also two sponsorship slots available for the Awards, due to a sponsor pulling out and the other slot is for sponsorship of nametags.

Right now 360 people are registered to go to the Awards. And with only a week to go I had my first Awards disaster dream. Things are heating up!

Busy at the UCC Journalism conference all day. Back on Thursday.

9:50 Opening Address, Speakers for Session One Take Stage
10.50 Mr Gerry O’Regan, Editor, Irish Independent.
“Why traditional Newspaper’s are NOT dead!”
10.10 Rick O’Shea, RTE 2fm. “Blog Will Eat Itself – Old Is The New New”
10.25 Questions & Answers
10.45 Closing Address, Session One
10.50 Break for Coffee, Speakers for Session One Leave Stage
11.20 Opening Address, Speakers for Session Two Take Stage
11.25 Dusty Rhodes, The Death of the Newspaper: The Digital Radio Perspective.
11.40 James Cridland, The place of traditional media in the Web2.0 world.
11.55 Michael Foley, Sunday Times, Sports writer. The implications of New Media for Sport writers
12.10 Michael Kealey, ‘Legal challenges for a converging media’.
12.25 Questions & Answers
12.40 Closing Address
12.45 Break for Lunch, Speakers for Session Two Leave Stage
1.00 Lunch
2.15 Opening Address, Speakers for Session Three Take Stage
2.20 Damien Mulley. Blogging.
2.35 Jill O’Sullivan, A new media newsroom – does one size fit all? – and global new media trends.’
2.50 Brendan Keenan, Independent Group PLC
3.05 PJ Gibbons, Editor, Social and Personal Magazine
3.20 Dr Rachel O’Connell, Bebo Chief of Security
3:35 Questions & Answers
3.50 Closing Address

A CEO of an Irish company sent me a very long email recently telling me how I am to discuss his company in public in future. I found it quite inflammatory and abusive. He also called into question the ability of another Irish technology journalist in this unsolicited email and told me how I should not go down the path they chose. I am still wary of calling myself a journalist since these folks are professionals. I’m just someone with a gob. I asked said CEO could I publish his email on my blog and he has refused and questioned my inability to have a normal private conversation. Except a conversation is two way. Not abuse. No problem, it won’t be reproduced. Tom recently blogged about the fun he had with the CEO of Blueface.

There are good ways of interacting with bloggers and there are bad ways. Bloggers too are people and a modicum of respect for people would be nice if you are the one making contact with them. One way of getting their goat up is to tell them how they are to talk about your company in public. Another is to use passive aggressive bullshit of the type “I’m surprised that you of all people said that” or “of all people, you should know better”. Questioning whether someone is biased is another. As is taking swipes at a fellow technology journalist or someone in “the trade”.

Also if you are asked to stop emailing them. Do. Do not send another further email with more personal abuse. Finally putting all of these don’ts together in an email and marking the email as “personal and confidential” so the person in receipt of the abuse can’t reproduce on their blog or to others isn’t very nice at all. It’s not transparent.

It’s amazing that some business people think that being abusive to people will not come back and haunt them. Surely the Internet proves that the truth will out.