Damien Mulley

Damian O’Broin works with Ask Direct. He is the second guest blogger this week:

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Why do you do what you do?

It was never supposed to be this way. By my 37th birthday I should’ve been nicely settled in some professorship position having already bagged that Nobel prize for physics.

And failing that, surely I’d be sitting in my Dalkey mansion, counting my gold discs and leafing through the scrapbooks of critical acclaim from rock jouros the world over.

But no, here I am trying to keep a small business going with one hand, while trying to change the world by raising piles of money for progressive causes with the other. Hmmm. So why do I do what I do?

To explain. I run a fundraising and marketing agency for non-profits. I have no marketing qualifications. But I have read one of Seth Godin’s books. Ireland has no recognised fundraising qualifications. Although I do have nearly 15 years experience in non-profit communications, which I suppose counts for something.

The short answer, if it doesn’t sound too twee, is that I want to change the world. There’s a million things that make me angry, upset, outraged. And a million more that I know we could do better, quicker, fairer.

And I enjoy my job. On several levels.

I’m honoured to be able to use what talent I have to help organisations I believe in – groups like the Irish Hospice Foundation, Women’s Aid, Friends of the Earth and Barretstown – to raise more money and win new supporters. And conversely, that means I don’t have to sell my soul to The Man.

I love the challenge of constantly trying to produce work that’s better than what we’ve done before.

And I love the thrill of running my own business. Building and creating an enterprise that will – hopefully – grow and develop and provide for my family for years to come.

So it’s not a vocation. It’s a job, a career. Not that different to any other trade or profession. And there are times when I think I’d get lots of satisfaction from carpentry or organic farming – if I wasn’t such a city-boy who can’t cut a mortise joint to save his life.

So why do you do what you do?

Do you do what you want to do?

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Don’t forget to subscribe to and visit Ask Direct.

Though it is a Sports blog. Nice to see the Indo get into blogging though and good to see a fair bit of content on the blog already. Welcome to the Blog O’Sphere Peter Bills. I note by the subdomain that we can probably expect more blogs too.

New Blogs on the Block for this week. And last.

Silly season? Nawww. Overdosing on espressos.

Net neutrality in the UK? UK ISPs want a cut if the BBC wants to stream TV. Slippery slope or some such hand-waving thing.

Doggie sperm banks. It was only a matter of time I suppose.

Greatest movie ever? :

In one scene, a cute, topless girl is roughly tied down on a table by evil female Nazi experimenters who begin draining her blood and, as she screams in agony, they brand her like livestock with a coal-hot steel swastika,” our source said. “And every girl in the Nazi concentration camp is topless.”

The Penny Gap. Charging someone a buck for someting they paid nothing for before is not as easy as increasing the dollar a month service to two dollars.

This is Generation Now and they don’t care about privacy.

The Defrag conference looks good.

Plaid – Itsu

Rilo Kiley – Money Maker:

Matt Cutts is the guy inside the Google search engine bunker who talks to the outside world. He was at the recent WordPress meetahon and gace a great talk on ways to get Google to love you even more. Read his blog post and notes, read a written transcript and thanks to onemansblog, here is a video of the talk:

I’ve asked a few people to write blog posts for my blog this week, the first of which is “The Swearing Lady” from the blog Arse End of Ireland. She was shortlisted in many a category in the blog awards this year and if you’ve not read her, do and subscribe to her too. Oh and her birthday is this Wednesday, so wish her an early happy birthday. This is her guest post:

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You have no idea how much it upsets me to introduce myself as “The Swearing Lady”, but that’s how you lot know me, so it’ll have to do. It’s my own fault, naturally. When the blogging bug hit me, which it did with the optimistic wallop you get when applying for a large bank loan, I needed a name and I didn’t think too hard about being saddled with it. Like said large bank loan, I forgot that a blog is for life.

Anyway, I blog over at Arse End Of Ireland, which is a bitter little bite of the blogosphere indeed. The point of the exercise was to spew forth the nastiest quips I could secret behind faux-comedy without having to leave the house for the stand-up experience, which I’ve heard costs you a fortune in Jameson. And for a while it worked really well. No one knew me, because The Swearing Lady isn’t my real name. The lesson I should have been learning is that anonymity is the blogger’s best friend, and that the honesty that’ll earn you the respeck’ of thousands comes only from no one knowing where your local SuperValu is (obviously this doesn’t refer to tech bloggers, of which there are more than there are grains of sand in a seaside sandwich. Or journalists, who all have blogs for some charitable reason). For those of us who bitch, who confess or who wage war from behind a monitor, being a Scarlet Pimpernel will save you from just being scarle’. It’s much sexier as well. Remember when no one knew what Amy Winehouse looked like? It’s like that.

See, there may come a time when people notice your blog and stroke their beards and go, “I am quite, quite captivated”. They start complimenting you and emailing you and asking you for interviews and demanding you join them in podcast sessions and quoting you in the local paper. It is in this instance you’ll need to worry about that anonymity and the effect the gnashers of fleeting fame is having on its wee little arse. Is it worth having the discreet veil you’ve pulled over your identity raveled away by sudden interest and the love of a half-arsed audience? Fuck no! And not just because you’ll have lost the freedom of obscurity and you’ll no longer be able to decry the Irish Independent as a tosspot paper without upsetting half of your journo readers. It’s because…

Your mother will find out.

No more talking about how the boy-next-door gave you crabs, then (but that shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re a writer of exquisite talents, because no one wants to read about your itches)? No, the real problem is that you won’t be able to pass the homestead without Maman wondering aloud what you’ve said about her this week and looking pleased as a priest in front of a plate of Jaffa cakes.

“Am I in it?” she’ll ask.

“What?”

“The internet!”

“I fucking hope not.”

You thought I was going to warn you all about court cases and defamation charges, didn’t you? You thought I’d say that the freedom to write came from slithering away from the long arm of the law. Not a bit of it. Being able to blog without feeling like you owe your family a few seconds in the weak limelight of a 25-subscriber webpage is an experience so heady I’ve forgotten it now, like Keith Richards and a time before he was a breathing cliff face.

Hold on to your insignificance, brethren. Mammies will pull pride out of anything.

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You can read more from The Swearing Lady here.

Blognation Ireland is now live and first post from Conor O’Neill gives a great roundup of Web 2.0 companies in Ireland. Congrats Conor.

A while back I posted that I was looking to do some profiles of tech companies. After emailing every Business Innovation Centre, every City and County Enterprise Board and sticking it on the blog, I got 17 replies. You’d think there’d be more people interested in that. Shame really. I’m not sure exactly what else I am meant to do to help get tech companies some attention but this seems to have failed a little. Still, the next time I hear tech companies bitch about lack of coverage and I know they got my email and didn’t bother filling in a simple form, you can imagine what I’ll say. One lovely “go to” person in one of the groups linked me to a fucking website and suggested I contact each one of her companies. Should I have also written their marketing plan?

Anyways, here are 17 of the companies so far who I will profile in the next while:

PutPlace
Pixenate
LouderVoice
Planware
Beecher Networks Ltd
iQ Content
Magnetic Time
Bigulo
Nubiq
Tourist Republic
Stealth Shield
iText
CREMe Software
Zimbie
Time Warden Ltd.
802.EU
Hosting 365

Want to be added? Fill in this form.

Mashup Camp, Trinity College Dublin, September 12th and 13th.

Easter.

Global Map of Digital Inclusion.

Firefox plugin to turn your GMail into an online drive.

The Facebook datastore API.

Way back when, IBM were one of the first companies to encourage staff to use the web, then to blog and now to use virutal worlds. Each time they release guidelines and this is the one for virtual worlds.

Hugs. Or should that be *hugs*

Supermarket 2.0

According to PC live, ISME are encouraging companies to invade the privacy of job applicants by reading their blogs and facebook profiles. While not illegal, is this fair?

Be Kind, Rewind – New Gondry movie. Oh yes:

The Faint – Agenda Suicide:

Playing Elecy Piccy:

Alexia and Richard both have blog posts today which concentrate on the fact that ire should not be directed at Aer Lingus and the Transport Minister and some frank reassesments should occur on the abilities of Shannon and Limerick to attract business instead. Seriously, if a company decides to pull out, they might be jerks for impacting on the lives of a lot of people but why are we not seeing a collective reaction of “Fuck you, we don’t need you anyway, jerks” ? It is obvious to Aer Lingus that Belfast is more lucrative for them than Shannon, so why not change that? If Aer Lingus was the match that held up the whole house, then that is a MAJOR worry and as Alexia said, why the fuck should Aer Lingus be bribed to make them stay and the same offer not given to anyone else?

We do remember the days of Aer Lingus charging us 400 quid to the UK, right?