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Voting is now open on the 2009 IIA Net Visionary Awards.

Categories this year include:

• Best Business Blogger
• Best Business Podcaster
• Best Online Financial Services
• Best Online Trader
• Best Use of Social Media
• e-Government
• Innovation
• Internet Entrepreneur
• Journalist
• Mobile Internet Innovation
• Online Tourism
• Social Contribution
• Web Designer Excellence
• Web Developer Excellence

Voting is open to everyone.

• Best business blog (for this one)
• Internet Entrepreneur
  
• Internet Marketer

Nominations are now open for the 1st Irish Web Awards

At the moment you need to be involved in a site in order to nominate it, but the organisers may change the criteria.

Damien Mulley has finally announced the launch of the 1st Irish Web Awards. Damien is also the driving force behind the Irish Blog Awards by the way.

Unlike so many of the other industry events that seem to gauge participation by the amount of money you are willing to spend, The Irish Web Awards are open to anyone and the sponsors are covering the costs (which makes sense!).

It will be interesting to see how much traction this new awards event is able to gain in both industry and elsewhere. At present there are several other award ceremonies being run every year, but each of them operates in a very different manner.

Disclosure: Blacknight host the sites for both the Irish Web Awards and The Irish Blog Awards

Last week's ICANN meeting proved to be incredibly busy, both in terms of number of attendees and the number of announcements made.

From our point of view there were a number of topics that are relevant and important to our business and I'll be posting about some of these in the coming weeks both here and on my personal domain blog.

Last Thursday morning I was on the panel for a workshop on IPv6. There were four of us on the panel talking about our experiences from very different angles. If nothing else I definitely feel that I learnt something from it.

Of course the big announcement of the week was in relation to new Gtlds. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have cherrypicked from the announcements and now seem to think that all sorts of crazy domain extensions will now be available. They won't. (I'll follow up on this over the next few days).

As John mentioned on his blog, ICANN have finally taken steps to mitigate "domain tasting". It won't stop it outright, but it should curtail it quite a bit. It will also have the handy side-effect of stopping Network Solutions' practice of "holding" domains for "clients", as they won't be able to do it without incurring a fee.

The Afilias team were at ICANN Paris in full force and held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of dotme (Montenegro).

Closer to home (relatively speaking), Telnic announced their launch timeline. They've also started rolling out demo applications so that both users and developers can get a "feel" for the things you can do with a dottel domain (.tel).

The next few months should be an interesting time for the domain industry!

ICANN's 32nd International public meeting opened in Paris yesterday morning.

There are several hot topics on the agenda and judging by the crowds of people at last night's welcome cocktail, attendance levels are good.

If you're interested in finding out more head over to the meeting's official site where you can find details of meetings, talks, presentations and more.

The areas that are bound to attract attention this week are quite diverse and encompass topics such as new TLDs, the launch of .tel (dottel), Whois (again!), registry failover, the registrar agreement and both IDNs and IPv6. (Can you say "acronym hell"??)

Of course no ICANN meeting would be complete without an equally busy social agenda and last night's welcome cocktail at La Defense (photo above) was no different. Wednesday's gala dinner is being held in yet another famous Parisian landmark (more on that Thursday I hope!)

Image via Wikipedia

Blacknight, Microsoft and PollDaddy provided prizes, with us offering a year's VPS hosting to the winner!

We'll be liasing with Alan to ensure he gets to make full use of his prize :)

Image via Wikipedia

Thursday evening sees the Firefox party in Dublin, which is sponsored by ourselves, PutPlace, Wubud and BT.

If you're in Paris this week there's a domainer meeting being held prior to the ICANN meeting. It looks like quite a few people will be attending both events, as they are in the same venue.

Saturday is BarCamp Belfast.

And of course there's ICANN in Paris which officially starts the following Monday.

We're delighted to be involved in some little way with the next BarCamp event which is being held on Saturday, June 21st 2008 in Queen's University.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, as I will be in Paris for the ICANN meeting.

If you're interested in finding out more or would like to simply drop by you can find all the details over on the BarCamp site.

The list of attendees is growing nicely, so it should be an enjoyable and informative day for anyone interested in technology.

Image via Wikipedia

Later this month Firefox v 3 will be launched (it's currently in advanced beta testing) and it will be time to celebrate.

The good people at Mozilla are organising parties at a number of locations worldwide and the Dublin event is being organised by Paul from Segala and being sponsored by us and Putplace.

The event happens to coincide with the Irish Open Source Technology Conference, so there should be a number of OSS people in the Dublin area anyway...

As we mentioned previously, we are one of the sponsors of the Irish Internet Association's Congress, which takes place this year in Dublin's Croke Park.

Full details of the event may be found here

If you would like to avail of a 20% discount on booking simply use the coupon code: Congress2008

As we're sponsors of the event some of our staff should be around during the day, so keep an eye out for them!

The guys in Enum 353 are running a session this Friday on VOIP security which might be of interest to some people:

Venue: Morrison Hotel, Ormond Quay, Dublin 1
Date: Friday 28th March 2008
Time: 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. (lunch included)

There will be no charge to attend the session.

Overview:

This workshop will discuss several VoIP security considerations from a
service providers perspective, for example, SIP client security, SIP
proxy security and PSTN Gateway security. The workshop starts with a
short SIP introduction which highlights the SIP topics needed for SIP
hacking. Following this will be an in-depth look at specific attacks, a
live demonstration of the tools used in these attacks and a discussion
of attack countermeasures. Hacking methods displayed will include:
password hacking, account hijacking, relay attacks, identity spoofing,
billing bypass ...

This full day event will be presented by Klaus Darilion an expert in the
field of SIP communications. He studied electrical engineering at the
Vienna University of Technology, where he later wrote a Doctor thesis
about SIP based voice communication for public safety applications.
Klaus Darilion is now employed with enum.at, the Austrian ENUM registry,
where he is working on ENUM based call routing and all kinds of SIP
based communication.

NB: This event is not organised by Blacknight, so please address any queries to Enum353

Update: Sorry about this, but I've just been told that this session is not as open as I thought previously! This session is only open to members of the VoIP ENUM working group so for more information please email vewg@ienum.ie

Last Saturday Creative Camp was held in Kilkenny Castle. I've been to some nice venues over the last couple of years (I used to live in a really nice one in a previous life!) and Kilkenny Castle definitely gives them a run for their money.

Although the castle is in the middle of Kilkenny once you step through the gates you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were in the middle of the countryside, as all you can see is grass and trees.

The facilities in the building itself are excellent and the organisers did a wonderful job in arranging to hold the event there.

Since Kilkenny is only about a 20 minute drive from the Blacknight offices we simply had to turn out "en force", so six of us headed over for the day.

One of the things about our line of business is that although we maybe in contact with clients and business partners on a regular basis via email, phone and other methods, we rarely get to meet them "face to face". Events like Creative Camp are very refreshing in this regard, as it allows us to meet people in an informal setting. It's also a wonderful opportunity to get feedback on our services. While we may be doing a good job there's always room for improvement and the only way that you can really find out about it is when someone "grabs you" in a corridor and lets you know.

Being able to bring so many members of the team to an event was a great experience as well, since normally it's just me and one or two others. This time round there was a mixture of our development team, technical team and sales team, which was good fun.

There were some very interesting discussions being held throughout the day culminating in a very interesting panel session in the main hall about "Women in Technology". It also marked the official launch of a new site Sass.ie (think of it phonetically!) which we are delighted to sponsor. (We may be capitalist swine, but we like giving back to the community as well)

After the day's events we headed off for a nice Chinese with a couple of clients and friends before making our way back to Carlow.

George, our sales manager, took some nice photos at the event which you can find here. I was going to post a couple of them, but they're rather big.

So this weekend is Creative Camp and I'm currently trying to work out who exactly will be going from our offices... I know a few people were talking about it, but I'm still not 100% sure who is definitely going. It looks like there might be two carloads ...

So we're basically invading Kilkenny!

I'll probably be buying drinks / food for people later in the day / evening, so if you want some just look for the me ...

Don't know what I look like?

Well here's a recent enough photo of me with Playboy centrefold Sara Jean Underwood:

Relevance?

Practically none, but I've been trying to work out how to get a photo of me and a Playboy model onto the company blog for weeks ...

Of course I won't have these lovely ladies on my arm this weekend, but I should still be recognisable...

We've been active members of the Irish Internet Association for the last number of years and have been happy to sponsor several of their events in the past.

This year's event takes place in the Croke Park Conference Centre on Friday May 15th

This year the IIA's conference will be focussing on social networking and new media.

We'll be providing more details on the speakers and the rest of the day's details as soon as they are forthcoming.

At least two or three of our team should be at the event, so please do make yourselves known. There might even be a prize draw for something really cool and useful... If nothing else we'll definitely have a few hoodies and polo shirts to give away (they're really comfy!)

If you haven't done so already I'd recommend that you subscribe to our blog's feed to be kept up to date!

Next Saturday is a date that should be marked in every Irish web professional's calendar, as it marks the first "event" organised by the members of Irish Webmaster Forum. (You don't have to be a member to participate!)

Where?

Harbour Master, Mayor Street, IFSC, Dublin 1

When?

Saturday February the 9th. 7.30 PM til ...... I guess that's up to you!

The original thread that started it all off is here, but it's been mentioned on quite a few people's blogs and sites over the last few days.

Although I won't be able to attend due to prior engagements (translation - I have to go and see my mother before she disowns me and had arranged it beforehand) I'm hoping that some of our other staff may be able to make it, but even if they don't we'll be there in "spirit", as we're sponsoring the event.

I'll expect a full report with photos from the attendees!

It seems we've been nominated for the Best Business Blog category at this year's Irish Blog Awards.

Thanks to whoever nominated us!

I honestly don't expect us to win, as the competition is very strong in that category, so best of luck to all the nominees!

DomainFest draws to a close this morning with the farewell breakfast which I won't be attending.

The first SnapNames Live auction produced some interesting results, though not all domains found buyers. (I reported some of the results on my domain blog - for full results check DomainNameNews )

I'll be heading back to Ireland this afternoon via London, so I should be "back in circulation" on Monday (if not sooner!).

Registration for this year's DomainFest will be opening in little over an hour's time at 10am PST.

The organisers of this year's event are expecting over 600 delegates to attend over the event's three days.

Personally I'm looking forward to the live auctions being held tomorrow and Wednesday.

DomainFest is being held in Hollywood in a couple of weeks and we're proud to be one of the sponsors.

The event is one of the most important in the calendar for people involved in the domain industry and, if last year's event was anything to go by, it should draw a very interesting crowd from the four corners of the globe.

Last year I got to meet people from every aspect of the industry, so I'm hoping that this year will be similar. I've spoken to several people over the last couple of months who plan on attending THIS event since they had such a good time last year.

Unlike a lot of other industry events I've been to DomainFest manages to mix the business and pleasure to provide an almost perfect cocktail. You can easily find yourself having a drink in the bar with an unassuming multi-millionaire if you're not careful!

Of course a conference wouldn't be a conference if it didn't have speakers and at least one keynote. Last year they had TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, while this year's line up includes John Battelle, whose name may be familiar to anyone involved in SEO.

The agenda for this year's event looks very interesting and I will try to post more details as soon as they become available.

Similar to last year's event there are two "tracks" available.

If you're a DomainSponsor client, then you can learn about some of their new products and services.

However if you're more interested in hearing and discussing the latest trends in the domain name industry then the main track will be the place to be.

The topics on the agenda include new TLDs, legal issues, portfolio management and the famous networking sessions.

Last year was the first time I'd ever been to a networking session that was so intense and so incredibly productive! It's like speed dating, except it's for business contacts!

My biggest concern, of course, is not to get too involved in the live auction! It would be oh so easy to spend large amounts of money when you see the preliminary list of domains that are going to be on offer.

I'll be flying out to LA towards the middle of next week, as I want to take a couple of days prior to the event proper. At least that way I won't be able to use the excuse of jetlag if I spend the company's profits on dodgy domain names!

Rather than leave it to the last minute I thought I'd take a moment today to give a quick outline of our Christmas 2007 opening hours.

Office Opening Hours:

Friday 21st December - open
Monday 24th December - closed
Tuesday 25th December - closed
Wednesday 26th December - closed
Thursday 27th December - open
Friday 28th December - open
Monday 31st December - closed
Tuesday 1st January 2008 - closed
Wednesday 2nd January 2008 - open. Normal operations resume

Accounts

As above

Technical Support

Our support desk is accessible 24/7/365 and we will have oncall staff throughout the holiday period to deal with any emergency issues.
If you have a dedicated server or colo you should have the "out of hours" number to call. If you don't have the number or have misplaced it please let us know as soon as possible.

IE Domain Updates

The IE Domain Registry will be closed from Friday 21st until January 2nd, so no dns updates will be processed during the Christmas period. If you need any changes made then you need to get them done by close of business on Thursday 20th.

Other Domains

Most other domain registries are automated, so changes and requests maybe processed.

If you have any queries please let us know

Finally, on behalf of all the staff at Blacknight, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a peaceful and pleasant Christmas break.

Next Monday, 10th December, Mobile Monday will be taking place in downtown Dublin.

James Pearce, dotMobi's CTO posted the following to the Mobile Monday group:

When: Monday 10th December, 6:30 for 7:00
What: Bob Last and Chris Moisan, Taptu
Where: The Porterhouse, 16-18 Parliament Street
http://www.porterhousebrewco.com/templebar.html

We're thrilled to be able to hear about mobile search from Taptu
(http://taptu.com/ and http://taptu.com/blog/).

Taptu has been hot news in mobile this year, and the service has had
rave reviews in such illustrious places as the Scoble Show, WAP Review,
and Mobile2.0. Now they're coming to a pub near you!

So... if you thought that the mobile version of the search game was
wrapped up already, come and hear Bob and Chris dispel a few
assumptions. Mobile's a little different, right?

If you're interested in attending let them know so they can gauge numbers

The Irish PHP Users Group meets every month in 3 different locations.

This month is no different with 3 meetings scheduled for tomorrow evening:

Dublin: Longstone pub on Townsend Street
Cork: Metropole Hotel on MacCurtain Street
Monaghan: Contact Kae Verens for details.

More information on the UserGroup may be found on their site

On a sidenote, if anyone has an event that might be of interest to our clients please let me know. I'm only too happy to plug relevant events on the company blog

I mentioned the upcoming eNum event a couple of weeks ago.

I've just received details from them about the day's event and it sounds like it could be very interesting:
Venue: Gresham Hotel, O'Connell St, Dublin 1
Date: Wednesday 28th November 2007
Time: 4.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. (followed by drinks and snacks)

here will be no charge to attend the information session.
(parking available; close to DART and LUAS)

Agenda:

* Welcome and Introduction (IENUM)
* ENUM in Ireland (IENUM)
* ENUM in Austria (IPA)
* ENUM in the UK (BT)
* How to become an ENUM registrar (IENUM)
* ENUM - an Irish implementation (Soft Telecom)
* ENUM – an industry-led policy perspective (ENUM Policy Advisory Board)
* Open forum - Q&A
Objectives of the session:

• Share the experiences of ENUM in Europe, and understand the various business models used by registrars
• Inform about the benefits to service providers of being an ENUM tier 2 registrar
• Show how to become an ENUM registrar
• Discuss technical implementation details of ENUM and VoIP
• Share experience of a practical business implementation in Ireland -
ENUM as a tool to connect remote sites

If you're in the Galway region then you might be interested in the Linux InstallFest on Saturday 17th November:

Galway LUG is organising a multi-distro installfest from 1000-1200 on Saturday 17th of November, in the DERI building (opposite the Westwood Hotel), Newcastle Road, Galway[1]. We will have people available to help with Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva and RedHat (minimum). There will be demo systems with various software preinstalled, and with luck plenty of install CD/DVDs.

In typical Irish fashion both the IIA Net Visionary Awards and the Golden Spiders are on this month.

This has happened every year for the past three years (possibly longer). You'd think that they'd spread themselves out more .....

Several of our clients and friends have made the shortlist in both awards this year, so we wish them the best of luck!

The Golden Spiders are allowing the public to vote on the best blog and social networking categories this year, so if you haven't voted you may want to do so now.

We aren't shortlisted in either (we didn't enter the GS, so getting shortlisted would have been a miracle!) this year, so we won't be attending the ceremonies, but from previous years' experience I know it's good fun!

Carrying the title and theme "Mobile Broadband - Mobile Content, The Next Wave" the 2007 Wireless Ireland Conference is being held on November 13th 2007 in Dublin's Irish Management Institute

The lineup of speakers for this year's conference includes a healthy mix of Irish and international players:

John Strand, CEO, http://www.strandconsult.dk (Strand Consult)
Jan Hoffman, Mobile Manager, http://www.tv2.dk (TV2 Denmark)
Eamon Hession, CEO, http://www.puca.com (Puca)
Emer Conlon, IT Project Manager - http://www.rte.ie (RTE)
Fran Rooney, Chairman, http://www.icebroadband.ie (ICE Broadband)
Mark White, CEO, http://www.nowcasting.ie (Nowcasting)
Richard Rodger, CTO, http://www.feedhenry.com (FeedHenry)
Colm Piercy, CEO, http://www.Digiweb.ie (Digiweb)
Colm Healy, CEO, http://www.xiam.com (Xiam)

IENUM Ltd, which runs Enum in Ireland, is organising a "user day" at the end of this month.

Although we don't have the details as yet I thought I'd give people plenty of advance warning.

Enum is one of those technologies that *might* become important in the next couple of years, though it might not.

What is it?

ENUM stands for Electronic NUmber Mapping. A protocol developed by the IETF and detailed in RFC 3761 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3761.txt), ENUM provides a means to map telephone numbers to domain names enabling the identification of a variety of services such as VoIP, fax and email available at that telephone number. ENUM is being heralded as the means to interconnect the PSTN and Internet worlds.

Ireland's Enum trials were carried out last year and were deemed successful. Commercial service commenced earlier this year.

For more information please visit the Irish Enum site.

(Disclosure: I sit on the Enum 353 Policy Advisory Board)

I just got back from the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California.

As happens with those kind of events you spend about a week soaking up information. There are a lot of people in the internet industry globally and some of them are doing very interesting and exciting things. I'll be posting about some of those in the coming weeks.

Of course, like any industry, the internet is not without its problems. One of the areas that I've touched on previously is registrant rights and you can expect to hear more about it in the future as ICANN tries to put in place mechanisms to help better protect end users.

All in all it was a fascinating and fruitful week and I am looking forward to the next one!

One of the main theme's at the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, California, is IDN - internationalised domain names.

IDN has been a topic of much interest, discussion and debate for the last few years as currently you cannot use non-ascii characters in domain names. While that may not be an issue for an English speaker it is a problem for speakers of other languages who use other character sets.

To get an idea of what is possible have a look at the examples on the ICANN LA site.

I'm heading off to Los Angeles in the morning to attend the ICANN meeting.

I'll try to blog a bit from there either on here or on my personal blog or my domain news blog (you're spoilt for choice!).

The meeting agenda is available online.

If you're not a big fan of TLAs (three letter acronyms) then it's probably a nightmare trying to decipher the timetable.

As you can see there are meetings running from Saturday until Friday on the main timetable.

At events like this there will also be a lot of informal meetings going on all day and all night.

Some of the topics that will be on the agenda this time round include:

• Whois - since nobody can agree on this one (except that they need to do something about it) you can expect to see it on the agenda again and again


• New Gtlds - what will be the next big thing? How will ICANN decide what is allowed and what isn't?


• Translation - we live in a multilingual and multicultural world.


• Registrar Accreditation Agreement - the contract that all registrars sign with ICANN. It hasn't changed in years, so it's currently under review


• Security topics - everyone has to take an interest in security these days. It's unavoidable. ICANN includes representatives from all areas, so discussions can cover a range of topics


• Domain tasting - it doesn't seem to be down as an agenda item, but I can imagine that someone will bring it up at some point

One of the areas that ICANN has been working hard on improving is that of public participation, so you can pose questions to panels even if you are on the other side of the globe. More information can usually be found on the public participation site or the ICANN blog.

The next ICANN meeting is being held in Los Angeles, California.

Although the meeting doesn't officially start until the Monday there will be meetings and events over the weekend as well.

I'll be attending again, as there are quite a few topics of interest on the table.

If you're interested in the meeting schedule, then it's available on the site.

The meeting will also include a special event in honour of Vint Cerf who has served ICANN since the beginning.

Zend just sent me an email about a webinar that might be of interest to our clients:
Migrating from PHP4 to PHP5 - Presented by Ivo Jansch, CTO iBuildings

This webinar is aimed at both developers and IT managers who are still using PHP4 and considering migration to PHP5. This session will address the question, “What are the benefits of migrating to PHP5 and equally importantly, what are the risks?” Following this webinar you will be in a better position to make an informed decision between PHP4 and PHP5.

We mentioned the pending "death" of php4 some time ago.

It now seems that some people have got together to help push the move to php5 forward and have set a deadline of sorts.

The "go php5" site lists software projects that support php 5.2 and greater natively ie. without "dirty hacks" or any other messing about.

As I mentioned previously, most scripts should work properly under php 5, but there will always be exceptions!

If you'd like to find out more about why switching to php5 makes sense have a look at their FAQ.

The idea behind this is to give people that extra "push":

PHP version 5 adds a number of new features and design changes that make developing robust, secure, feature-rich software faster and easier. Those features do not exist in older versions of PHP 4, however, and many are very hard to emulate. Such features include fast and easy XML support for improved web services, better timezone handling, vastly improved database tools and input tools to make PHP applications more secure, and many others.

Projects that support PHP 4 cannot make use of those newer features, however. That means projects have to choose between supporting PHP 4, which has been in maintenance-only mode for over three years, or enabling modern web applications and services. For a long time many projects have chosen to support PHP 4 because of the large number of web hosts running PHP 4. Unfortunately that has resulted in a "chicken and egg" problem where web hosts have no incentive to upgrade to PHP 5, which means PHP developers can't use PHP 5's new functionality even if they want to.

By announcing that many leading open source projects will drop legacy support for PHP 4 at a fixed later date, we believe we can break that cycle and encourage web hosts to upgrade and allow open source developers to build faster, more secure, more powerful web applications.

Now if only we could persuade people to stop using MS SQL 2000 and FrontPage!!

PodCamp Ireland was fantastic.

The organisers did a fantastic job and I hope everyone had as much fun as I did.

They even managed to bamboozle me into joining a panel!

A couple of us have headed over to Kilkenny for the day to attend PodCampIreland.

If you're in the area drop into the Ormonde Hotel

Ireland's first major podcasting event takes place this Saturday in the Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny.

The event kicks off at 10am and promises to be an interesting day if the list of expected attendees is anything to go by.

As it's only "over the road" from us I plan on attending, as I'm still feeling guilty about not attending the last couple of events that we sponsored!

For a list of possible attendees see here

Voting has now opened in the 2007 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards.

I've been nominated under both Internet Entrepreneur and the Online Trader categories, so any and all votes would be appreciated!

There's also quite a few other names on the list that are familiar to us here at Blacknight. They belong to friends, business partners, clients and acquaintances. I wish them all the best of luck!

Unfortunately I didn't make it to BarCamp Galway, as we're doing a major deployment this weekend (remember those photos? Multiply the pile of servers by a factor of 3!)

I'm hoping that some of us will make it to Kilkenny for PodCamp instead!

If you'd like to find out what people are getting upto in the wonderful world of mobile devices and the mobile web, then Mobile Monday is the place for you.

On Monday next, September 24th Mobile Monday Demo Night will take place in The Hairy Lemon, which is in central Dublin (map)

Several companies will be showing off their latest creations so it should be good fun.

As we're promoting .mobi domains at present it's only natural that we also take the time to promote mobile web related stuff, so we'll be sponsoring the event.

More info here

Yes - that is a very big image!

But it hopefully caught your attention

Ken McGuire has made a series of PodCamp logos and buttons available for people to put on their blog / site.

Podcamp is a free event and takes place in Kilkenny city (about 30 minutes from our offices) on September 29th 2007.

If you haven't registered, why not do so now?

It won't cost you anything!

EDIT: Fixed the links.

Our accounts department will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week, as one of our staff, Leona, is tying the proverbial knot. Since most of the office is invited to the wedding on Thursday we'll be closing accounts on Thursday and Friday. (Yes if you want to pay us we'll be able to manage it!).

On the subject of weddings this year has been very busy chez Blacknight with three members of the team getting married.

George, our sales manager, tied the knot earlier this summer. Carla, one of our programmers got married this weekend and now we have Leona following suit.

We wish them all the best!

BarCamp Galway takes place on 22nd September and we're delighted to be sponsors.

We may even get to send someone to attend the event! Though I won't confirm that just yet, as it seems to curse any chance of it happening if I do!

In any case you can find out more on the event's blog or on the wiki.

So far to date we seem to have sponsored every barcamp event that's been held in the 32 counties!

Nominations are now open for the Irish Internet Association's annual awards - the Net Visionaries. The timeline and details are available on their site.

We were involved with the awards for the last couple of years and I would consider it to be the only true internet award in Ireland at present as it is well respected within industry circles.

If you would like to nominate someone then you can do so directly here

The categories cover both the technical and business side of the internet business and you DO NOT have to be a member to nominate or get nominated.

Due to work pressures I wasn't able to attend the event we sponsored down in Cork yesterday evening.

Damien tells me that there was a good turnout, so I'm delighted.

The IT@Cork blog has a review of the event as well.

It's a long weekend here in Ireland, so our offices will be closed from this afternoon until Tuesday morning.

Hope you all have a nice weekend!

As it's a long weekend a lot of us will be heading away for the weekend to visit family and friends or simply relaxing and enjoying life.

I'm not sure if I'll be breaking open any bottles of champagne over the next couple of days, but it's always a possibility!

One or two of us will be down in the "real" capital, Cork, next Wednesday evening for a talk we're sponsoring on Firefox 3.

The talk, which is being held in conjunction with It@Cork, is being given by Marcio Galli of the Mozilla foundation:

FireFox - A Web-browser, a Platform, a Framework.

A talk on Web development and advanced applications with upcoming Mozilla Firefox 3.

The presentation focuses on demonstrations of new features of the Firefox "platform" built on open standards with the focus on technology cases and development opportunities.

Target audiences: Computer science students, web developers, software engineers, entrepreneurial individuals, and more."

For further details and to register see the It@Cork site

So if you'd like to find out what the future of Firefox is going to be like, then why not drop by?

The event is being held out in the National Software Centre in Mahon, so hopefully the traffic around the Jack Lynch tunnel won't be too heavy, or I might be late!

We're sponsoring yet another BarCamp - BarCampBelfast, which is being held this Saturday, June 30th 2007 at Queen's University in Belfast.

I've been at a couple of the BarCamp events over the last year and if anything they aren't boring, so it should be a good day. In any case it's a wonderful excuse to head up to Belfast!

Several of our team will be up a the Irish Internet Association event in Killiney Castle this Thursday.

The conference, which we've been attending for the last 3 or 4 years, is always a good event and is a wonderful opportunity to "put faces to names", so why not drop by our stand in the exhibition area on Thursday afternoon?

You might even get a little "goodie" to make the trip worthwhile!

It looks like I'll be tied up all afternoon, as I'm chairing one of the break out sessions:
Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts

The panelists include:

• David B. Johnson, Google – AdSense International Manager


• Richard Delevan, Sunday Tribune – Business Editor


• Richard Hearne, Red Cardinal

As it's a breakout session nobody will be pontificating. It's an ideal opportunity to ask questions and get answers from experts in their field

See you there!

I just got back from Mullingar a couple of hours ago where I was a guest of the Westmeath County Enterprise Board and the IIA.

The event, which was entitled "Using the Internet and Blogging to Increase Sales", was highly enjoyable and featured a great panel:

• Maryrose Lyons - who gave a talk on content and layout
• Me - I gave a talk on all aspects of blogging (admittedly I was bit short on time!)
• Brian Greene gave some fantastic examples of Irish businesses that have started blogging
• Maggie Bowen - who rounded the event up with a talk on using the 'net to increase your bottom line

The event was held in the Mullingar Park Hotel on the outskirts of Mullingar and was very well organised.

Kudos to both the IIA and Christine Charlton and her team from Westmeath County Enterprise Board.

If anyone wants to see my presentation you can download it here. It's in Powerpoint format, but will work fine on Open Office (I converted it from OO to PP this morning)

As one of the sponsors of the IIA conference we are able to offer our clients a reduced rate on the tickets.

Simply email events@iia.ie quoting "Blacknight rate" for details

The Irish Internet Association's Annual Congress is being held in Dublin on May 17th in the Fitzpatrick Hotel, Killiney.

This year's theme is "Buy, Sell and Do Business Online" and the event's organisers have been working on a great lineup from all the big names in the online industry.

Participants this year include Bebo, Google, eBay, Microsoft and Realex Payments.

We're sponsoring one of the afternoon sessions which will be focussed on monetisation - "Can you make money out of Blogs and Podcasts" . I'll post more details on the session closer to the date.

Further details of the event are available on the IIA's site

I'll be heading off to Lisbon in the morning to represent Blacknight at the ICANN meeting.

It should be an interesting few days, especially in light of recent developments with XXX, ccTLDs, the launch of .asia and a whole lot more.

A number of people who were at Domain Fest in LA earlier this year will be making the trip to Portugal, so it's a wonderful time to renew friendships and maybe even talk about domains and the internet business!

Full details of the various sessions may be found on the ICANN site

There are a number of sessions covering the domain aftermarket that I will be attending, as well as others on new TLDs.

It should be both fun and informative!

This weekend is a long weekend in Ireland, as it's St Patrick's day on Saturday. St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, just in case you didn't know.

In time honoured tradition the entire nation of Ireland will be celebrating a collective hangover on Monday. In order for this to be practical we have all decided to take the day off.

If your server explodes or you have any other issues over the long weekend we will be monitoring things as usual. Our technical staff will respond, though they maybe slightly groggier than usual :)

Our offices will reopen at 9am on Tuesday should you have a desire to speak to us

Ronan Kirby from RedHat did a nice write up on his trip to Skycon the other week.

Much to my amazement he not only mentioned my talk on email filtering but also includes a photo of me. It's taken from a rather odd angle and before anyone asks, no I wasn't drinking beer while giving the talk!

You can read the article on their site here

Several members of the Blacknight team were down in Limerick at Skycon from last Thursday until last night.

Skycon was organised in celebration of the 15 year anniversary of Skynet, the University of Limerick computer society.

Over the past couple of years I have been to quite a number of events throughout Ireland which were organised, for the most part, by companies and professional organisations. Many of them seemed amateurish compared to Skycon, which was organised, of course, by students.

As some of you may know, I am a graduate of UL and we also employ a number of other UL graduates, so it's always nice to go back down there.

This time was a bit different, as both myself and Paul were giving talks.
We also provided prizes for the table quiz on Saturday night!

My talk on email filtering was on Friday afternoon, while Paul gave a talk on open source software chez Blacknight on the Saturday.

Other speakers on the agenda included Alan Cox (RedHat), Simon Phipps (Sun) and TJ McIntyre . Full list of speakers is on the Skycon site

A big thanks to all the organisers for making the event such a big sucess and for looking after us all.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to Domain Fest in LA.

It was a truly amazing event and I would like to take this chance to give a word of thanks to all those involved. They did a truly amazing job!

Rather than try to outdo Ron Jackson I'd recommend you have a look at his overview of the conference.

I'm heading off to DomainFest in Los Angeles tomorrow morning.

For once we aren't sponsors or exhibiting!!

It will be a great opportunity for me to meet up with people who I've only ever dealt with over the phone or via email.

Of course it won't be all work, work, work!!

The conference doesn't start until Wednesday afternoon, with the actual sessions running properly from Thursday morning onwards.

The event organisers have got together a fantastic lineup, so I'm hoping to make the most of it.

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) will be giving a talk at lunchtime on Thursday, while there will be plenty of other sessions with representatives from some of the big "movers and shakers" of the domain name industry.

I'm really looking forward to it!

We'll be down in my alma mater, UL, in mid-February for Skycon.

Skycon is being organised by the University of Limerick computer society, Skynet, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year.

Paul Kelly, Blacknight's CTO, will be giving a talk on using Open Source software to run a hosting company (or at least some parts of it).

I will also be giving a talk, though the exact topic has not been announced as yet.

Full details of the conference maybe found on the Skycon site

I'd just like to take this opportunity to give a huge thanks to the organisers of BarCamp Southeast.

Tom and Keith did an absolutely amazing job and it is only due to their hardwork and meticulous preparation that the day was such a complete success.

Several of our team went down to Waterford for the day to hear about some of the cool things that the Irish 'net community is currently playing with and I think I speak for all of them when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Admittedly there will have been a few groggy heads this morning, but I guess that's a sure sign of an enjoyable post-BarCamp session

With Christmas only a couple of weeks away we thought it was time we got some seasonal banners and button ads, so we contacted our friends in SpoiltChild Design and this is what they came up with:

120 x 60 button - suitable for blogs, sidebars and other sites where screen space is at a premium.

728 * 90 leaderboard. This format works very well on fora and other sites that can take an oversized banner.

468 x 60 banner ad. Probably the most popular ad format for online advertising.

Skyscraper 120 x 600. The skyscraper is, like its name suggests, tall and thin

Our Christmas flavoured print ads are also using this design, as well as a couple of other ones, so we'll probably post them as soon as we can get our hands on some gifs or jpegs.

Happy Christmas by the way !!

We'll be in Cork tomorrow at the IT@Cork conference.

It looks like there could be an interesting line up, with a combination of both Irish and international speakers included in the day's lineup.

We'll also have stand, as we are one of the event's sponsors, so if you're down that way feel free to drop by

I like us to get involved with interesting projects, so when Tom Raftery asked us if we'd be interested in sponsoring the It@Cork conference this year I was interested.

Rather than merely shoving our name on the sponsors' list we're actually sponsoring the pre-conference podcast series, where Tom will be speaking to some of the speakers that will be in Cork in November.

The first interview is with Jeff Nolan and is well worth listening to either on your pc or mp3 player!

We are proud sponsors of the Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards again this year.

This year's awards sees the introduction of two new categories that reflect the growing popularity of the media in question - namely blogging and podcasting.

Here at Blacknight we're passionate about new technologies, so it's little surprise that several of our clients have been nominated.

Best of luck to all the nominees this year, as I can see that some of the categories are going to be hotly contested.

NB: Voting is open to everyone - you DO NOTneed to be a member of the IIA.

I was down in Cork on Saturday for BarCamp which we were sponsoring.

I had a really good time and met some really interesting people.

None of this would have been possible without the hard work of the organisers and volunteers, so I'd like to take this chance to thank them for all their selfless work - without people like them great events simply cannot happen.

Maybe this could become an annual event?

The Irish Internet Association is organising a half day seminar in conjunction with Carlow County Enterprise Board.

As the event is taking place in Carlow it's only natural that we should be involved

The schedule for the afternoon is as follows:
2.00-2.15: Registrations

2.15-2.30: Welcome and Introductions, CEO Carlow CEB

2.30-3.00: Quality Web Design to drive customers to your site - John Mitchell, Strata3

3.00-3.30: Getting your Website spec and design right for your business - Michele Neylon, Blacknight Solutions

3.30-4.00: Generate Sales Leads Online - Fergal O’Byrne, CEO IIA

4.00-4.15: Panel Q&A

4.15-4.30: Carlow SME Showcase

4.30-5.00: Networking

As you can see I've been asked to give a talk on speccing a website for your business, so if anyone has any particular thoughts they'd like to share now is the time to let me know

If you are interested in coming along let the IIA know

I'll be down in Cork next Saturday for Bar Camp which looks like it could be an interesting event.

Looking at the list of attendees and speakers I recognise quite a few familiar names so it will be nice to actually meet a few of them "in real life".

If anyone wants to say "hi" just keep an eye out for me...

We're also exhibiting this week at the World Ploughing Championships in Tullow, Co. Carlow.

Paul and his team have been working on putting together some interesting demos etc., to liven up the stand.

I don't think I've ever really been to a ploughing championship, so I've no idea what to expect!

The Irish Internet Association annual awards, the Net Visionaries, will be held later this year.

The Net Visionary award is the only award in Ireland where the public can not only nominate the winners, but also vote for them. You don't need to be a member of the IIA, nor does the nominee.

You can nominate people under any one of the range of categories on the official site.

This year's categories include the introduction of both "blogger" and "podcaster"

Blacknight is sponsoring the "Web Designer Excellence" award.

And here they are... courtesy of Flickr

www.flickr.com More of blacknightsolutions' photos

I'll be putting online some of the photos we took at the conference last week later today.

We're at the Irish Internet Association conference all day today - have a look out for the guys with the Blacknight name tags.

We're going to be giving away a branded iPod Nano later during the day to one lucky delegate.

Jimmy is ensuring that the company name goes with the people and is dressed all in black

David Jesse from eBay.ie is currently talking about how the eBay system works for users.

Bitbuzz have provided the wifi for the day throughout the hotel.

As mentioned previously we are co-sponsors of the Irish Internet Association Conference on 25th May.
What I didn't mention was that I'll also be involved in one of the afternoon sessions on domain issues. Conor McGuire from the IEDR and myself will be sharing our expertise and answering people's questions on domains of all shapes and sizes.
So if you have any queries about domain names, cybersquatting, eu domains or any related matters why don't you drop by and let us know

As co-sponsors of the Irish Internet Association's annual conference, which is to be held this year in the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel, Killiney on May 25th, we're looking forward to seeing some of you on the day.

This year's lineup includes speakers from some of the most important online companies, not only in Ireland, but globally!

Although the full schedule hasn't been finalised the provisional one includes Yahoo!, Google, MSN, eBay and Bebo, so it should be quite informative.

If you're not already a member of the IIA then I'd encourage you to join now

I'll be giving a talk on Open Source software in business at the ICT Expo next Friday, 5th May, 2006 in the RDS.

The talk is part of a series being organised by Open Ireland in collaboration with ILUG that will run over the course of the two day event.

The talk is officially entitled:
Linux and some of its friends in the enterprise

Linux and its Gnu/other friends in the enterprise, introducing several ways that this flexible system can be exploited within the enterprise. Here there will be a talk on the use of databases, email, appropriate content on the network be that servers or on the desktop. This space is so broad but we have managed to extract from the field just a few gems.

So you can expect to hear about a very wide range of topics crammed into a very short period of time

At Blacknight we use a combination of both Open Source solutions and proprietary ones to run not only our core systems but many aspects of our business interaction with our clients. As a business we do not have the luxury of making decisions based purely on philosophy. We have to make the right choice in order to deliver the best solution to our clients and partners at all times.

Throughout the year the Irish Internet Association is organising a series of events covering a range of topics related to the internet industry.

On 12 April they are organising a half-day event covering blogging and podcasting. Brian Greene from Doop will be giving a talk on podcasting, while I will be giving one on blogging.

Where?
Engineers Ireland Headquarters, 22 Clyde Road, Ballsbridge
When?
12 April 2006 9:30
Cost?
Fee is €50 for IEI/IIA members and €65 for non-members

The Irish Internet Association, of which we are members, is organising a series of debates this year.

The first debate is on the motion:The Internet is Crap and will not survive !

Needless to say I'll be opposing the motion as will my team mates.

Full details of the event are on the IIA site here, while the event also received some coverage in Silicon Republic today

As some of you may know, this Saturday sees the inaugaral Irish Blog Awards taking place in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Here at Blacknight we love blogs, or maybe it's just my own personal bias :)

In any case we are delighted to be one of the sponsor's of the event and will be giving away a black iPod Nano to a lucky blogger (we're also giving free hosting and other goodies to nominees).

Damien Mulley, who is the driving force behind this year's event, was interviewed with Rick O'Shea, MC for the night, on the Dave Fanning show this evening and gave us a lovely plug.

Thanks Damien!