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I said yesterday i’d go through my day in more detail once i had a chance to catch some z’s, so that’s exactly what i’ll do now….

First of all, the whole event was extremely well organized and credit must go to these guys and of course the sponsors.

Here was the timetable for the day…

I attended the talks circled (bar the last one which i had intended going to but couldn’t make it as i wanted to get a bus home at a decent hour). Next time i’ll probably stay over

All of the talks were held on several floors in the Guinness Storehouse which consists of several small presentation rooms on each floor (perfect for events like this one).

Although there was no need for me to go to the social media talks, they just stood out for me and were of more interest to me. I also took notes at all talks i went to and i’ll share my favourite tips on each talk with you…

Greg Fry

He was talking about a goal setting template and shared it with us… these are a few headings he’ll take in to consideration before setting goals;

• Financial
• Family Life
• Spiritual / Ethical
• Physical / Health
• Social / Cultural
• Educational

Adrian Avendano

This was completely off the wall on how the human brain works… he mentioned this video which is hilarious but the most interesting thing i took from this is that the human brain doesn’t like going back to the same place twice.

He gave an example of ‘wack a mole’ (where you have 3 holes and wack something that pops out). It takes us longer to wack the 2nd mole than the first one because our brains are looking for something new / different.

Amanda Webb

interesting talk on facebook and she told us the best time to be active is the morning time – when everyone is just starting work – i always thought lunchtime was best but i must experiment with mornings

Krishna De

Showed us how you can print off a pdf of your linked in profile or export your contacts to a csv file (that could be handy). Although i don’t really use linkedin, i must start to use it more and give it more time – especially if i’m gonna be attending more of these networking events.

Claire Boyles

i love twitter and use it daily so i was never going to come away from this talk learning anything new about how to use it or how it works but i did still pick up a few interesting things…

Can’t remember who said it, but somebody in the audience compared the flow of information to the flow of a river which i thought was a great analogy – the river always flows whether you’re there or not. Go away and when you come back it’ll still be flowing – it stops for nobody.

Claire also told us a story about her dog that went missing a few weeks ago. It was eventually found & returned to her thanks to twitter!

Morgan McKeagney

I remember coming across the iQprize a while back – they basically gave €10k to an entrepreneur for his business – no strings attached. Kinda like a dragons den type thing where you have plenty of ideas and businesses coming in and showcasing the idea and the best one wins (selected by a panel of judges).

Main tips i picked up from Morgan were about coming up with an idea / service. You have to ask yourself;

• Who’s the service for?
• Who are you competing with?
• How are you different or better?

It’s a very simple approach, but one that i can see works even if it’s just to filter through ideas and separate the runners from non-runners.

Anyway, here’s a few more pics from the day and the Guinness Storehouse – it was my first time there too and i was very impressed.

Apparently of the 499 registered, there were 291 there and i know for a fact there were people there who hadn’t signed up so i’m guessing there were over 300 there in total.. either way it was a good turn out although i have to admit, i’m surprised over 200 people registered and didn’t show up – poor form as they knew there was a cap on numbers and by registering it meant other people couldn’t… i deliberately waited to register myself until i knew for definite i’d be going….

Still, it felt pretty busy and for most of the talks i went to there were people standing / sitting on tables etc… so had there been another 200 people there i’m not sure what it would have been like

I’m just back from Dublin and bizcamp (bizcamp.ie) which was held at the Guinness Storehouse. It was hugely beneficial and i’ll take away a lot of tips and knowledge from it. There were several speakers who each gave about 45 minute talks on various subjects throughout the day.

In total, i went to 6 talks and picked up a lot of interesting stuff. It’s Saturday evening and i’m wrecked after travelling, so i’ll leave the gorey details for another day, but it was well worth my while going and i’ll defintiely be back

Entry, food, talks were all free and that’s what made it so different. People sharing information – no strings attached. What i found interesting was that the talks on social media in particular were packed and there were a lot of questions from the audience (twitter, linkedin and facebook).

As it was bizcamp, and full of business owners and entrepreneurs, the questions focused mainly on profits and if it is worth the time / hassle … the same people were probably asking those same questions when setting up a website years ago. In my opinion, you join the club or get left behind – just like a lot of businesses have done with websites.

10 years ago, websites were for techies or big fish who could afford them – nowadays if you have any sort of business at all, it’s almost compulsary you have a website. We haven’t reached that stage with social media, but we’re getting there…

Anyway, i’ll be posting some pics and going through my day in a bit more detail over the next few days…

It’s been over a year since i first mentioned the idea of doing a skydive on this blog. Once i commit to something i’ll usually follow it through at all costs and complete it at *some* stage, so i never doubted that i’d through myself out of a plane once i’d blogged about it.

photo credit: Andy H McDowall

Anyway, i’m happy to say the skydive is now booked and paid for and i’ve yet to get an exact, official, definite date, but it could be as early as next Sunday (27th) – 9 days away. I was always eager to get it over with before the weather started getting worse and before i settled back in to college.

This is the sort of thing which people will quiz me on but honestly i won’t even think about it until the night before. You can’t put yourself in to these situations mentally before hand as they’re too surreal for your mind to comprehend.

So until i’m up there and looking down, i won’t know how i’ll feel or what i’ll be thinking but i’ll be jumping regardless Anyway, more on this next week as D Day approaches….

This year, i have a year-long project module to complete. I’d tell you the exact details but i still haven’t had a class yet for this module (i’m now two weeks in to college)

photo credit: Gildas Le Mentec

My timetable has changed about 5 times since i started back and i’m still missing this subject completely from it. Anyway, i have a rough idea of what this project is about – i have to create a website, probably using asp.net and show that i can work with databases to create a basic site within admin / user functionality.

We didn’t/don’t do design in the course i’m in, but i do in my spare time so i’ll be setting very high standards for myself on this one.

I’ve already made up my mind what i’m doing and i’ll have plenty of motivation for this one… i’ll be creating some sort of feedback / discussion website which allows users to submit flaws and problems within the college.

No doubt the idea will evolve, but i’m determined to create some sort of easy to use, community driven feedback site. As far as i know, i can’t use any open source cms and i have to code in asp.net from scratch (which i haven’t really done before), so i’m facing an uphill struggle already but i’m sure i’ll learn as i go along.

I could create a site on anything but i’d prefer to kill a few birds with the one stone and seen as it’s a college project, what better subject to focus on…

I have a full year to complete this, so you can expect a work of art at the end of it all. I’ll be custom designing this from scratch and coding it all myself too. Hopefully i’ll be able to put it online and if i can’t, i’ll revamp it and put it online anyway in some shape or form, even if it is just to act as another portfolio filler

Last year, my ‘masterpiece’ was a dragon’s den parody video which i single handedly edited using a whole host of tools. Sound, special effects, angles, frame by frame editing… it was a hugely time consuming project and i was completely winging it as i’d never done video editing before but it all worked out grand in the end

So for my third year in college, this is the one project i’ll be putting all my effort in to.

Today, irish twitter users gradually broke a news story about a Luas (irish tram) crashing in to a bus with plenty of injuries and possible fatalities. In Dublin city center (especially O’ Connell Street), you always have plenty of photographers, tourists and workers roaming about so if something big happens, the public are on it in a flash.

photo credit: infomatique

At 2.59pm, cyberax262 tweeted this;

Bus just smashed into luas on o’connell street! Drive probably very injured. #luas #crash #bus #oconnellstreet

At 3.03pm darraghs tweeted this;

Luas crash on O’Connell St, looks pretty bad, first carriage off the tracks

At 3.03pm MarkBagnall tweeted the first picture of the event – roughly 4 minutes after it had happened;

Luas v Bus on O’Connell St, really hope no one was seriously injured http://twitpic.com/hxjqw

From then on, twitter was buzzing and more and more people arrived on the scene and took photos, added tweets, reported what they saw… office workers nearby took aerial pics… several news sites scrambled to break the story and many took pictures from flickr and twitpic which users had submitted.

It’s yet another example of how twitter is taking over from traditional news sites and becoming THE place for breaking news around the world. Most of the news sites are a good half an hour or more behind the times as they obviously can’t use twitter as a trusted source and need to take time to gather the stats and verify sources etc…