Paul, Ken and a few others including myself have agreed to a bit of a challenge in the run up to the Irish Blog Awards. Basically whoever gets the largest percentage increase in RSS subscribers via Feedburner between now and then will do well on the drinks front on awards night. So if you are one of those readers who just pops over here regularly via your browser, why not consider adding this blog to your RSS reader?

Jason and Mike have announced the TechCrunch20 conference and it has a wonderful twist – 20 startups get to present and it costs them nothing to do so, unlike many others. It’s being held on the West Coast in the Autumn Fall. Whether we get a slot or not I think this is shaping up to be something very special. Well done to the two guys for this beautifully disruptive move.

Thanks to Damien for quoting me in The Tribune yesterday. I thought it was an excellent article both on BarCamp and on raising funds. I’d like to explain my quote a little more here. Basically it concerned the €175m the Irish government have given to a set of VCs here. The VCs have to raise matching funds and then start backing businesses here. Many of us have a problem with this idea and my quote was in that context.

I was very surprised to see ATOM 1.0 did not make it into WordPress 2.1, especially considering I installed a third party implementation months ago (can’t remember from who at this stage) . Sam points the guys to plenty of implementations.

All feeds from LouderVoice will be ATOM 1.0.

UPDATE 1: I actually read this post by Matt before I blogged and somehow managed to completely miss the mention of ATOM. Here’s looking forward to 2.2!

Finally the question is answered: LouderVoice is all about reviews but with a BIG difference.

Instead of expecting you to spend time and effort writing reviews for us, we’re about your reviews on your blog building your reputation.

We provide the tools that enable you to publish structured reviews to your blog (hReview for the techies out there) and we’ll help everyone else to find your reviews, read them on your blog and then rate them and relate them to reviews by other bloggers. Our job is, above all, to be useful.

If you run any version of WordPress on a WeFaction hosted account you’ll run into the problem of sendmail being disabled so none of the notification mails get sent out. The way around this is to install the wpPHPMailer plug-in which uses SMTP instead. To get around the catch-22 of needing it installed to get your WP password, you’ll have to do the WP install, then go into phpMyAdmin and change your password using the MD5 function in the wp_users table and then login and enable the plugin and set the mail server options.

If you live and breathe web development, then head on over to the main company site to see what we are looking for.

I’m heading over to the second Irish BarCamp in Waterford this Saturday. I currently don’t plan to give any talks as I have had zero time to prepare anything (darned start-ups!). I will be on one of the panels and I’ll be actively contributing to lots of the discussions (like Donncha‘s).

If you spot me, do say hello. I’m staying the Saturday night so there’ll be tons of time to shoot the breeze.

I was excited for a very short period this evening when I spotted on Ryan Carson’s blog that there was an opportunity for web app startups to get on stage for 10 minutes in front of the entire audience of FOWA. There were only three spots left. I was just about to shoot off an email saying “me me me” when I spotted the final line “The cost is £5k”.

I’m still stunned. Surely the only start-ups that can afford to spend 5k are the ones who are already funded and who don’t actually need the PR? I was highly critical of LeWeb3 but Loic deserves great credit for the start-up room idea where the cost was a big fat zero. I would never begrudge anyone making a few quid but it seems like the highest cost is being targeted at those least able to afford it.

Ah c’mon, no “Best Microformats Blog”? Or “Best use of the word Beta in a Blog”?

There are, however, categories for Best Business Blog and Best Newcomer……..

Head on over and vote for all your faves.

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