This is Damien Mulley and my Irish Web Awards Post.

Posted by McAWilliams in People, photography      7 comments    previous post: Vodafone 360 and Dita Von Teese | next post: Jenny Greene and The Electric Disco Album

Oct
12

So the Irish Web Awards were on last Saturday night and I would like to convey some opinions I have of the event itself.

This is its second year running and to be honest, I found the whole evening awfull, I shall go more into that in a while, but it may help to know more about the preceeding weeks beforehand. The guy above is some guy called Damien Mulley, he runs a blog (click the link if you are bothered) and seems to organise awards too, one for his mates in the blog world called the Irish Blog Awards and then this crap the Irish Web Awards. It seems anyone who wants can be nominated for these awards, then a bunch of Monkeys from what I can gather judge them and make the longlists into slightly smaller longlists, which he claims are shortlists! The scoring system for these seem flawed to say the least, you rank them by how pretty they are, “oh I like green I shortlisted that webpage” or “well there was a really attractive woman on the home page” were two reasons judges gave me for their decisions!

This formula is so wrong for starters monkeys cant decide what makes a good webpage, and also a webpage is not just a homepage there are other pages lurking in the background!

Onto the night itself, the hotel was lovely, unfortunately full of these nerdy geeky sorts who have never been let out of their bedrooms, it was horrible, chaotic and just plain ugly. The fashion also really sucked, it was just embarrassing. Eventually after these geeks had 2 drinks and were all plastered from lack of ever drinking before, they were cordoned into the main room.

A 2FM DJ called Rick O’Shea who is also a blogger (see the connection, bloggers seem to stick together like snails and slugs) took to the stage and proceeded to tell us all in binary how to behave ourselves because people from the real world were also there (I think that may have been the hotel staff) and would not know how to cope with geekdom. Then the pain began in a huge way, Rick told everyone that a bad powerpoint presentation would be used to announce the shortlisted few, this had the hall in stitches laughing (must be an in-joke or something) what Rick did not tell us was that he would be the worst ever compare for an awards with crap gags, crap microphone technique and that the awards would take an eternity to get through.

What seemed like 4 hours later they came to an end thank god, geeks accepting awards is something I hope to never experience again, the acceptance speeches had me totally baffled it was like being at a nerd convention, I understood nothing they spoke of, captured really well by Ryan Whalley

After this pain I took myself to the lobby where the drunks huddled around me obviously knowing I was a real person from the real world, they were like zombies preying on me, and I was scared.

So what about this Damien Mulley chap, well I hope that this has taught him a lesson to never hold an awards ceremony again, it was badly organised, under staffed, the food was revolting, the sweets from the 80′s was obviously another in joke that went over my head, as for throwing crisps into the audience do you not think these internet people eat enough crisps and pot noodles and crap on a day to day basis already, lets not forget the in-joke acronym tshirt with funny shit like “lol” and Britney f!cked” or my favorite “I am a bot” printed on them, how tacky was that!

So would I go back to the web awards again, to fucking right! As you all know I have been to every awards event Mr Mulley has held, from blog awards 1 to web awards 2, and he is incredible at what he does. I dont think some people realise that this guy does these events off his own bat, he makes very little from them some times nothing at all, one year even making a loss!!! yet some people out there bitch, complain and moan about these nights! Yes the awards are not your normal awards but that is what folk love about it! its casual, fun and memorable, if you dont like it well then dont come again! go to the stuffy awards instead and fall asleep during the presentations, pay the ridiculous price to sit in an uncomfy suit and eat a shit meal at a round table with other stuffy folk rather then eat chipsticks thrown by Rick into the crowd etc etc.

It maddens me to see and hear people complain about these nights. Oh yeah I did the powerpoint that went on and on, I spent 2 weeks at it, it ended up as a 166mb PPT file and had a hell of a lot of coding in it to get it to work, even though it may have looked cheap and nasty it was actually more complex then you think. So if you hated it or got bored of it I don’t care, it was done for free and in my spare time and I am actually proud how shit it looked, but at the end of the day its what so many of the people out there want to do to help Mulley along, and yes Damien I will help out any way I can with anything else if you ever need it, just never powerpoint again!

Finally thanks to Stephen Boyce for teaching me how to switch powerpoint on and all the rest, Jenny Greene for her fantastic voice over work and Alexia for ensuring the presentation ran as planned!