Are the Irish blog awards fixed?

There is something rotten in the state of DamienMark and the Irish blog awards. I had simply thought it was a harmless bit of nonsense which had some weird quirks and oddities. But that someone could not post during almost the entirely of the period that was stated as a minimum requirement for nomination and yet still win an award is more than odd. That two would do so goes beyond passing strange.

The fact is that no one can independently vouch for the judges because no one outside the inner circle knows who the judges are. The rules or even mere guidelines are lacking to the point of being vapour but even the most lax of rules wouldn't have had two nominees making the short-list for what is meant to be a year's work when they didn't post for most of the year in question. The bald fact is that one of those winners only started to post less than 2 weeks before the deadline, while another took a sabbatical for 8 months only returning to resume posting less than 2 weeks before the deadline.

With this kind of arbitrary inclusion and exclusion it is hard not to see the awards as being more about currying favour and jumping on bandwagons than any sort of real assessment of quality over the course of a year. It's pretty like crowning the league champions on the basis of a few good matches at the end of the season. Having the accolade of being the best for a particular year should mean that you were the best over the course of that period not that you had flashes of excellence here and there. It must be galling for those who lost out that their entire years work wasn't judged to be as good as a few weeks or a couple of months output by someone else.

Then going beyond that we have the peculiar notion that the winner for best newcomer (a nice young lad by all accounts) was heavily promoted by the organiser and his friends.

Then the winner for best blog from a journalist appears to have provided the goodie bags.

That the winner for best current affairs and ultimately the Grand Prix prize for best blog is also a close friend of the organiser shouldn't in the normal run of events be a matter of any concern but with everything else that is going on one can't not mention it. I don't doubt that it is amongst the best in its category but the absolute best?

In the normal run of events, one or or two of the above you could gloss over but all of them? Then you have the all organisational strangeness. Why have no confirmation for registration that people made in December until just 48 hours beforehand? Especially, when you consider that many people had to travel to attend and stay overnight? Why is no confirmation mail sent to those who nominate of their nomination choices so that they have some proof that they did nominate and who they nominated? Why was it that registration for attendance opened weeks in advance of opening the nominations, meaning people who were nominated couldn't register to sit at a event that they should have been the focus of? Why is it that we have no publicly available criteria of what is used for the judging? Why is there no confirmation for people that they applied to be judges? Why is it no one can know who the judges are? I applied to be a judge in 2007 but heard nothing back then, other people I know applied last year but heard nothing back. Yet we're repeatedly told that judging is open to all but that is not true, you can offer to be a judge but the selection of judges is not open. I noticed in my own case some touching on my blog from the judging area of the awards.ie site -I was longlisted for political blog - a few hours before the short-list was posted. Only one of which actually looked at the archive for the previous year. I wouldn't have had me remotely near the short list but it would be good to know you didn't make it having actually been really reviewed not just glanced at at the last minute. I wonder how much assessment was really made of other the categories, was it as superficial as that?

Again, none of these things on their own is proof of misdeeds, indeed taken together they might still be a matter of mere coincidence but the absence of any transparency about proceedings must naturally lead to questions. The notion of Ceasar's wife being above reproach comes to mind. When the process is secret all efforts should be made to ensure that there can be no inference of wrong doing. It might sound dull but the process matters, it takes from the winners that such a cloud should exist over the process and for no good reason either I can understand.

When it comes to our electoral process we don't have people vote then take the votes into a locked room to be countred by only a few people who appointed by the government and who we never get to see and then at the end a government representative would come out and tell us the result. Everyone would look at that and shout fix. Yet the process for the blog awards is little different. Judges are appointed in secret, they judge in secret, their votes are weighed up in secret.

Sure it's a fun night out for those concerned but so too apparently are 12th July parades and lynchings in the deep south on the 1930s were very good at bringing the community (some of it at least) together. Of course, this is nowhere on that scale but the mentality that will be used to defend it is much the same. A group who enjoy one another company refusing to answer any questions about the process involved because it is just a bit of craic. A bit of craic which leads to business being generated for some of those concerned? That sound like a straightforward business promotion to me.

Needless to say none of the actual nominees are in a position can say anything because the temperamental nature of the host is well established at this stage and the potential consequences of making any kind of critique is there for all to see. Since my card is marked anyway I'm saying it, I've nothing to lose by asking merely questions. The wonder is will we see any answers, or will it be a case of simply attack the man and not deal with the questions.

In answering my own question I would say that "no the awards aren't fixed" but they sure as hell seem broken.

Green Party email spam, EU email good!

It would seem that a number of people continue to be outraged by getting an unsolicited email from the Greens. But was it really the method that outraged them or was it the messenger? Now I'm pretty self evidently not the Greens biggest fan (keep it under your hat but I'm a member of Fine Gael off and on since the early 80s) but I suspect that the outrage was a little overdone in some cases given their response on a prior occasion to receiving exactly the same form of contact from another political organisation.

So was it the method of communication or was it in fact the messenger that got the noses of some out of joint? I think the latter and here's why. The EU had a get together of bloggers back in October of last year, and quite a nice day it was too. I was alerted to it by an unsolicited email, as it would seem were the others who posted about it. This mail was not personally addressed, it went to multiple recipients and from their posts on the topic the great and the good had no problem with this method of initiating contact when it came to them from the offices of the EU. So no outrage at all when they are favourable towards the endeavour - indeed they straight out encouraged people to attend - but all sorts of moral indignation when it was the Green Party who contacted them. At least in Michele's case, there is no evidence that he hasn't been consistent.

If we're going to grow the use of the net as a means to increase political participation and involvement it would make sense to have some degree of consistency from the bloggers when it comes to complaining about the method used to contact them. Being all flirty with the EU but getting all huffy with the Greens when contacted in exactly the same manner shows that there is an agenda at work here.

Below is the mail from the eu about their get together.

From: Philippe.CARR@xx.xx.eu
To: undisclosed-recipients, :
Subject: Advanced Invitation: Organise, Activate, Influence: Social Activism Online in Ireland
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:53:49 +0200

You are cordially invited to the 1 day conference Organise, Activate, Influence, Social Activism Online in Ireland on the 4 October 2008.This is a conference put together by bloggers for bloggers. The European Commission Representation and European Parliament Office in Ireland are acting as facilitators for this event.

Please click on the bellow link for the days program and how to register.

http://www.euireland.ie/conference/

Spaces unfortunately are limited and offered on a first come basis.

We look forward to seeing you on the day

Philippe

Philippe Carr
Press Officer
European Commission Representation
European Union House
18 Dawson Street
Dublin 2
tel: 00 353 1 634xxxx
fax: 00 353 1 634xxxx
email: philippe.carr@ec.europa.eu
internet: www.euireland.ie

spam, SPAM, spAM, and Damien

There has been considerable talk about spam in the last week on foot of a mail from the Green Party about a competition they are running or trying to run. What is surprising is the rather superior attitude of some of those commenting, especially Damien Mulley when you consider that he did the same thing himself when it suited him. While much of the comment was quite considered, though some was perhaps a little less so, the commentary of Mr Tubbs stands out as it verges on the hysterical, swerves into the lunatic before careening back up the road into plain rudeness. Indeed such is the virtual rending of hair, that one almost expects talk of personal violation. Below is a self admitted bulk mail I got from Damien. It reads

"Howdy,
As you may or may not know I'm organising a training day in UCC
next Saturday (March 24th). The training will cover the basics for an
IT company or IT person that's just setting out in business. Details
are available here: http://url.ie/388

If you are interested in coming along, please do come along or if you
think someone you know in the Cork/Munster area would benefit from the
training, send the details on to them. All training is provided free.
After Cork it is hoped there'll be on in Dublin around April 28th.
Yes. this has been a mass email but I'm sure you'll forgive me.

Damien
-- blog: www.mulxxx.net
Mobile: +353 86 xxx xxxx
Projects: www.IrelandOffline.org www.awards.ie
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dxxxx "

At the time (a bit under 2 years back) the only contact I'd had with Damien was via the blog awards for which I had been nominated shortly before receiving the above mail. So harvesting email addresses from the blog awards and then bulk emailing people to advise them of a training event he was running was par for the course for Damien back in the day. Since it would seem that training courses are now a significant earner for Damien it would be reasonable to think of this now as an email was for an event that provided him with a grounding in what is a commercial activity. I can't really say I was especially put out by getting it but it would seem if I was to follow the lead that Damien sets for those who send mai lto him, I should have contacted the Data Protection Commissioner and scweamed and scweamed the blogophere blue with how someone had contacted me about something I wasn't interested in using an address they had garnered purportedly for other purposes.

The rather dull fact is that there is spam and there is SPAM, and if you can't tell the difference then I'm not sure what I can say to help you see it. To top all this for all the talk of the need for the personal there is the notion put forward that you can bulk email people but if you make sure to use the bcc field so that it appears to be just to them as individuals and then use some automated process to include their first name at the top then that's all fine and dandy. That this might signify to anyone with half a brain that the intent was somehow significantly less impersonal than doing the same but without their name shows that for at least some of the offended it's all about the perception not the reality. It's still a bulk email, but you put their name on it - oh - that's so much better. On a scale of one to SPAM this was probably a two.

28 days later

29...30! Most people in the Irish blogosphere will be aware of Damien's cry for help/tirade against Fine Gael last month. Well, here is what they don't know, it wasn't true. I chose not to engage directly at the time in order not to leave myself open to accusations of seeking to deflect attention from the Irish Blog Awards which are primarily Damien's creation and for which he deserves considerable credit and which I can well imagine generates a good degree of stress in the organising.

Put as simply as possible his bald assertion that he was being harassed and stalked on and off line is completely erroneous. Some few people may be aware that I had what could be charitably described as a set-do with Damien back at the turn of the year over his use of a particular piece of terminology and his less than elegant reaction to my making my opinion about it known to him. The back and forth on the whole thing lasted a few days, and since then I've had no direct contact with him. Well after I got to make one comment which he proceeded to modify I reckoned there wasn't much point in bothering.

As regards his even more peculiar reference to being harassed and stalked off line all I can say is that to the best of my knowledge the last time I was even in the same city as Damien Mulley was for the blog awards last year. In fact in the week prior to his post about all this Damien travelled to Limerick twice and on one of those occasions was or so I heard inquiring as to my whereabouts. As it happens I was in Dublin on both occasions. Frankly, if that is stalking it sounds much more like Damien is the one doing it. Or if I really am supposed to be doing it I should think about buying a manual. I would very interested in seeing Damien produce the merest sliver of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim.

As regard his involvement of Fine Gael in all this, I'm further perplexed. In his communications with a number of people and organisations regarding his claims he has mentioned my name and that of Fine Gael. Why? The truth is that it would appear Damien is prone to the odd bout of histrionics going from cheerleading for Eamon Ryan to being his self appointment nemesis in the blink of a political eye. Since this was a disagreement between two individuals over the use of language one would wonder why Damien took issue with my membership of Fine Gael at all, rather than say my being an engineer or a Kerryman. Honestly, I would suggest that his repeated harping on about Fine Gael says more about his own indulgence of his biases when approaching any topic than anything else.

I comment on lots of blogs and I suppose one might say we end up playing in the same sand pits from time to time. Let's face it the Irish blogging township isn't quite that large and I wasn't aware that I was supposed to be banished from interacting with people simply because I had fallen foul of Damien Mulley. So I'm sure there have been a couple of occasions when I've commented on the same post as Damien but what reasonable person could characterise that as harassment or even stalking?

Further to this we had his quite excitable jumping up and down about people making threats of legal action. People who were paying close attention from his first post would have noticed that it was Damien Mulley who first spoke of contacting An Garda Síochána and of seeking recourse to legal advice. To date I've heard nothing, nada, faic from anyone to do with his claims and frankly I strongly expect to never hear anything. Any more than I expect to be contacted about the whereabouts of Shergar or the Irish Crown Jewels. Since there was no harassment or stalking there aren't going to be any legal actions forthcoming from Damien. Simply saying something again and again doesn't make it true.

The one quite serious implication from his remarks in his post was that I, acting with others, was in some way seeking to deliberately impact on his health. This is, just like the rest of his post, completely rubbish. As the state of his health wasn't known to me, how was I supposed to be doing this? Voodoo? Incantations? If he is suffering from some form of paranoia and it is somehow impacting his health then I would really suggest that he seek help for it. Strange to think that a simple thing like a relative nobody in blogging not being cowed by Damien's vitriol three months ago would be an scab he would chose to return to on the eve of the blog awards. Retaining a positive mental outlook is vitally important when a person is dealing with a disease like MS.

As for making threats to radio shows and contacting blog nominees about their eligibility for nomination that did not happen either. Who was contacted and exactly what kind of threats would I be in a position to make to radio shows? Withhold my license? Write to Arthur Murphy on Mailbag?

If people like Damien want to say something about people they should be prepared to be upfront about it. Damien made big play of taking his twitter account private though I suspect the real reason behind that was so he could continue to make snide, sly, underhand comments which are his real modus operandi. It's the web 2.0 version of whispering in class with your hand over your mouth. I'm sure those who do have access to his twitter will know if this is the case. Did he name names? Drop hints? Is he still going on about it?

The really disappointing aspect for me was that so few people looked for any justification for the accusation. Most were simply prepared to take him at his word and instead of calling for habeas corpus, the call went out for a head, any head in fact. I acknowledge that Damien has done tremendous work promoting blogging in Ireland but to suggest that such efforts somehow gives him carte blanche to make accusations about people and then never front up is totally unjustified. I will continue to blog, but as for the Irish Blogging Community I have to wonder who would wish to be a member of a community that reaches so readily for pitch forks at the whim of its leader.

It is worth remembering that a benevolent dictator isn't benevolent to everyone all the time and at the end of the day they really are a just dictator, one more petty tyrant.

Context is all as they say.

The actual mail that caused my expulsion from Eden. I do note for grammar reasons that I should more properly have said avoided instead of avoid. My intention was to pass on a minor crib to Mr Mulley and that was all, I even explicitly acknowledge in the last line that it was entirely up to himself what language he uses.

Mail history begins here -

To: "Damien Mulley"

A tad harsh I was only saying, not sure who ate your doughnut. And the latter is
anatomically difficult. G'luck.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Damien Mulley" <>
> To: "Daniel Sullivan" <>
> Subject: Re: Happy new year and all that.
> Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:32:53 +0000
>
> Dan, don't bother contacting me again. Go f%&k yourself.

Damien,

Hope your health gets sorted in the new year and that you're in fine fettle
throughout. One minor crib but would it be at all possible if you avoid
using the R word in future.

- EDs note: Note the following text is taken from Damien's site as linked to below -

But there’s more!
But hell, with P.S., I’m a Retard doing so well and Irish accents being all
hot again, let’s give them quality stuff. Glenroe. Dinny and Miley and Fanny
and Biddie and endsinYie and their Billy Barry kids with D4 accents.

- EDs notes: my quoting from his site ends at this point -

http://www.mulley.net/2007/12/29/the-irish-yet-again-miss-another-obvious-opportunity

I know it sounds terribly nanny state of me, and it is entirely up to yourself.
Anyway have a good'un.

Mail history ends here!

A heresy

I'm not interested in starting a war, not even a minor police act or peacemaking intervention or whatever people ended up calling the thing in Iraq. However, once it appears that one man's consumer right advocate decides becomes tomorrow's whinger or the smug man's George Carlin I'm disinclined to hold fire. Course I didn't actually instruct anyone to stop using any particular word, I was merely enquiring if the use of one word could be avoided by way of a crib or comment; passing comment supposedly being the lifeblood of blogging. There are naturally going to be times when no other word will do but the word that one has chosen with such care and consideration as Billy Connolly so perfectly illustrated in his timeless comparison of "fuck off versus go away - exclamation mark". Yet there is the world of a difference between Billy Connolly swearing and some spotty teenager repeating the same word again and again at the top of their voice for their own amusement . Most of us can tell the difference.

Naturally, when you've built yourself up and been built up by others so that you've got the loudest platform the tempting idea when someone says something that you disagree with is to misrepresent what the other person had to say so as to portray the other person in the worst possible light and then seek to drown out this other viewpoint. This all serves to ensure that you're always going to be the one seen in the right. There is an expectation amongst the hoi polloi that the great and the good don't stoop so low, perhaps in truth it should be less an expectation and more a means to identify the great from the merely well known.

Nanyway, Turns out that in reality once the individual's voice is loud enough it's also a cracking good way to ensure that the voice of other individuals isn't heard. Of course presenting yourself as an advocate of debate but then cutting someone's access mid-stream so as to prevent them from responding is a pretty contrary way to go about such things. But to do so without actually letting on to everyone else involved in the conversation that you've canceled their ticket creates the impression that you've won and they've simply retreated with their tail between their legs. At least in sports everyone else gets to actually see you taking your ball away with you. Not so for the high priest of Irish blogging who nixes your access on the QT and professes himself more than adequate to be the impartial judge of all that it is good or bad in Irish blogs. Could the same person really have said

"... I think that the philosophy of blogging, with everyone allowed to comment on what you write and point to what you write and quote what you write will be assimilated more into mainstream. I'm a big fan of Jeff Jarvis and his ideas of the newsroom of the future are well worth a read. As I said earlier, blogs are a great way of enabling the voice of the individual to be heard." ?

Bad words for the beautiful people

Just in case some folks are being given the impression the thought police have come down on poor Mulley.net and are trying to suppress his right to party or some such I thought I post the briefest of background since I’m not allowed post any comments in response.

I mailed the newly crowned journalistic technology supremo of the Irish internet scene suggesting I had a minor crib about the use of the word “retard” in a post of his and if it’s use could be avoided if that were at all possible. Not wishing to be needlessly Michael Howard about all this but I did not at any point instruct anyone (and who the hell would I be to be to instructing or telling anyone what to do) to stop using particular words, I was simply making a comment. And it was only a minor crib and as far as I can see people are all over the place talking up the idea of social networks and collaboration and a key aspect of that effort is the value of feedback. Sad fact is that when you’re on the receiving end you're not going to agree with much of the feedback and you plain might not like some of it. But that's the point of it. For my own part, I had honestly thought that the word had largely disappeared from conversation in this side of the Atlantic, not that it had even been as common here as it was in the US. Now, I wasn’t offended by the word or upset; I will admit to being somewhat surprised to see it. I got a mail back which succinctly told me “Dan, don't bother contacting me again. Go fuck yourself.” Well, that's me told then isn't it. Of course what some like to term Political Correctness is what others would might just call simple decency.

The follow up response on-line has been to declare that he will not be stopped from using whatever words he wishes, though how exactly someone just saying something is remotely going down the road of “stopping” them I’ve no idea but there ya go. And the post naturally has to include a variety of words to show how Damien is reaching for his ready pack of Twenty Major to defend saying fuck or whatever but Twenty is genuinely funny and quite pointed in his comments; the post I was commenting on was neither funny nor very pointed.

And most odd of all in the heel of the hunt is that someone who was quite recently carping about the fact that someone that he had occasion to pick a bone with had the temerity to ban his comments is very quick to use the same tactic once someone else’s shoe is on another foot entirely. Yep it seems so sensitive is Damo to any kind of negative comment that it turns out that I’ve been “banned” from posting comments on the site of the great and all powerful Wiz. Not that I posted much of any use in any case, so no loss to anyone there.

So by all means keep reading Mulley, he posts some really interesting stuff, but for God’s sake don’t dare say anything negative about him or it’s the stocks or the badlands for you.