Things have been extremely busy here at blackdog.ie but there are a few updates I would like to bring to the few people who read here.
- The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend. I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
- The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords. A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips
Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D
The guys and girls at google do like to have fun. Yesterday in their robots.txt file the included the following code (in fact it’s still there, but probably won’t remain there for long).
User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats
And last year they also had a special edition :
User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains
The mediadonis memoribilia ebay auction has ended, and it has been won by the Munich iPhone developer Hans Schneider. Hans has donated €50 to the charity in return for the two items, and we will match the bid to bring it up to a nice €100 for the charity. Thanks to marcus tandler for indirectly supplying the items, and to Julian Dziki for being a good partner in crime 
I hope Hans enjoys his prize !
Richard Hearne from RedCardinal is offering some free consultation again. A while back he offered some tips to the short list of the Irish Blog awards , and now he is offering to help some Irish online businesses, to analyse and optimise at their conversion performance. He’s also offering the help of two great Irish developers, namely James Larkin and Jason Roe, for the programming and graphic parts of the tests. All he asks for in return is that he can use your data in case study. Overall the package is worth €3,000, and has the potential to make your business more profitable in the long run.
If you have an online shop, or sell items online and you want to increase your sales rates, then this will probably be right up your street. Right now Richard is only offering this to 5 Irish companies, so be quick.
Last week, Fran from MadeInHollywood was looking for some ideas on what to blog about. Being the ever generous person he offered to send some samples of what they make (they make foam cut outs) in return for some ideas on what readers of their blog would like to see. Today I picked up the foam letters, which look really nice. Thanks Fran !
MadeInHollywood has worked with some interesting clients like Arnotts and An Bord Gáis
