Humbled is still the word I’m using… The turn out last night was astounding and the crowd there were fantastic.

I meant to give a thank you speech at the end last night but was so relieved the event was well received that I completely forgot. This is what I should have said to close the event:

In no particular order I’d like to thank Rick O’Shea and his soothing voice for making the evening so much fun. Also lots of females and males commented you are much cuter in person and you change the pic on your blog. You brought professionalism to the gig. Well done man. Hope to see you next year where we’ll make sure you get paid. Speaking of which, Bernie Goldbach, Brian H. Greene, Conn Ó Muíneacháin and probably other podcasting/audio people did a wonderful job with the soundsystem for the night. I loved the podsafe music beforehand too.

Thanks too to Elana, Suzy, Conor and Joe for helping on the night. Big thanks to John Timmons for putting together the powerpoint presentations and helping out during the build-up to the event. John is my co-pilot in IrelandOffline too so I owe him a lot over the past few months/years and after all that he bought me a bottle of champagne for the Awards!

Thank you to the fantastic people who sponsored the categories and to all the very generous individuals and companies who sponsored the spot prizes. To the prize winners, don’t forget to blog about what you won. I hope everyone blogs a review of V for Vendetta too. Big thanks to my folks who helped out an awful lot in the past few weeks. Thanks to all the journalists and researchers who covered this and convinced their editors it was worth covering.

People kept on saying I’m great for doing this but I’m just the guy at the front of the Blog Awards store, it was the blogging community in the back who got together and worked out all the things that needed to be done and if you guys didn’t create such wonderful blog posts and photography and creative pieces then I would never have thought we should have an awards event. As was stated in by non-prepared opening remarks, if you are passionate about something, blog about it, if you know passionate people, have them blog about it. Exercise your freedom of speech and encourage others to do so as well. Bring them into this community and we’ll welcome them and be their guides and helpers if they look for assistance. With that in mind there’ll be details soon about an upcoming bloggers workshop to help bloggers become more familiar with changing templates, installing statcounters and so forth.

Well done to all nominees. Keep doing what you do and show the rest of us what we can achieve too.

By the way. The prize giving isn’t over. 🙂 There’s going to be more given away on this blog in the next week so stay tuned. I learned a lot from this event so next years event should be more professional. We’ll have a band and keep the room for longer so we can all drink and dance (badly) til the small hours. Like the Oscars we can do video medleys of each category nominee.

Lastly, check out the amazing Irish Blog Awards photo slideshow here

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 11:21 pm and is filed under BlogAwards. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are currently closed.