boards.ie Ltd., Ireland’s largest message board community, has acquired the “Boards Group” set of message board sites from creator and boards.ie director John Breslin, in a move that opens the way for similar community websites to boards.ie in other countries such as the UK and the US. boards.ie is one of the largest indigenous Irish websites, and celebrates its 7th birthday as a company in February 2007.
To date, the Boards Group consists of boards.us, a site for discussing all things related to the United States, boards.jp, a Japanese animation fan site, and smaller discussion sites for New Zealand and China. Plans for international expansion involve boards.org.uk, which aims to become a sister site for boards.ie in the UK, and boards.tv, a television discussion forum that is currently in early development.
The acquisition also includes journals.ie and Planet Journals, a popular blog hosting and aggregation service that was established by Breslin in 2005. The boards.ie “eyes” brand, currently used on the classified ads subsite adverts.ie, will also be extended to this service.
- John Breslin (nickname Cloud or Cloudie) is...
- Currently a lecturer in Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway and an associate researcher at DERI in the area of the Social Semantic Web.
- Also co-founder and director of boards.ie Ltd., Ireland's largest message board community (see the boards.ie Wikipedia article).
- Founder of the SIOC project (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities; see the SIOC Wikipedia article).
- Also blogging at SocialMedia.net.
- Creator of WebCamp.
- Advisor to CrowdGather.
- Contactable at skype:johnbreslin or via Skype In / voicemail on +1-415-287-0222.
- This site contains John's personal opinions, unrelated to the views of his employer.
Twitter
- johnbreslin: Fixed planet.journals.ie database but I don't think anyone uses it much anymore, was down for a month...20/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @IrishTimesBiz that breaking news link is a 40420/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @euan some interesting blog posts on wikinomics.com about brownbook.net and parlus.com (you replied before I could fix typos on iPhone :))19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @psd I agree, in fact there's a discussion going on about the wastage in one particular Irish campaign at http://url.ie/wqq19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @Eirepreneur You've gone all "Sapphire and Steel" no-face mannish http://tinyurl.com/6rpt7d19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @ryancarson Nice one re student tickets, I've passed on the news to researchers in DERI...19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @damienmulley ...or even boards.ie Parenting, Beer Guts, Third Level Education, like, someone who actually buys bread instead of teenagers!19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @duggan Hello, just found you!19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @damienmulley Sounds like it was many ?000k misspent: not targetting the right age group; coulda gone for boards.ie food&drink targetted ads19/11/2008
- johnbreslin: @damienmulley thanks! Delighted with them as you can imagine... I believe our unique visitors from Ireland are the highest...19/11/2008
Congratulations John - boards.ie is one of the great Irish web successes and I love Planet Journals.
Are you retiring to the Caymans
Congratulations John, a nice story of entrepreneurial success.
Well done John.
No retirement planned or affordable just yet
Coincidentally, today is the 6th birthday of boards.jp and 2nd of boards.co.nz.
Well-deserved!
Congrats John, a great story.