Rise of the Planet of the Blogs

It's never too late for a prequel, or a sequel, so I've decided to resume blogging right here on my own site. It's been over a year since I wrote something, so here's an update on what's been going on:

• My last blog post talked about socialmedia.net, my latest venture. It's basically an online publisher of daily articles on emerging technologies, and is now called New Tech Post. The company has been operating for a year now on the campus of NUI Galway, with a writing team led by Tom Murphy and with regular contributions from Conor Harrington, Lisa Jackson, Ina O'Murchu, Aoife Connelly, and others. More recently, we began a joint venture with our investors at the Irish Innovation Center in San Jose, with the aim of creating a communications bridge between Ireland and Silicon Valley. We're about to announce our first major sponsor in the next few weeks, and hope to have some more on board thereafter. You can hear me talk about New Tech Post on the FocuSME podcast.
• I have taken on the role of General Chair for the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, which will be held in Dublin next year, probably at the end of May. ICWSM is the premier social media research conference that brings together researchers from the computing and social sciences. It's a real honour to have been chosen to head this prestigious conference event for 2012, and I'll certainly do my best to continue a great tradition of outstanding conferences. It is also pretty exciting that we will have much of the world's top social media research talent descending on Dublin, Ireland next year. Now if someone would just sort out this darn lack of a direct Dublin to California flight for me I'd be very happy.
• Last year, I took over as course director for the Engineering Innovation - Electronic degree course at NUI Galway. Although we've had a small intake in the first two years, the enthusiasm shown by these students has been great and I believe it's a great opportunity for engineers to develop business skills in tandem with their core electronic expertise. The course was recently launched by our Dean Gerry Lyons and Mike Conroy, the managing director of Cisco Galway.
• I've moved office to the new Engineering Building at NUI Galway, the country's largest at 14,000 square metres (or about 70 houses!). It's a fabulous resource for engineering in Ireland, and will be home to a thousand students and a hundred staff when term starts next month. We had a great launch event with the Taoiseach last month.
• Next month, I'll be speaking at the first Irish Executives conference to be held in Galway. Irish Executives originated as a LinkedIn group set up by businessman John Keogh, and now has many thousands of members. There are some good talks and I'm looking forward to being on the social media panel with Niall Devitt and others.
• boards.ie and sister company adverts.ie are both doing really well; I'm only a single-digit shareholder in both now, but it's been great to see these sites continue to rise in popularity during 2010 and 2011. boards.ie receives 35 million page views or well over 2 million unique visitors a month, with over 70% of these visitors coming from Ireland. We launched our Boards Deals group buying service last summer, and adverts.ie continues to attract more and more classified ads, entering the top 50 websites in Ireland recently.
• I've also invested in a US company called StreamGlider, a live dashboard for your social media streams that will launch on the iPad before year end (the launch has been postponed by a few months). More as it happens!