by Paul Klipp, 13 October 2008

I went to the Irish Web Awards in Dublin, because one of my friends, Conor O'Neill of Loudervoice.com fame, was nominated and because several of my Irish clients (thanks to Fergus Burns of Nooked.com and Keith Bohanna of dbTwang, especially) told me it was great fun and the best place to meet everyone who is anyone in the Irish tech community. It was a blast, with music, an open bar, and the most laid-back, friendly, and enthusiastic award ceremony I've seen in a long time. The people were great and it seems that everyone in Ireland (at least in the tech community) knows everyone else. All web entrepreneurs deserve a friendly network like this. I know the New York and Boston networks are strong. London has OpenCoffee, which is a great initiative. Poland should have something like this to bring entrepreneurs together to inspire and support each other.

I really liked the fact that there was an award for accessibility. Sometimes it seems that Web 2.0 and AJAX have collaborated to kill accessibility, or at least to push it to a back burner. That's a shame, and in some cases, like public service sites, it should be criminal. Kudos to Moviestar.ie, the organizer of the Irish Web Awards, and the category sposor, iQ content, for putting accessibility front and center with a category of its own. I might mention that the winner, Kanci, was also nominated for the Most Beautiful Site awards, proving that accessibility and aesthetics are not contradictory.

I saw some great ideas at the awards and I'm inspired by the scope of products, services, and informational offerings still untapped by internet entrepreneurs. There's still a frontier here where despite a lot of me-to's there's also a lot of room for innovation. That's good news for me; I love the job of making something truly new into a reality.

You can find a list of all the winners here.