Following our new marketing plan by Una (and I would suggest her to anyone planning marketing), I have been doing research on incubation spaces in Ireland. Apparently I knew about 6 of them beforehand, but I wanted to make complete list before planning how to approach them.

I do believe that doing research through Google is waste of time. It’s not that I can’t find things - there is just too much of them and takes time to filter out information you need. Also - problem with searching incubation spaces is that each university has one and most of them don’t advertise it.

That’s why I went to twitter and I’m really grateful to all who replied to me. @UKBI gave me list of UK & Ireland incubation spaces which wasn’t really big, but there were main Irish incubation spaces mentioned. My list grew to 18 incubation spaces at that point.

Researching more in Google about incubation spaces brought me to new page I haven’t seen before for start-up businesses. Sorry - design for that page is crap (I like business-startup.ie much better), but it has a lot of valuable information. And there were over 50 incubation spaces in Ireland. I’m gonna work forward from this list.

Update July 1st:

Another list provided by twitter friend @NiaLLLarkin from startup-ireland.org.

Today I decided to start using Technorati more serious. While I have created account like few months ago I wasn’t using it at all. So I decided to go through all the people I’m following on twitter (and most of them are IT persons based in Ireland) and add their blogs to the favorites in technorati. And believe me or not, it didn’t took me a lot of time. However I was surprised that less than half people on twitter has blogs. I rember survey going around about month ago on twitter for all non-bloggers using twitter. And I thought it was nonsense to put it on twitter as everybody probably have blogs…

So why twitter but no blogs?

1) Person don’t use twitter much and don’t care about social media. There is a lot of twitter accounts that haven’t been used for months. I wander - is twitter gonna delete them at some point? Because even if it is only few rows of text, a lot of users like that might take space on their server.

2) Person twitter profile link leads to their company website. I do have problem with that - unless it is companies twitter account, I can’t get more info on person twittering.

3) The blog is hidden somewhere on their website and can’t be found right away. What the point writting blogs if nobody can find them?

After I added all those blogs on the technorati, another problem came up - there is too much of them now! And I still haven’t found button “remove from favorites”.

Reason I started all this is because I’m still newbie to blogging. I love to write. I have always written diaries, short stories and some ideas. But blogging is something more challenging. What would people find interesting? What would make people write comments? Why would they blog about me or put link to me? And how do I get more popularity and traffic to my blog? Kinda challenging, but fun.

Did I had fun evening? Yep! Would I go to another Twestival if there would be one tomorrow? Definitely. So for lazy persons who didn’t went to the greatest events of all, this post is for you.

What is Twestival? Official statement : on the 12th of February 175+ cities were hosting Twestival bringing together Twitter communities for a charity:water. Non-official statment: go meet with people who you usually chat with, have a drinks, talk and lots of fun.

DubTwestival took place on The Sycamore Club in Temple Bar. It was organised by @qhussain and @aido (maybe someone else too, but haven’t seen them on twitter). One of the topic talks was the open ceiling, which actually was quite cool. Music was awsome - I would loved to do some dancing, but people weren’t drunk enough when I was there. Actually even knowing that beer is for free, I met quite a few who decided not to drink on the night.

I got the coolest picture with @jaimekristene (background put by @JamesLS) and got feedback from @czajkowski and others right away how great pic it is (because everybody uses twitter on twestival). I met quite a few girls from Girl Geek Dinner, people from Open Coffee Dublin meetings, from IBW forum (e.g. @helentreacy), from IIA (@iia and some others) people who started using twitter yesterday and people like gay crusher in toilet who said he will start using it tomorrow. I met also people who was following me, but I never knew they was following me. Nice bunch anyway.

There was amazingly lot of lottery awards. While I was there, they went out 3 times 3 awards and I think there was more after. @maryrose and @debbiemet kept going around and selling lottery tickets. As it was very loud I couldn’t work out the prizes, but I overheard that there was shaving kit, gym memberships, some event tickets and holidays to be won.

I talked with people about everything starting from business with @e_eric, OOSBarCamp with @czajkowski till Nintendo games and travel with people I didn’t know. I didn’t manage to meet @cambellscott (from IGOpeople), @mcawilliams (twitter legend), @martharotter (GGD organiser) and few other persons I really wanted to meet in the short 2.5h I was there. Anyway at the end I lost my voice completely and hearing as well (music was too loud) and there was meeting tomorrow so I had to go.

When I decided to went home finally (it was only 9pm) somebody almost took my scarf to wipe the spilled drink. I run for bus and sat in the wrong one. Realised I’m on the wrong one after a while and had to walk 20min back. Felt like guy on the buss stop was geeky enough and I should try talk with him (I didn’t). No, I wasn’t drunk, just too washed away from reality by the event.

p.s. Can’t get photos out of my iPhone :< So check other ppl photos on DubTwestival website

This is already my 3rd post about twitter. Somehow I feel like Twitter fan now (even if I’m not reading twitter very often).

Today I googled for my company and some other blog that appeared in my Google Analytics, just to see where does the hits came from. And accidentally I found one interesting site - muumoo.jp. While you wouldn’t understand a thing what’s written there (it’s in Japanese), I found that if I write http://tw.muumoo.jp/_twitter name_/friends_web then list of all twitter friends + their links appears on the site. As I wanted to add friends blogs in Technorati, this is great way to see all blogs.

Check out my friends list: http://tw.muumoo.jp/gita_m/friends_web

Just a few min ago saw @walters post on the twitter: “It was a long circuitous route but I’m now in the T-Shirt business http://sxoop.com/twitter/mosaic.pl“. Check it out. For you, who are completely into twitter, it will be nice way to show off