As some of you may already know, I finished up with RTÉ at the end of December and with the beginning of a New Year have started a new job as Content Manager for WorldIrish.

You might remember this post that I wrote back in October after the Global Irish Forum and wonder why I have left Ireland’s biggest media website. It comes down to this – I believe the time is right for WorldIrish.

WorldIrish is the best organisation to create a community for Irish people and those who think Irish. It’s assembling an excellent team of people and will be working hard over the coming months to create something useful and meaningful for the global Irish community. I’m excited to be part of this.

I started in RTÉ in 2007 and had some great experiences from covering Barack Obama’s convention speech in Denver to travelling to Kenya as a backpack reporter. I found 2011 (like most people working in the media) to be an exceptionally busy year. I established RTÉ’s first social media desk, project managed RTÉ’s digital output across several platforms for the General Election and most recently worked on the organisation’s digital strategy.

I have been fortunate to work with some truly excellent people in RTÉ during an interesting time of great digital change.

I’m leaving an established mainstream media organisation for a very ambitious start up. It’s going to be a big change, but one I’m keen to embrace.

We’ll be working hard in WorldIrish over the coming months to introduce an online global Irish community with greater functionality. I’m looking forward to taking on a new set of challenges.

And if you haven’t done already, sign up to WorldIrish here!

Have a great 2012,

Blathnaid

No other websites or social networks (that I’m aware of) offer what Worldirish.com does. In fact, there is no one place online, or off, that you can find a database of Irish people (including diaspora). That is its strength, its power and what gives it such opportunity.

I have some superficial issues with design and navigation, but I can look past those, they are by no means deal breakers. However what I can’t look past is the massive opportunity Worldirish.com has missed.

Worldirish.com is a directory. You need to know who you are looking for. As it is currently presented, it does not facilitate focused connection-building and that is very disappointing.

I appreciate the idea of connecting people by their values, but surely what we need is something more practical.

Here’s what I would have done if I had designed it. I would have asked people for more practical information. For example, there should have been fields for the following: current country of residence, current job title and, most importantly, current industry. With this information gathered a kick-ass search functionality could have been built in to help people find connections that were useful to them.

Consider a possible scenario, a recent graduate decides they are going to set up a start-up semi-conductor business in Timisoara, Romania. If Worldirish.com had the functionality I’m suggesting it could have helped that graduate to find Irish or Irish-connected people working in their industry, or a related one, in Timisoara or other parts of Romania. This kind of connection would have been massively beneficial and thoroughly practical for anyone in any industry.*

Here’s another example. I am hoping to travel to Uganda soon to work on a story. Finding Irish aid workers in a particular part of Uganda is currently very difficult to do. Something that made it easier would be very helpful. If Worldirish.com had industry and geographical information, connecting two Irish people, who don’t already know each other, and who live in different parts of the world could be done with a couple of clicks.

A journalist, an artist, a musician, a software designer or an electrician could have benefited from a site that created a network (or even a directory) like this. As far as I can tell, Worldirish.com cannot facilitate this level of practical connection-building the way it is currently set up.

I understand we have Linkedin (but it doesn’t take Irish and Irish-connected people and put them in one place) and that this site works hand-in-hand with it and other social networks (and that’s a great idea) but while I admire the attempt to connect across values I keep thinking about its potential and what it could be.

There is clearly an appetite for an online platform that connects Irish people. I hope future iterations of the site will enable the practical connections that we really need.

-Blathnaid

UPDATE: Mark Little has tweeted to say the site is still in beta and there is more to come.

(* This is of course working on the basis that people join Worldirish.com)

In other news, I recently participated in a television journalism course for young journalists in Timisoara, Romania. I was one of 16 journalists from across Europe at the Circom-run course. I learned a lot from the trainers as well the others participating. If you have a couple of minutes take a look at the report I did while I was there, which was recently broadcast on RTE.

Hoping that the rain will stop soon,

B

Neworld Blog reports 77% of all Irish internet users use Facebook, according to recent figures from Comscore.

(The) average Irish person spends 4hours 10 minutes on Facebook per month, well ahead of competitors Google sites (2hrs 51mins), Microsoft sites (1hr 36mins) and RTE.ie (22 mins). (Comscore)

According to Ipsos MRBI, 1.75 million or 50% of the entire Irish population, over the age of 15 years, use Facebook. 175,000 new Irish users joined the site in the last six months.

Facebook’s own figures estimate there are 1,865,000 Irish accounts on the social network.

With 1.8m Irish accounts and growing it’s hard to argue about Facebook’s dominance.

So we know there’s an audience, but what are they looking for?

Vadim Lavrusik over at Mashable has a very interesting post about Facebook’s growing role in social journalism. It even points to a news organisation that is moving its community news website totally over to Facebook. (Note: Lavrusik has just been appointed Facebook’s first journalism programme manager)

CyberJournalist has a post with some nice quick tips for publishing content to Facebook (this link has five tips,  there are eight if you download the document).

After using Facebook successfully during the General Election and seeing the power of the platform first hand – I’m hoping to experiment even more with it soon.

-B

On another note, here’s an interesting list of basic web skills journalists should have from 10,000 Words. I’m ten for ten! If there are areas you need to improve they have some good links where you can find resources.

If you haven’t noticed, RTE.ie/news has been re-designed! RTE.ie’s News, Business & Sports Editor Tom Grealis explains the redesign here.

Also if you haven’t checked it out already, pay a visit to thejournal.ie – it’s an interesting new Irish venture!

-B

RTÉ has recently launched the News Now app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

News Now is an apt description for this. If you click on ‘Top Stories’ it  delivers the latest RTÉ News, Sport and Entertainment stories from RTÉ.ie using a simple and readable layout.

As well as text stories, the app shows the latest live RTÉ News TV bulletins, weather, stocks and currencies through the ‘Watch Live’ function. You can also watch the Morning Ireland webcam (with radio stream) from 7am – a great accompaniament for the commute (not with the iPod touch though!).

You can download the app for free from the iTunes store here

More details from RTÉ about the app here

(DOI: RTÉ is my employer)

Read the full article here

I was lucky enough to be one of the journalists who received funding from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund for a reporting project this year.

A few weeks ago I traveled to Kenya and Uganda. Going by road from Nairobi to Entebbe I reported on people who keep bees for a series of stories focused on food security.

I traveled alone with a backpack full of equipment: video camera, digital camera and lenses, audio recorder, plenty of tapes and leads and of course paper and pen. The aim was to come back with a multimedia project similar to a series I also did for RTE called Global Classroom.

Today, the first part of the series, The Humble Bee, went live on RTE.ie. It focuses on beekeeping as a means of improving food security on a macro and micro level. It looks at a family who keeps bees to make an income and a farmer who uses bees to improve pollination on his farm. There are videos and photos (more hopefully on the way) and an accompanying radio report, which was broadcast on RTE Radio One on World Report.

The rest of the series will look at other aspects of bee keeping in east Africa including women who keep bees, the environmental impact and the challenges some people face.

This has been a wonderful and challenging series to work on – I hope you enjoy it.

Check it out here
-B

RTÉ Elections 2009

In the last few weeks quite a bit of my time has been spent coordinating the website for the 5 June elections. It was launched this week and you can visit it here.

Check out the group blog  Campaign Daily – with great contributions this week from Mark Little (who had an excellent blog on RTÉ.ie for the US elections), Miriam O’Callaghan and Cian McCormack.

Visit us at Twitter @RTE_Elections and while you’re there  follow Prime Time’s new Twitter stream @RTE_PrimeTime as well.

There’s lots of great material on the main site including an excellent guide to PR-STV by UCD’s Prof Richard Sinnott (the system of voting used in Ireland), chapters from the just published and widely discussed All Politics is Local, lots of great audio and video highlights from RTÉ’s best news and current affairs programmes and features written by young journalists covering the European Parliament elections.

It’ll be a busy couple of weeks ahead as the website keeps on growing and the elections get closer but I’m looking forward to it particularly the count weekend!

Blathnaid

P.S By the way send us in your election photos!

Joe Zefran, RTÉ.ie News Editor and I have put the cross-media series together.

Joe traveled to India and I went to Rwanda and Kenya where we reported and shot our own video for three reports on three programmes, including the Irish charity Camara, which are using three different approaches to reach the same goal: educating the world’s youngest citizens.

The series looks at how children in the slums of New Delhi are linked to the larger world, how one experiment wants to make sure every child in the world has their own laptop, and how an Irish charity is changing the lives of people in Kenya.

There will be full-length text features and web-exclusive interviews on RTÉ.ie/globalclassroom.

Plus, for the first time at RTÉ, RTÉ.ie will produce a three-part television series that will air on the Six One News and News on Two.

My reports will air on Monday and Wednesday and they focus on Camara and One Laptop Per Child.

This has been a very exciting project and I look forward to doing more like it in the future.

**Six One News reports**

Part One, Two, Three