Despite being involved in the industry for a number of years, I attended the Golden Spider awards for the first time last thursday.  A website that’s close to my heart, moynihanrussell.ie, made it to the shortlist in the Best Professional Services category so I felt that I really ought to attend.

Alas, our site didn’t win, but it was an interesting experience none-the-less. The event was masterfully executed,  everything ran on time, Des Bishop was highly entertaining, food was grand, buckets of wine, everyone appropriately turned out – although him indoors was one of about two not wearing a bow tie and only one of, well, one who refused to wear a white shirt. Instead, he wore a black shirt and regular black tie. We planned to pass him off as a clergyman if anyone got ’shirty’ about it!

For me, one of the highlights of the evening was when Aodhan Cullen- founder and CEO of StatCounter- was awarded the Internet hero award.  In his acceptance speech he told us the story of how he began as an entrepreneur at the tender age of 10 when, with a view to earning extra pocket money, he put an ad in the Golden Pages for typing services at “£2/page & a free copy with that”. 
Now, a mere 15 years later his StatCounter tool is used by circa 2 million website owners and bloggers worldwide. I related this story to my sons on the school run the next morning and it was only after I’d dropped them off I realised that they may have thought that I was putting the challenge to them.

So let’s see what they can come up with!

Internet heroes: Denis Jennings and Aodhan Cullen

Internet heroes: Denis Jennings and Aodhan Cullen - photo: pix.ie

Little did I know when I was putting on my frock earlier that evening that I would meet one of the pioneers of the Internet. Former head of UCD’s Computer Science Department and founder of the IEDR (.ie Domain Registry) Denis Jennings. Way back in (previous recession days) 1983 while in charge of the supercomputing programme at the National Science Foundation in the U.S. he made the decision to deploy the TCP/IP protocols (created by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn) that up till then were mainly being used by the defense department of the US military, to link up all the University Networks in the U.S. This has evolved into the Internet as we know it today.

 

All the winners are listed on the Golden Spiders website.  Below are some of the ones I remember:

best …