The Irish Web Awards are being organised by Damien Mulley who has already organised the highly popular and successful Irish Blog Awards.

Only representatives of a website can nominate their website, nominating your site is free, and entrance to the award ceremony is €30 quid and it’s in Dublin.

If you want more info, visit the site.

This post is an experimental post which is aimed at examining the influence of inbound links on a website. BifSniff is a playground for me, and where I post all my fun finds on the internet as well as the odd film review etc, but it’s also a place where I get to test out some WordPress theories I have and that kind of thing, because my ‘day job’ is as web designer and all the stuff that goes with web design, like SEO and all that jazz.

What I’m doing with this post is examining the impact of a single link with specific anchor text in it from a site with reasonably good ‘Google-Juice’. That’s why I’m linking to another site of mine using the phrase web design cork.

The site I’m linking to has no other inbound links to speak of, and I hope it will remain that way for a little while so I can monitor what happens when Google picks up on this one, and this one only - so much as you might be tempted to deluge said site with inbound links now that you are aware of it, I would beg you to graciously hold off a while

I will be publishing any interesting discoveries on the blog over there, so keep an eye on it if you’re curious.

Thanks for ignoring this post! Normal insanity will now resume…

Full details of the competition are on the Glengarriff Lodge blog

All you have to is write a blog post which has a link like this in it: Luxury Self Catering

The post must also link to another blog, a friend who you think might be interested in the competition.

Go to the competition blog post and leave a comment letting them know where your entry is, and you’re done.

Easy peasy.

Full disclosure and all that: As part of my dayjob I had a hand in organising the competition.

Several friends mentioned this to me recently, so eventually I went off to see if it was true, and lo and behold it exists… a black Google. Not run by Google themmselves but powered by Google Custom Search.

It seems these guys believe that if Google were to make their homepage black instead of white, it would save a load of energy annually due to the amount of people who use Google everyday.

Well Google are unlikely to change from their flagship white, so Heap Media made their own black google. Called Blackle. It seems it all started with a blog post about the energy a black google page could save, and the author of that blog post now has an in depth explanation of the theory if you would like to read it.

While the concept has it’s sceptics, I like this quote from the Blackle website:

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Even as a reminder to save energy, the concept has it’s merits. So, will I be setting Blackle as my homepage? Er… I’m not sure. I tried it out, and maybe it’s because I’m so used to the white, but I found it uncomfortable to use. I will try it out some more, and if I can live with it I’ll use it. Hey, I’m just being honest!

IrishBlogs.ie is a great site - anyone who uses a feed reader should be subscribed. And anyone who is an Irish blogger should be listed!

But, every now and then my feeds disappear from the site :(.

The last few BifSniff posts don’t seem to be there, and the last few FestivalShirts posts don’t seem to be there either.

There doesn’t seem to be any contact form or anything on the site either… I’m sure there used to be…