Why the Golden Spider’s is important

The Golden Spider awards?  Important?

OK.  The truth?  A part of me say’s it isn’t.  A bit say’s it’s a beauty parade of sites, large and small, some of which no one has ever heard of.  Part of me says it’s an excuse for late night drinking in a once super-posh south Dublin hotel. Part of me say’s it’s an excuse for competitors to sneer at each other across a crowd, or for employees and bosses to have sort outs, clearing the cigarette laden air.

But then, aren’t all awards ceremonies like that.  And are they the worse off for it?  No. It makes precious little difference to their importance.  The Golden Spiders is a forum for an industry to meet and greet, share a pint, clap and slide off home... Very therapeutic.  It’s an opportunity for an industry that has taken more knocks than others to take itself seriously for once and not take itself too seriously at the same time

OK.  This is where I sound older than I am, or, about the right age, but I’ve been to all of them so far (I think?)   Not a grand claim, but it gives me an overview of them... and an opportunity to point out some trends.

Before the dot com boom it was a nascent awards ceremony, where a small room could contain all the major players in Ireland each person being one-third techie, one-third entrepreneur, one-third person who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.   Then the Nasdaq struck a tone which shook all, and if you were on the right side of the investor fence, you were an instant multi-millionaire – on paper at least.  The atmosphere of the awards had changed.  An un-earned smugness and swagger crept in, accompanied by breathless ambition, greed, and some misery at missing out.  The bursting of the bubble decimated the attendees and this was a time where those at the awards who were involved in the industry and who’s experience pre-dated the dot com crash could be counted on the fingers of one hand.  There were five of us! The lingo and buzzword vendors had fled to fairer pastures, and the tables were populated by ‘industry’ rather than ‘internet enterprise’.  The sales guys were still there, but worked for telco’s and portals, rather than tech SMEs.  Then in the early 2000s, things limped along until Google fixed the net for us all.  Search engines worked, things could be found, and PPC made sense and was cheap.  Bebo and social sites cemented the advantage won and now we’re in the age of the iPhone, and very high levels of broadband net use for all, if you want it.

That was the difference about this year’s awards.  The mobile content providers.  The winning entrant involved a mobile phone system for keeping tabs on minors.  I’m reliably told it works on very few phones, but I haven’t checked it.  That’s not the point.  The point is that the net has left the office, or home, or SoHo business model.  Facebook can be conceived in the same breath as outlook, or a contacts database, without spam email.  Bebo.. . the same.  The buzzword is the mobile phone App.  This concept was almost unimaginable even a few years ago.  ( I know I’m always banging on about how things have changed, but it never ceases to amaze me, and informs views on the trajectory things might take in future).  But Locle takes things a step further, marrying Facebook with location based services.  The full integration of the latest developments of the social net online, with local society offline.

There was another difference with this awards.  Maturity.  The Internet has slowly but finally arrived in Ireland as an intrinsic and fundamental force in the media landscape.  Not as an add-on for nerds and geeks, but as a centroid around which old media rotate and learn... eating audience share and headspace like a black hole.  Netspace: -engaging, entertaining, informative, efficient, flexible, customizable, cheap, upgradable and full of innovation and creativity.  There were few times for other media that you could make any of these claims, but most importantly, the last two – innovation and creativity.  Radio Luxembourg for Radio?  Hall’s Pictorial Weekly for TV?  Maybe a few others, but these old media have been suffocated by top down civil society, from governments to the church with academic confusions about the role of the public service broadcaster, who owns the media in question and who is more important – the content producer or the audience.  But for the net, innovation and creativity are a commonplace and for this reason the net is where I think the future of our media landscape must lie – with great ideas and the chutzpah to do something about them.  Because what stood out to me about this year’s Spiders was that the creative media thinkers, innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs never seem to tire of the netspace and this is likely to be true for the mobile net too.  There were loads of them there; clever, clever people doing really cool things that stretch the boundaries of communicative technology and its relationship with modern society on very limited resources.  These are things that will create considerable societal change while they make a buck.  Very few new enterprises do things as important as that.  The vast majority make money for a single individual, but very few indeed change the way we all interact with each other.

So, why are the Spiders important?  Well, if it’s only because they are a haven for Ireland’s enterprise and good ideas - that’ll do for me.