Tom Raftery is blogging from the IT@Cork conference.

For those who are just getting into RSS, Les Bain just published an interesting RSS Tutorial.

I just got done with my keynote here at IT@Cork. It’s interesting, the audience here only had 1% RSS users. Quite different from the other audiences I’ve spoken to (which have been more than 50% RSS users).

It’ll be interesting to see what the reactions are. One question I got was telling “how does Microsoft control your message?”

Let go of the idea that you’re gonna control anything anymore. I told them how anyone in the world can write about how their Xbox is crashing. Any idea that you can control what people are saying about you or your company is totally out the window. The only choice you have now is whether or not to join in the conversation.

Here’s some conversations about me. Clogger warns me against too much transparency in my personal life: “For a fully-fledged ‘celeb’, there’s WAY too much info on his private life out there.”

Bernie Goldbach brought 10 PR students to IT@Cork and is asking them what they think of me. It’ll be interesting to see what Bernie reports.

The conference is interesting so far. I’ll report more later.

Oh, and Clogger, you have it all wrong. The downsides of being well known aren’t having some weirdo stalker. It’s the email! 336 emails unanswered and a folder of stuff I want to blog about. Memeorandum is popping with new product announcements from Yahoo and from Microsoft.

Had a wonderful day today. Hung out with Tom Raftery, Donncha O Caoimh and his fiance Jacinta. Now, who is Donncha? One of the developers who works on WordPress!

It’s funny, but he’s never met Matt Mullenweg. Jacinta asked “is it true that Matt’s only 21?”

We kissed the Blarney Stone. Donncha took pictures during the day.

After that we visited Heineken’s brewery in Cork and got a tour. It’s run on Windows. Since Tom’s a Mac guy and Donncha is a Linux guy it was nice to meet an IT guy who uses Windows.

Think IT doesn’t matter? Well, it matters to the beer in Ireland. The whole plant is run by computers. More later tonight.