Last week was a brilliant one.  It began with a win on Monday for an amount of money that I’d been waiting for since July 2008.  Quite a hefty sum too, nice to receive it in time for me to hand it straight over to the Revenue.

On Wednesday, a new maternity hospital opened in Malawi. This was the result of five years of hard work on the part of The Rose Project.  That Irish charity fundraised and built a maternity hospital to help a country that is on its knees with some basic healthcare.  It’s definitely something that we Irish can be proud of as The Rose Project is a small charity set up and run by Irishwoman Mary Donohue.  It’s not in the media everyday.  But it works hard and does great things.  The hospital was opened by another Irishwoman we can be proud of – Dr Mary Robinson.

To cap it all off, on Saturday night at the Irish Web Awards, The Rose Project website won the award for Most Accessible Website in Ireland. This is the second year in a row that a site by Brightspark has won such a prestigious and coveted award.  We’re delighted that our work is being recognised by the judges of the Web Awards and really pleased too that it brings further coverage to The Rose Project.  Congratulations to The Rose Project on the win.

It’s notable that out of 22 awards handed out on the night, 9 were won by what I would deem to be ‘small’ organisations who obviously chose well in how to spend their limited budgets.  The other 13 were won by well-funded organisations or semi-state bodies – the likes of The Irish Times, RTE, IDA.    I’m delighted to see that publicly funded websites in Ireland have improved so  much.  At the same time, I’m really proud for the people behind the following sites who really are living the ethos of today – to get more with less:

• Best Site in Irish Language – Nos Magazine
• Best Social Media Campaign – Count Me Out
• Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Organic Supermarket
• Best Ecommerce – Curious Wines
• Most Innovative – Decisions for Heroes
• Best New Web App – Kildare Street
• Best Music – Nialler9
• Best Videocaster – Look & Taste
• Best Podcaster – The Persuaders

With the global web awards, the Webby Awards early closing date of 30 October 2009, I would strongly urge all the winners and indeed the shortlisters at Saturday night’s awards to enter the Webby Awards.  Put Ireland on the global web awards map.   Enter here.