From talking to other Irish magicians, I realise that many of them do not have very much experience or history dealing with online magic communities. In my opinion neglecting the internet in this manner can be a big mistake. The internet can be a fantastic place to find out about new products, to meet more magicians (Irish and International) and to get wonderful tips on performance from a wide range of magicians. Below I have detailed 5 magic communities that I think may be useful for Irish magicians.

Talk magic

Talk magic are magic forums that are unaffiliated with any store. Talkmagic was one of the first forums I found myself at, and one of the few I still use today. There is a very friendly user base there, mostly English, but there are a few internationals there (four or five of the regular posters there, including myself, are Irish). Talk magic often attracts publishers of material and they will often answer questions about their products in the relevant review threads. For example, Anthony Jaquin (Reality is Plastic) is quite active in the (extensive) review thread for Reality is plastic, David Penn (Coinvexed) stops by quite regularly to answer questions regarding his products, Jon Thompson (Naked Mentalism) is a very regular member of the forums, and has been since long before his books were released. You also often find people from the likes of BBM and RSVP will stop by to answer any questions when one of their products is brought up.

The review section there is very extensive, and it’s a wonderful place to find out about products that may be much less mainstream than you would normally go for (But still excellent).

Talkmagic can be found at www.talkmagic.co.uk

Boards.ie

Boards.ie is is an absolutely huge Irish forum, it is very very active and has forums dealing with everything from classic cars, to religion, to distributed computing. More importantly to anyone who would be reading this post however, there is also a Magic & Illusion forum there. At the moment it is very low traffic, but you can normally get a quick enough response and it would be wonderful to build up a more regular user base there.

The Magic & Illusion forum can be found here.

Facebook

In my opinion, Facebook can be a fantastic resource for connecting with other magicians.  There are plenty of different magic related groups (Including Irish Magic).

Facebook can be found here.

The Magic Cafe

Like Talkmagic, the cafe is a large international magic forum that is unaffiliated with any specific place. It is probably one of the largest magic related forums out there, and while I am not a regular visitor, in the past I have found them to be very accommodating and friendly. One of the most noticible attributes of the cafe is the huge quantity of sub forums that exist there. You can probably find one touching on nearly every aspect of magic that you could want to investigate.

The Magic Cafe can be found here.

Magic Ireland

There is no harm in a little self promotion!