Blog of the week
Here we go with our weekly awards again after the lengthy Christmas break. First up for 2003 is [techno\culture], which writer Karlin Lillington describes as her "weblog on whatever comes to mind..."
Born in Canada, raised in Silicon Valley, based in Dublin, Lillington works the tech beat mainly for the Irish Times but also for The Guardian, and she contributes to a list of publications that ranges from the San Jose Mercury-News to Salon.com. Before plunging into technology writing, she completed a PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, that left her with "the most (the only?) saleable doctorate in the arts — a study of Seamus Heaney's poetry, completed just before he won the Nobel."
[techno\culture] features mostly tech snippets spanning the US, Irish and European markets, but these are often interspersed with items that combine technology, politics, culture and society. The sharpness of the summaries, the freshness of the items and the density of the postings are proof of Lillington's enormous energy and voracious reading, surfing and networking. Here we have a professional writer freed from the deadlines and space constraints of print revelling in the liberty that blogging allows.
Typical of her posting is this fascinating snippet from Wednesday, 8 January:
"Moblogging software for mobile phone-created weblogs: a new Irish company, NewBay Software, will launch a product this month that enables people to create a blog using only a mobile phone and SMS and MMS messages. So text messages and images from a camera phone can be sent remotely to your blog. No PC is necessary although most people would view the blog by PC and would probably want to tinker with their site by PC; no software is carried on the handset itself; instead NewBay offers the software to mobile operators who can then offer a blogging service. This is NOT a direct consumer offering but would presumably be rebranded by an operator. Either the operator or NewBay can host and manage the blogs."
Lillington adds further value to this posting by referring to her Irish Times story on the subject (subscription required) and linking to both a longer version and the official press release. Excellent. Rainy Day salutes [techno\culture].
Diarist of the day: 'Chips' Channon, 10 January 1946"At the fashionable, carefree Carcano-Ednam wedding reception I remarked to Emerald [Cunard] how quickly London had recovered from the war and how quickly normal life had resumed. 'After all', I said, pointing to the crowded room, 'this is what we have been fighting for.' 'What,' said Emerald, 'are they all Poles?' "
