Most journalists work hard to get stories and to get at the truth. However technology journalists tend to exist on the handouts of the PR companies, recycling press releases as news. Yet the award for "journalist of the year" went to Karlin Lillington of the Irish Times. Strangely, John Sterne and Jamie Smyth, journalists who are more concerned with news did not get the award even though they have worked tirelessly and against the great tide of technological cluelessness epitomised by the Friday Fluff Stuff pages of the Irish Times and  publications such as the late and unlamented Web Ireland that have almost swamped the Irish internet business with reheated press releases. These journalists have broken more real stories than Lillington ever has. Yet apparently those voting in the IIA awards via the IIA website chose to ignore those real journalists. Does this mean that those who voted for Lillington are clueless? Not necessarily so. Though if they haven´t the intellect to tell technology bandwagon guff and happy-clappy puff pieces from real technical reporting then  you´d have to wonder what reality they inhabit. Perhaps it is a syptom of a deeper malaise that afflicts the membership of IIA and those who voted - clue deficiency. It would be interesting to see the voting figures for these awards as they would give some idea of how relevant these awards are.

But after IEDR had allowed these domains to be registered in blatent contravention of its own generic rules, it announced it was changing the generic rule. This rule change was presented to clueless technology journalists as IEDR trying to help the ailing Irish internet business by relaxing its rules. However to see IEDR sponsoring an award for social inclusion while  callously passing over charities that would have had a far better claim to some of these domain names is sickening and grounds for the relevant government department to strip IEDR of registrar functions. Interestingly the Web Ireland/National Internet Awards of which IEDR was the main sponsor last year did not take place this year and it seems much of the money that was raised for two charities at the Web Ireland organised event did not make it to the charities. Web Ireland is no longer publishing.

The IIA Net Visionary award went to Deirdre Veldon of Ireland.com for  the contribution she has made to the Irish internet business since she joined Ireland.com in 1996. That should be good for another few unquestioning puff pieces in the Irish Times. Then again the competition from other prospective IIA Net Visionaries wasn´t there. There was a distinct lack of vision among the candidates for Net Visionary this year.

The IIA should really be honouring the poor bloody web developers and programmers who continue to work hard while dot.com disasters like ireland.com continue to bleed money  because its management cannot figure out how to make money. But that wouldn´t be right for the dot.com wannabes of the IIA - they seem to live in a never never land that existed for a few brief picoseconds before the dot.com crash. The Media Lab Europe is still a good thing to these happy-clappies and Eircom is not the reason that Ireland has a third world comms infrastructure. Back in the real world, the people working on the web in Ireland have to cope with a criminally overpriced communications infrastructure delivering a service that would embarrass a third world country. If the people in IIA management had any brains or even were remotely as clueful as they would like to think, then they should have given the Net Visionary award to the IrelandOffline movement - a movement that has done more in its short lifetime to bring the issue of Ireland´s thirdworld communications infrastructure to public and governmental attention than the IIA has done in its entire existence.

Then again the IIA doesn´t represent the Irish internet business so these awards are not, as the Irish Times claimed, the "top internet awards". The top internet awards in Ireland are the Zeddies. These are the industry awards as voted by the Irish internet business.

The IIA represents a small, ever decreasing, and increasingly irrelevant clique that has more in common with the fiascos  of Rondomondo, Nua, buyandsell.net, Ebeon, Local.ie. It was started as a talking shop for a bunch of businesses in Dublin that once thought that they had something to do with the internet. The first CEO that the IIA appointed was a self-confessed SPAMMER, Frank Cronin. This caused a slight problem for the IIA in that it could not publish a position paper on spam given the somewhat unique insight that could be provided by its then CEO. In June, it appointed another non-entity as its second CEO - at least the first one had some net relevance.

The IIA´s mailing lists are silent, the IIA management betrayed the Irish internet industry and the industry got up and walked away.