For the second year running, Whirlpool won the Best Technology Media Website at the Sun Microsystems IT Journalism Awards .

Whirlpool is (officially) Australia’s best broadband news and community forum site. Although it has strong links with the industry, it is staffed entirely by volunteers and enthusiasts.

It is an astonishing tribute to the power of an intelligent user community that it beat a number of competing commercial sites with professional full-time journalists and budgets in the hundreds of thousands, including ZDNet.com.au and CNet.com.au.

The awards ceremony was held in Sydney last Friday. I had the honour of accepting the award on behalf of the whole Whirlpool team and got to keep the trophy (temporarily), a beautiful bronze Frill-necked Lizard:

Disclaimer: I write for Whirlpool as a reporter.

When I first switched to Macs a few years ago, I found all the help and advice I needed in its Apple Mac forum , which is large enough to contain real experts and small enough to be friendly. I recommend it.

UPDATE: Here is a photo of me (courtesy of itjourno.com.au ) holding up the award in an unprofessional, enthusiast-like way so that the photographer can get a great action shot of the back of the framed award certificate :-)

personal, broadband, Australia, apple, macs, forum, news, you bloody ripper!

Stephen Withers has updated his Whereis script for Address Book.

This script offers much better mapping of Australian addresses than the default “Map of” service in Address Book provided by MapQuest.

The new version (1.7) has been updated to take account of recent changes on the Whereis site.

It works well for me. And it’s clever, successfully parsing addresses as varied as “1/2 High Street”, “Unit 1, 2 High Street”, “Level 1, 2 High Street” and “10-14 High Street”.

Whereis for Address Book is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site.Address Book, Australia, Australian addresses, whereis, mapquest, plugins