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 :-)

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To help mark Apple’s 30th birthday, C|Net is asking for Apple users to submit stories of how Apple’s products have changed their lives. For the better, one imagines.

It also welcomes photos of users with their favourite Apple computers or gadgets.

You can send your submissions to apple-birthday@cnet.com.

(The image here is the cover of Leander Kahney‘s book, The Cult of Mac. Buy it and read it. Not only is it nicely written and diverting, it will reassure you that your own love for Macs is really quite rational and moderate).apple, cult of mac, 30th birthday, apple love stories, macs