The technology channel on http://www.online.ie/technology/ has the capability to be  good. But what happens over the next few weeks will decide matters - will it be another drivel riddled press release site with clueless "technology journalists" misreporting and misunderstanding events or will it be an example of what a really good technology news site should be?

Notice how many new sites claiming to cover technology news there are? The strange thing is that the number of these sites almost varies inversely with the number of people writing about technology who have a clue. Yes many of these new sites are  not run by technologists or even by people who have a clue about technology. They are run by the plague of the information age - the technology journalist.

It seems that just about anybody can call themselves a technology journalist. The term itself is almost grammatically insane in that nobody ever refers to a political correspondent for a newspaper as a politics journalist. By rights it should be technological journalist or  technical journalist. But there lies the crux of the argument - these people rarely have any knowledge or background in technology. A mere facility with a wordprocessor is all it requires. And of course the ability to add a few sentences to a banal press release and hash it out as "journalism". I could immediately cite a number of sites, including some in Ireland that follow that path and claim to provide Irish technology news to the unsuspecting reader. These sites are devoid of the analysis that makes good journalism. Analysis takes knowledge and the complete lack of technological knowledge will always shimmer through.

Even newspapers that were once regarded as being of high quality are not immune to this plague. An article criticising Amazon.com for patenting an ordering technology in the USA was so fundamentally riddled with inaccuracy that it was clear that it little more than an effort to jump on the anti-Amazon.com bandwagon. Nobody who had any basic knowledge of the situation would ever confuse patent protection with copyright protection. Patent protects the idea and copyright protects the expression of an idea. Even some PR individual from Amazon.com referred to the article as being drivel. The most ardent anti-Amazon.com activist would grimace at the stupidity and ignorance of the article and probably end up agreeing. The problem for the Irish Times seems to be that they have nobody with sufficient knowledge who could immediately identify such inane drivel. They have no technical or technological journalists.

You would not allow someone who only knows how to apply a bandaid to do open heart surgery. While technology journalism is not open heart surgery, a knowledge of technology is a prerequisite for covering the subject. People who cannot demonstrate that they actually have such a knowledge should not be allowed to write about it in  publications where it may be taken seriously. For if they are allowed to do so, it is the reader who suffers. Journalism is meant to enlighten or expand the mind. These people do neither and it is quickly becoming a case of the technologically clueless leading the technologically blind. Over the next few weeks, it should become apparent what kind of technology section, Online.ie´s technology subsite will become. Perhaps it may surprise everyone and be clueful. On the other hand it could become a pale imitation of the www.ireland.com/technology subsite with its sociology masquerading as technology and largely content free articles. It would be a shame if it went the "technology journalist" route as it has the capability to be great. Most of the articles appear to be sourced elsewhere and little content is generated by online.ie.