The tagline of Maryrose Lyons's blog proudly proclaims that she has been blogging since 2003.

Her day job is with Brightspark Consulting, where she dishes out advice on internet marketing and design to clients such as Clerys Bed Store, Bank of Ireland Global Markets and Smart Telecom. Not surprisingly then, a lot of her output relates to issues such as opt-in e-mail marketing and key word optimisation for websites.

Lyons does a good job of rounding up the best information from around the web on these topics and adding her own thoughts. Within the limits of client confidentiality, she also provides some insight into the creative processes and considerations that have gone into projects for her clients.

Lyons is an inveterate networker and is a regular attendee at grassroots events such as Open Coffee (a loosely organised monthly meet-up of techie types over coffee). This is reflected in her blog, where she highlights networking events and conferences for the technology and creative industries.

Not that Lyons is averse to a bit of humour or straying off topic as evidenced by a recent headline, "Facebook is like Toilet Paper", and a pre-Christmas post highlighting Annie Lennox's charity record Sing.

Like many internet users, Lyons is a not a fan of spam or unsolicited commercial e-mail. But unlike others she hasn't taken it lying down. So aggrieved was she at receiving multiple e-mails asking her to enter the Golden Spiders internet awards that she pursued the matter with the Data Protection Commissioner.

As a result, last month she accepted a settlement whereby Business & Finance, the company behind the awards, agreed to pay €500 to a charity of her choice. Lyons nominated Daisyhouse, which provides housing to single homeless adults.

All of this was of course chronicled on her blog. Did someone say blogs were irrelevant to the real world?

Maryrose Lyons- http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/