BlogSpot: Irish senior level executives who write blogs are few and far between. While Sun Microsystem's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz blogs and every other US tech company seems to have appointed a chief blogger in the last year, Irish companies still seem shy of allowing execs to publish their thoughts on the web.

Which is why Iona Technologies former chief executive and technology industry heavyweight Chris Horn is such a welcome addition to the world of Irish blogs.

It probably helps that Horn has stepped back from daily involvement with Iona, but he's hardly resting on his laurels. In his first post back in February he outlined his various business and voluntary involvements. Horn seems to be something of a professional chairman these days, heading up the boards of bodies as diverse as Unicef Ireland, open source start-up Cloudsmith, Dublin software company LaCayla, and Trinity College's new Science Gallery.

The tag-line of the blog is "Musings on the software industry and other things", and Horn to date has favoured longer, thoughtful posts rather than a barrage of regular links to news reported elsewhere. In the two months the blog has been in existence he has averaged about two posts a week.

The topics for discussion broadly fall into two camps - high-level discussions about software architecture and Horn's thoughts on the technology industry in Ireland.

A trip to Stanford University with a group of Irish software company chief executives provided the inspiration for an early post that had many. Given that no Irish software entrepreneurs have managed to build a global software company, Horn suggested Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary was an ideal role model for tech execs. More recently he politely suggested that the advances Irish and Chinese software companies were making to each other at an Enterprise Ireland matchmaking event were unlikely to bear fruit in any of the ways they expect.

Even the posts of a technical bent can prove enlightening - Horn compared the complexity associated with a business moving to the newer service-oriented architecture approach to software to that facing a government trying to rebuild a war-ravaged country.

Here's hoping that some who have followed in Horn's footsteps, and who are still involved in the industry in an executive capacity, decide to follow his lead into the world of online publishing.

Blog of the Week:Chris Horn's blog http://chrishornat.blogspot.com