The best of Paula Rooney at ZDNet Open Source

I can think of no better place to start than with my co-blogger, Paula Rooney.

Paula is a fine journalist, who combines an AP stylist's factual accuracy with the sensibility of a programmer. I hope we get along, even though she's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism while I went to its rival, Northwestern's Medill School.

She was not here as often as I'd like this year, partly for personal reasons, but also partly because she is also now the co-blogger at Dan Kusnetzky's Virtualization blog, where her gifts are always evident.

Despite working part-time and with one hand tied behind her keyboard, Paula still contributed some of the most popular stories to this blog over the past year.

Here they are:

Linux Foundation: Let's Kill Microsoft's FAT -- This was the 20th most popular story of the year, and drew 186 talkbacks. I should note I wrote on the same topic around the same time, but all the talk gravitated naturally to Paula's place, where all are always welcome.

Firefox 3.5 final prepped to ship early next week-- Our 21st most popular story of the year illustrates one of Paula's strengths, straightforward news-oriented headlines. I find a lot of readers prefer this to my own attempts to be cute. The story drew 24 talkbacks and a reader score of +14, with no one voting thumbs-down. I'm envious.

Linux Foundation ready to fight Microsoft if TomTom lawsuit involves Linux kernel -- This February story drew 55 talkbacks. It drew a total of 58 votes, with a +26 favorable rating. Unfortunately TomTom settled shortly thereafter.

Please feel free to add your own plaudits and compliments for Paula before, and if we're fortunate we'll get more of her fine work in 2010.