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With temperatures in some parts of the UK and Ireland set to reach as low as 28°C on Monday night, many have been wondering why this winter has been especially harsh. According to NASA the reason is a natural shift the the location of the Gulf Stream called ‘Negative Arctic Oscillation’.

While our North American friend will be treated to a rare total lunar eclipse on Tuesday, during which the sky will turn blood red, Irish eyes will be set on the midwinter sunrise. On Tuesday the Irish broadcaster RTÉ will be live streaming the annual illumination of Newgrange passage online from 8:55am.

There are less than six sleeps to Christmas so Santa is pretty busy getting ready for the big day. So too are NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, who are preparing to track Santa Claus and the reindeer as he crosses the world on Christmas Eve.

Weather, politics, Ireland's economic problems and a good bit of humour were the stories that you have been reading on The Sociable this year. In our first annual list of Sociable top tens we count down the most read, clicked and shared during 2010.

Mark Zukerberg has beaten Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, The Chilean Miners and The Tea party to be named Time magazine’s person of the year. Each year Time Magazine awards people who have had a significant impact on world events to be their Person of the Year. Discussing this year award, Time editor Rick Stengel said Zuckerberg was awarded the honour to for

About this time every year Google publish Zeitgeist; a collection of data and visualisations that help capture the spirit of the year just gone by based on the aggregation of billions of search queries.

Earlier today Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP, launched its free music streaming service known as MusicHub. Eircom MusicHub allows free unlimited music streaming for existing Eircom broadband customers, and music downloads for as little as 32c per track.

Today, December 7th, 2010, Ireland's government will set out the toughest budget the country has seen in thirty years. This article will automatically update with the latest reports and reaction from Irish social media users during budget day.

Gadget blog Engadget have confirmed that the Google Chrome team are holding an announcement event in San Francisco on December 7th. According to Engadget the team are expected to announce a Google-branded netbook that runs Chrome OS.

According to an article published in the Wall Street Journal today Google is weeks away from launching its long awaited digital book retail project known as Google Editions. The article states that the service from Google will launch this month in the US, and internationally within the first quarter of 2011.

A lot of debate has been circulating in recent months about the subject of IPv6 and how it will be the saviour of the internet as we know it. In this article we try to explain what exactly IPv6 is, why it’s so important for the continued success of the internet, and how prepared Ireland is for its imminent deployment.

Congratulations to all those who won at last night’s Eircom Spiders in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin. Fota Wildlife scooped the prestigious Grand Prix, as well as winning the Best Travel and Tourism Website award.

In a speech at a telecoms conference in London recently Ed Vaizey, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries in Britain, made clear his opposition to net neutrality.

In a blog post on the official Google Docs blog three new Google Docs features have been announced and will be made available over the coming days: auto-corrections, LaTex in equations, and images in spreadsheet cells.

.CO domains are about to go mainstream as domain registry site Go Daddy makes .CO domains the default option for new registrations. This change is fairly significant as Go Daddy accounts for nearly fifty percent of all internet domain registrations.

Your news from across the web with The Sociable. Jack Dorsey’s Square Despite eager anticipation from Irish users Jack Dorsey’s smartphone credit card scanner, Square, has no plans to launch in Ireland…just yet

Mozilla, the makers of the popular web browser Firefox, have released an add-on designed to make sharing content on the web “easy, safe and fast”. The new service, called F1, is an effort by Mozilla to combat the unsightly and confusing array of share buttons found on the majority of today’s websites.

Google has released five new themes for its GMail email service today. Users can now choose between a black and white theme, Android, scenic tree tops and a hand drawn inbox. There are now 40 themes (if you count the custom theme) available for GMail.

Futurist Ross Dawson has released a “Newspaper Extinction Timeline” where he maps out how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world. The first nations to leave behind the much loved newspaper and embrace media consumption majorly through digital devices will be the USA in 2017, followed by the UK and Iceland in 2019.

Since being upgraded to #newtwitter we at The Sociable have noticed that when our Twitter account is over capacity we are being presented with the message below rather than Yiying Lu's famous (or infamous) Fail Whale image.