The world of Web 2.0 consists of many sites that you might use for different purposes, you might use Flickr store your photos, Twitter to microblog, last.fm to find new music, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, maybe a blog of your own, the list could go on for quite some time. In each of these sites you might have a profile that tells part of the story about who you are, but these websites usually keep themselves to themselves, the profile will only reflect your interaction with that site. So different aspects of your Web 2.0 personality can be found scattered all over the Internet, but now it is possible to tie these strands together to enhance your website or blog and give a better impression of the things you find interesting.

The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology. The report's author, Josie Fraser left a message on the forum for Course Profiles to let us know: "I'm delighted to let you know that Course Profiles has been featured in Childnet's Young People and Social Networking Services report ... thank you for providing such a great example". The report covers the use of social networking services by children and young people in education and coverage of its contents (including a link to the full report) can be found on Josie Fraser's blog.

Last week I had the pleasure of being at the SocialLearn workshop held for OU students, staff (including many Associate Lecturers - the vital members of staff who act as learning mentors to students) and alumni to discuss and get input for the SocialLearn project (a next-generation educational social network platform, more information can be found in Martin Weller's slideshow). A few of the participants have already written blog posts describing their experience of the event, Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to "an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people", ok I like that quote I have to admit! Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop. I've been working with my OU colleagues Nick Freear and Alex Little to produce some add-on applications for the platform, early forms of which were demonstrated. I also got the chance to run a small spin off workshop (for the first time) to explore scenarios for the use of mobile technology with SocialLearn.

I can't help noticing the number of Asus EEE PCs around now, it is strange to think that twelve months ago these weren't really about and there was still discussion of when will be the "year of the Linux desktop". Of course, events took a different turn, and suddenly the desktop didn't seem so important anymore. The real prize was a computer that was small and convenient, inexpensive and easy to carry about. The EEE PC came supplied with a version of Linux called Xandros (which I'd never heard of until then), but more importantly, in a fatal blow to the argument that Linux is too difficult for non-technical users, it came with an "Easy mode" menu that made finding and running applications very easy, with a tabbed menu and large icons. Now other manufacturers are working on their competitors to the EEE, and Canonical, the company that provides commercial backing to Ubuntu, has been working with a couple of them to produce the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Yesterday I treated myself to a new mobile internet "dongle" to go with my Asus EEE PC. I decided to go for the Huawei E169G usb modem as it matches my black EEE, however there is a small problem with getting this device to work straight away. The problem is that the E169G is a composite device, which basically means that it will ask as a USB memory stick until it is sent a command to tell it to be a modem. The EEE doesn't know about this so you can't use it straight away as a 3G modem in the connection wizard. Fortunatelty, back in April Dale Lane documented in his blog how to send the modem the right command to be able to use it wil the EEE, his blog post on the topic is worth reading as it explains the background to the issue. After experimenting with my friend Keren Mills' E169G (thanks Keren!) to check that I could get this method to work I took the plunge and got my own one. Following the instructions on Dale Lane's blog I was able to send some commands manually to the unit to get it to switch but what I really wanted to do was to get the EEE to recognise the device automatically so I can start a 3G connection without having to run any commands in the terminal. Fortunately this is possible.

One of my aims for this year is to learn the Python programming language. Why? Well it seems to be cropping up all over the place. If you own a Linux machine or an Apple Mac, chances are it is already installed. Google recently made it the primary language for their AppEngine platform. The design ethos behind it is very appealing, a down to business approach to programming that dispenses with needing lots and lots of code and allows the developer to ulitlise powerful libraries to get the job done. Python code can be run on many different devices, and it is possible to use it to develop desktop, server and web applications. Now it can also be used to develop applications for mobile phones. This is very appealing to me as a developer as it takes time to master a new skill and I would rather that skill provides a lot of flexibility and the chance to get involved in a wide variety of challenges.

If you've been trying to watch YouTube videos or use the BBC's iPlayer site on your Asus EEE PC you might have noticed that it it is not possible to use these services in full screen mode. YouTube videos just play in a bigger window when you try to activate full screen. Trying to watch the videos when embedded on their webpages can be a little frustrating as it wastes available screen space (on what is quite a small screen anyway). Fortunately, this is quite easy to fix. The problem is that the version of Adobe Flash player that is supplied with the EEE does not support full screen mode. I found that the version installed on my machine was numbered 9.0.48.0 and the latest version, at the time of writing is 9.0.124.0. You can find out the version of Flash you have installed by typing about:plugins into the address bar of Firefox or Flock, or by visiting this link: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/.

The most popular post on this blog for some time has been Using you Asus EEE PC on the 3 mobile network, which is no doubt a lot to do with it being linked to from 3 Mobile Buzz. I think it is safe to say that the two hottest gadgets this year have been the Asus EEE PC and the 3G dongle from 3, which put together make a whole new computing experience. Why? I think this may be a similar change to the introduction of mobile phones. It seems to me there is a direct comparison between the way we get onto the Internet and how we use phones. First we started with a hard wired connection, just like the phone, now many of us are on a WiFi connection, which is a bit like a cordless phone, in fact it has a similar range, you can stray a short distance from the location of your network, but if you go to somebody else's house, another workplace or away somewhere you are left with a chore of trying to get access to another network. There are WiFi systems now where you can "roam" between different hotspots, but in some ways that reminds me of the old Rabbit phones where you took the handset with you and had to find a base station to go stand near to make a call.

Something we do have a wide choice of in Ubuntu Linux (and on many other Linux platforms) is virtualisation software. Previously in this blog I've covered VirtualBox, which was recently acquired by Sun Microsystems. A new version of this software is out, but unfortunately the download repositories have been disabled and the downloads moved to an old fashioned manual download and install model thanks to "U.S. export regulations". I hope Sun sort this out soon. Another option though has been quietly developing and as available in (K)Ubuntu 8.10. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an an open source option to run virtual machines on your computer which can benefit from hardware acceleration many many modern CPUs to achieve near-native speeds for the guest images. The user friendliness of this software has been greatly improved through the addition of Virt-Manager, a GUI front end for KVM which means that you don't have to use the command line anymore to set up, monitor and run your virtual machines. I took this software out for a test drive by making a virtual machine that can run Ubuntu 8.04 (32 bit) on my Kubuntu 8.04 (64 bit) system, you could of course also have Microsoft Windows as a guest, the software emulates an entire machine.

Ambient technology is definitely not about mood lighting, instead it is something far more interesting. It is a term which describes an idea that technology will adapt itself to your presence, performing the necessary reconfigurations and integration to meet your needs or simply increase your comfort. Typically it will do this without much of a need for human interaction, instead it just quietly gets on with its job. Such technology can be used for a variety of purposes, one of them being to deliver information to the user in situations where it is appropriate to take in a chunk of information at a glance, think of quickly glancing at a photo rather than looking at a spreadsheet. You could stare at a photo for quite a long time, but you can take in most of the information it has to offer quite quickly, the same is generally not true for a spreadsheet. An ambient information system such as this can be used to get a sense of what a community is up to, a perfect candidate being a community of Twitter users. A system which does just that is Twitterspaces which is now available as a view of OU users on Twitter at: http://eniac.hopto.org/soiaware/twitter_display/planetou.php.