Despite the idea of "being in Cyberspace" and the power of the Internet to connect us to people all over the world regardless of our location, we often use a browser to find out about people and services close to us. These might be queries such as finding the opening times of a local store, the time of a train or local expertise. Each time we do this it is often necessary to tell the website where we are, typcially by providing a post code, but what if you don't know the postcode? Fortunately browsers and becoming much more clever, and some can even work out where you are.

Smartphones are computers that happen to be able to make phone calls, and that leads to some interesting possibilities. I've been trying out the new HTC Hero thanks to the lovely folk at 3MobileBuzz who sent me one to have a look at for a week. The Hero uses Google's open source operating system Android, which is based on Linux and is optimised for smaller devices. HTC mobiles are available on many of the mobile phone networks, and they are not alone in using the Android operating system on certain models, manufacturers such as Motorola have recently joined them. The Hero is 3's first Android device and the model I looked at also has a bundled Spotify subscription (worth £9.99 per month), it currently costs £97.86 upfront with a two year contract that will cost you £35 per month, so this is toward the premium end of their range. Quite a bit of cash to hand over, but what do you get for your money?

Fun? Video chat? Google Wave? That's right, the Wave is not just about collaborative Wikis and seeing what the other person is typing. A really interesting feature of the platform is the ability to add extensions, one of the first of these is 6rounds, an extension that plugs in a full video chat facility to the platform, but not just that, it also provides the ability to perform tasks together. Interestingly, the extension has its roots in Speed Dating, but it looks like it has a great deal of potential, and like many Web 2.0 applications is built using open source technology.

Today I got my Google Wave invite and was able to activate my account. There has been a lot of hype about this product (to say the least) so it was interesting to be able to finally have a go at using it, so I thought I would type up my first impressions based on only a few hours use, so treat it as a raw first impression rather than a highly considered opinion! This is a tool that I think has great potential for people collaborating on projects, especially if they are located in different time zones and cannot meet face to face very easily, but to use it effectively though does mean climbing a learning curve.

The announcement last week that Google is developing (another) operating system caused a frenzy of excitement, unfortunately spilling over into some hostility towards the Linux community. There has been some rather silly talk about "real people" and "typical users", but the problem with these terms is they are used (in my experience) by people who don't consider themselves in these categories, but are somehow able to speak for them. In an era of general purpose operating systems everybody is a "typical user", and in thinking about potential new operating systems this provides a useful basis on which to evaluate new ideas. I've been thinking a lot about Google's Chrome OS and can see a future for it, but one very different from the ideas currently being talked about. I think it has no future in the home, but a bright future in the workplace.

Twitter is a never ending stream of information, some of it useful, some maybe not so, but one bit of useful information that did come to my attention today was a tweet from @IanEHarris mentioning that a Live CD image of Google Android has been developed that will enable you to try this new operating system in a virtual machine environment such as VirtualBox, or any other computer that could be booted of a CD or a USB stick. It's been known for some time that it is possible to run Android on x86 hardware with a port for the Asus EEE PC appearing earlier this year, but it was very difficult until now to get Android running on other hardware or virtual machines.

Back in September, Google Chrome was launched with quite a lot of fanfare, it was a big tech story and received a lot of attention. At the time there was speculation that it could not only threaten Internet Explorer, but even speculation that it could threaten Microsoft Windows itself. Today, with much less attention it was announced that Google Chrome was no longer a beta (test) product and the “goals for stability and performance have been met” but the developers also add “our work is far from done”. The announcement was reported by Reuters in their MediaFile blog pages though, where they posed the question “will you switch from your current browser to Chrome?”. Oddly enough I've been running a poll on this site which asked you the question “Are you planning to use Google Chrome as your default browser?”. The results are in, the poll is closed and the answer is pretty conclusive.

For about the last year I have abandoned the use of my workplace calendar system (based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange) and using paper diaries in favour of Google Calendar. This solution offers a number of advantages for me, it is entirely web based, it is platform independent and I can even see my appointments on my mobile phone thanks to the mobile version. I've also been using Mozilla Thunderbird, an excellent open source email program, for years. So it was very interesting to read Rob Parsons' post on getting these two technologies working together through a couple of add ons. It looks like Mozilla Thunderbird could become the Personal Information Manager of choice for those who use Web 2.0 services to manage their affairs thanks to an increasing number of addons. On the horizon is also an add on to integrate it with the popular web based task management system Remember the Milk, and apparently it is already possible to integrate Thunderbird with Google Mail.

The idea of PlanetOU was always to represent a community around an institution by aggregating blogs written by people connected to it (the idea is explained in full in my earlier post What planet are you from? PlanetOU of course!). It uses the core Aggregator module in Drupal to pull in content from about fifty different websites to make a constant stream view of the latest blog posts from OU staff bloggers. This approach works well, but a key point to note here is that when feed items are imported in this way Drupal does not create new node items (it isn't native content to the software that runs this site), and as such are not visible to the built-in search engine. These blogs are spread across many different domains (e.g. only a few people on the TwitterLeague for OU people use the OU's blogging facilities) and so are not indexed by any institutional search engine. Fortunately there is now a solution to this challenge; a Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE).

No doubt the big tech story of the week has been the release of the new Google Chrome browser, Google's new entrant into the browser wars. Like many others I downloaded this and gave it a go to see what the fuss was about. So first gripe, the current beta is only for Windows, although we are being promised versions for Linux and the Mac. This is an interesting decision, maybe it was taken as they don't want to aim the product at "geeks"? However, as an old manager of mine used to say, let's "park that thought" for the moment and look at the browser itself. Google came up with a great way to explain their new browser and its features; they did this in the form of a comic book and this can been seen at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I'm not really into comics or graphical novels, but this made a refreshing change from a white paper or a powerpoint-type presentation, although I must admit my attention was starting to stray at the end! This is well worth reading as it explains the whole project and its features very well.