I've written before about the blurring of offline and online worlds and here is a great example of the concept in action; an interesting program that allows you to integrate your Flickr account into the file system of your Linux-powered computer, making it as easy to upload and download files as copying and pasting between folders. This is continuing the idea of merging a web experience with the desktop experience rather than the web being confined to your web browser. The program that makes this possible is called flickrfs and is available as a package for Ubuntu systems and is worth setting up as it is interesting and useful in itself, but also because offers an idea of what it would be like to use a filesystem based on tagging rather than one based on rigid structure or classification.

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.

Google this week anounced that it was going to let outside developers host their applications on Google infrastructure through a new product: Google App Engine. This is the latest in a long list of products from Google who are most probably the world's leading Internet company and may well become the most important IT company, if they aren't already. The offering from Google does not work in the same way as conventional web hosting, instead you must devise a solution that will work with their infrastructure, but in return the promise that your solution will be able to scale to keep up with demand with such things as load balancing taken care of automatically. This probably won't be a problem for most developers who are used to devising solutions that work with in-house IT requirements anyway.