Having Flash 10 on your EEE PC opens up some interesting possibilities. One of these is the use of Seesmic, a website currently in beta that is designed to allow people to have conversations via video. The idea of this is that people can just use the built in webcam of their computer to record a short dialogue, this can be much quicker for somebody to do than composing a written comment and possibly could speed up the flow of a web-based discussion. The problem for EEE users is that this site just isn't designed for this type of machine. Hopefully the rise of netbooks means that we will see less and less sites being developed that do not work on them (that would be sensible after all) and let's hope that Seesmic will be able to correct this problem once they are out of beta. The way that the site is currently set up means that it is not possible to use it with an EEE. However, this is not the end of the story, open source has a habit of providing amazing flexibility, and we can put this to good use to make this site work for us. You mileage may vary with what is written here, but I have had seesmic working on an Ubuntu-powered EEE. If you get this to work with a standard EEE let me know.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My OU Story

Details coming soon. 

A while ago you might recall I blogged about the blurring of offline and online worlds, now another development is contributing to this change. Today I was delighted to find that my Google Docs account has been enabled with offline functionality. Basically this means that it is possible to start a document while online, continue to work on it while offline and then synchronise the change when you next go back online. Google have explained the feature in full, and included a video on it on their blog. This is a very useful feature as storing documents online makes it easy to share them with colleagues and also to switch between machines. It struck me that one very handy place for this feature would be on the Asus EEE PC especially as it has a link to Google Docs already from the easy mode menu.

I was surprised today while on Facebook to notice an advert on the left of the page with the face of a friend of mine promoting a certain local radio station. It looks like this may be due to the SocialAds system in Facebook, which seems to be a way to persuade people to but products on the basis that their friends are a fan of it so you should too. Unlike celebrities though, your apparent endorsement of a product won't earn you a penny, in fact you may not even be aware that this is happening. The products concerned don't seem to be completely random but may be products that you are a "fan" of.

For some time the same team that brought you Course Profiles has been working on another Facebook application for Open University students and staff and now that application has been released, it is My OU Story. The idea of this application is that it provides a place for people to tell their story related to OU studies. They can (through the preferences page) choose to allow the stories they post to be shared with everybody, people in their network, just their friends or even keep the story to themselves. When you post you story you can also record how you are feeling at the time on a mood slider (which I hope you like as it took ages to get right!). Once a person has submitted a few stories you can see how they are feeling over time by having a look at their mood graph. Being a social application through, the interaction is not just one way. If somebody reads your story they can also provide feedback, maybe to say they are happy for you, or on worse days to "hang on in there".

Up to now the computing experience has been divided into two - online and offline. Being online means using sites through a web browser, offline means working with different applications, mostly designed to work with documents not stored on the Internet, but instead on local file systems. However, changes changes in the way we communicate and work are starting to make this arrangement look creaky and old fashioned so thoughts have turned to how to integrate these two worlds.