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.

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.

One of the great aspects of the blogosphere is the ability for people to leave comments on your blog and also comment on other people's blogs. It makes for a great continual conversation between people all over the internet (by the way I would like to say a big thank you to everybody who has left comments on this site and taken the time to get in contact ). Comments are another manifestation, along with, for example, blogs, social networks and wikis of how the internet is moving away from being a broadcast medium that people just 'surf' to being a place for to interact, communicate and share ideas. The problem has been that is difficult to keep track of these different conversations across dispersed web sites.

The phenomenon that is Web2.0 has brought about many new opportunities to interact with websites. The downside of this so far has been the necessity to register for each site separately that creates the baggage of having to remember lots of user names and passwords. Help is at hand though with a new system called OpenID that might life easier for all of us in the future. The good news is that this can easily be integrated into Drupal to make your users' lives easier.