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.

It has been a very interesting year for social networking, microblogging, the practice of sharing short messages with followers has really caught on and Twitter has certainly enjoyed the most buzz of 2008. A notable feature though of Twitter's rise has been the number of problems they have and its bizarre reverse product development cycle, it now has less features than when I first joined; and all in the name of stability, a goal that Twitter is going through a lot of pain to achieve. In the background though has been the looming presence of FriendFeed, a service that aggregates streams from various web 2.0 services and has the ability for users to post comments. It was founded by some former Google employees and has been adding some very interesting features recently such as rooms and real time feeds. That's right - they've been adding features not taking them away! I've noticed FriendFeed is becoming more and more useful to me as it attracts users and it will be interesting to see how this develops in 2009.

Video is a fantastic medium, and the means to make video have never been more accessible. Many people have video cameras, not just dedicated units, but other devices capable of taking video such as digital photo cameras and mobile phones. The software to edit video is available for free with the availability of open source packages such as Kino, and you can make your video available to the world with services such as YouTube. But what about accessibility? It's a question I've heard raised about the use of video, often because people don't realise that you can add Subtitles (also known as Closed Captioning) to the videos that you upload. If you go to the YouTube page for a video you have uploaded you will see an option on the right hand side for "Captions and Subtitles". Here you will see a screen to upload your subtitles file, you'll notice too that you can upload different sets of subtitles for different languages, very handy if you want to provide translations in foreign languages for the dialogue in your video. People might use subtitles for all sorts of reasons, the most obvious might be because they hearing difficulties, but also for many other reasons, for example, they might be learning English, and having a subtitles file might be useful to help them follow the dialogue, or they might be in a quiet environment where listening to audio is not convenient.

On this day last year I wrote my very first blog post, prompted into action by a link from Martin Weller's blog to my then largely empty blog! I'm glad I became a blogger, I've already explained my reasons for blogging and the last year has no doubt seen some quite dramatic changes in the technology world. The blog has come a long way since then and now I am proud to say that on average two to three hundred of you visit it each day. I would like to say a big *thank you* to everybody who has read my posts and taken the time to comment. My fist post was about the Course Profiles application we created that works inside Facebook. Back then we were being told that no student wanted their university to have a presence in Facebook as The Guardian put it:

Thanks to a fellow user of Twitter I was alerted to this great video on YouTube which is a presentation by Michael Wesch who is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, given at the Library of Congress back in June 2008 which is all about YouTube and the community that uses it. Admittedly, when I first saw the title I wasn't encouraged really, I thought it might be a rather dry, navel-gazing study of the community surrounding YouTube, reading too much meaning into what is happening there, maybe with slow death by Powerpoint. I was very wrong, this video is well worth watching, and all 55 minutes of it too. It is thought provoking and even moving in places, with plenty of facts and figures that make fascinating viewing.

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.

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.