From The Observer:

Google is on the move. The internet giant has held talks with Orange, the mobile phone operator, about a multi-billion-dollar partnership to create a ‘Google phone’ which makes it easy to search the web wherever you are.

The collaboration between two of the most powerful brands in technology is seen as a potential catalyst for making internet use of mobile phones as natural as on desktop computers and laptops.

I’ve often thought that the future of the web is mobile: a Blackberry sized thing with a reasonably sized screen and keyboard. Let it boot straight up into a Firefox variant and then connect to web services. It doesn’t have to be through Google, Zoho have a perfectly good selection of apps, too. Everything is done online through the browser, which would mean no more synchronising of mobile devices with desktop machines.

Before this becomes a reality though, a better platform than AJAX needs to be employed, as Bill Thompson has pointed out:

There is a massive difference between rewriting Web pages on the fly with Javascript and reengineering the network to support message passing between distributed objects, a difference that too many Web 2.0 advocates seem willing to ignore. It may have been twenty years since Sun Microsystems trademarked the phrase ‘the network is the computer’ but we’re still a decade off delivering, and if we stick with Ajax there is a real danger that we will never get there.

Spotted at Google Operating System.

[tags]google, orange, observer, google operating system, zoho, bill thompson[/tags]

Steve Smith has updated his Tiger Admin plug-in. What does it do? It makes the WordPress admin screen look very nice indeed. Good job!

[tags]wordpress, WP Tiger Administration, steve smith[/tags]

Still not online at home, which makes my installation of Ubuntu a week or so quite frustrating: there really isn’t much I can do with it. Still, Pipex will be providing me with 6mb/s broadband in a week or so, which is something to look forward to!

Was having a poke about on Ubuntu though last night. I browsed through the repository of applications I can download and install, and was surprised to see that the majority of them state that they are unavailable for my system. This includes standard apps like Gnumeric and Abiword.

Could this have anything to do with the fact that I wasn’t online at the time, or is there something I should know about being able to install packages on Ubuntu?

[tags]ubuntu[/tags]

I’ve recently started my own Community of Practice over on the I&DeA communities platform, entitled ‘Social Media and Online Collaboration’. It will be a good way of getting the message across to people who work in local government that the internet isn’t just a distraction, it’s a tool that can have tremendous benefits in terms of sharing information, experience and best practice.

The CoP is a pretty nice platform. Using a bespoke system built by a firm called Conseq, it provides simple wikis, forums and blogs as well as a calendar and a space for uploading documents for sharing.

Of course, the issue is getting people involved. With a pretty minimal amount of effort, the Social Media CoP is one of the most active. I’ve created a few wiki pages detailing some of the stuff the CoP can do, my top ten blogging tips and a few other things on starting blogging and a Web2.0 site directory. It will be interesting to see how many others jump in.

The CoP platform is pretty similar to the site I have been working on, expanding the remit of my original LGSearch site, which is called LGNewMedia. It too has a blog, a wiki and a forum, along with LGSearch and the latest effort, which is a del.ico.us clone called LGKnowledge. Again, will anyone ever use this stuff? I don’t know. I know that they are already using LGSearch, which is cool, if unsurprising as it doesn’t need much effort to do so. The wiki serves a purpose as a documentation library, if nothing else, and the blog has a few subscribers, probably for news on LGSearch.

But I do think that LGKnowledge could be hugely helpful to people as a kind of simple knowledge management system, with appropriate tagging people could point stuff out to people in a really useful way. But it needs the committment from users to actually put the content in there in the first place, and I am not sure how they can be convinced that it’s worth it.

[tags]idea, communities of practice, social media, local government, lgsearch, lgnewmedia[/tags]