I am slightly loathe to add to the volumes that have been written on the iPhone but I was reflecting today on why I like the beast so much, and that has a lot to do wiht how I use it.

I txt every day; use the internet a lot (83 mgbt download in the last month) and have Google Maps save my life on numerous occasions.  I use Google search on the run a lot, to find stuff, plus the phone is my calendar and my address book.  I check names and addresses as well as names and numbers.  Plus a bit of podcasting, a bit of calculating, coverting currencies, temperatures weights and more plus the time zones so i always know what time it is in San Francisco.  And then I use the 'Pocket Watch' function to have a big clock on my desk when I am working at home, and iSolitaire occasionally keeps me occupied on a train, tram or bus.  Did I mention that I use it as a phone as well.

So what makes it different?  For me, it is the fact that it is delivery agnostic.  The web works as well as the phone.  Using numbers to dial or click on a contact is as easy as making a favourite list or checking voicemail.  Therefore it works like i do.  It is not a phone that struggles with the internet or a computer that can make calls at a push.  And everything is one click off the home screen, using my clumsy, podgy fingers. A delight that has genuinely made my life easier and I have no intention of moving back to Blackberry or Nokia or even Palm.

McKinsey's Newletter!  I have hundreds of them.  Yet as soon as the delete button hovers over the list, I sopt something that could  be interesting so I keep them all!  And not just McKinsey's, there are countless other newsletters and articles that have a great column or make a good point or introduce a new piece of software or contain a fact I should retain... and so it goes on.  I can shift them into folders but it still causes harddisk bloat.  So what do I do?  I have no idea,  and the problem gets worse every week.  And if I explode and delete a thousand of them, I know the next week I will be trying to find an elusive article or quote that was there...

Has anyone seen Microsoft's new rich media app Silverlight in action?  If you want to see what it can do, go to the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project.  You have to install Silverlight as a browser plug-in but that is very straight forward.  The project home page presents you with a map of Yosimite and about 20 panaroma locations in the Park.  Once you begin zooming in, thumbnail pictures of each panaroma appear.  Centre the one you want to look at and keep zooming.  And keep zooming.  You go from a thumbnail to a detailed image,  where you can almost see the individual leaves on the trees of the hill opposite.  And at each stage, the screen refreshes and displays the result with pin-point sharpness right to the limit of the zoom. This example is,  I think, a real triumph and enriches your experience of Yosemite.  What do you think?

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) has recently released a massive tomb (over 500 pages of text) called Education in a Digital World.  You can read about it here.  It has five parts:

Part 1: The Impact of Instructional Technologies
Part 2: Preparing Online Courses
Part 3: Implementing Technology
Part 4: E-learning in Action
Part 5: Engagement and Communication

And what is more, if you want to download it you can, for free.  The entire book is available or you can download the separate parts.  And what most impressed me was the fact that every chapter has a little synopisis and these are collected together in the first 5 pages of the book so you can check out out sections before deciding what, if anything, you want to download.  What a friendly, generous model. And this is a serious book written by a high-powered team from around the world and edited by Dr David G Harper of the University College of the Fraser Valley, Canada

If you don't think that this is an important issue to be aware of and be prepared to fight to maintain, then look at this YouTube clip.  Ultimately it is  about who controls the internet and who provides the content. It is worth ten minutes of your time. Thanks Treena Hales for drawing this to my attention.