With the September 1 launch of Sony's PSP (PlayStation Portable) http://www.sony.co.uk/, the next generation of fusion' technology is here and the doors to competition have been thrown wide open. The PSP allows the user to play games, watch films, listen to a movie and surf the net, all on one console smaller than a mouse mat.

But fusion' isn't just happening in hardware it's happening in soft ware as well. Demand is definitely driving supply in a big way, and the users are winning.

iPod moves on

Apple, of iPod fame, www.apple.com/ipod, really kicked it off four years ago with this dynamic new music machine. Now, Apple is reported to have teamed up with Motorola and is said to be releasing a mobile phone that plays music, modelled on the style of its ground-breaking (at the time) iPod. The race to win the minds and pocketbooks of today's mobile generation is on.

A blog a second

Speaking of speed, according to recent research a blog (online diary) is created every second! Podcasting, http://www.podcastingnews.com/, takes the basics of blogging, mixes it with the power of broadcasting live via the Internet to your mobile music' machine. Now that you can carry your radio' with you in your pocket podcasting gives us radio on the run'. The world of technology is moving fast. Are we trying to keep up with it or is it trying to keep up with the mobile, communications-mad society?

Clarification

And speaking of clarifying the meaning, new technological words are entering the hallowed pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. Phishing, gamepad and podcasting are all now in the OED. Visit http://www.askoxford.com/?view=uk to brush up on the latest new English' words you can safely add to your vocabulary, speak with confidence and even define if someone dares to ask.

Folksonomy

The word interactivity is bandied about freely in digital land. But true interactivity sharing searching, creating, editing, building a web site is getting kick-started with Wikis, based on the Hawaiian term wiki wiki which means quick'. This software allows for shared editing of web pages really opening the doors to interaction between users of a web site.

This has lead to the folksonomy, the definition of which can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/. Folksonomy is a practice of collaborative categorisation using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organise information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organisers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information'.

In plain language, the accessibility to the management of shared online information is exploding. Let's hope this is a development in the right direction and that the WWW doesn't implode from the weight of all this information and use.