Google's recently released Chrome browser was created not just as web surfing tool. Google has its eyes firmly set on Mircosoft's Office market as evident from the company's blog, Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, made no bones about what Google wanted to do when it designed Chrome:

"We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also amodern platform for Web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

But don't expect to be switching all of your productivity tools over just yet. Its a matter of watch this space… for now.

Here's a great excuse for when your website next goes offline. Sainbury's had its website knocked offline for several hours following a break in at the company's Internet Service Provider, Cable and Wireless. Expensive server or networking equipment wasn't the target, but copper cabling.

Spiralling global prices for scrap metals, especially copper has seen rise in metal theft. The surging price of copper has been fuelled by global demand, especially by newly emerging economic powers of China and India. With everyone now feeling the effects of global economic slowdown and surging fuel costs, it seems likely that metal thefts will continue to rise. Given that many networking components use a lot of copper, Sainsbury's may not be the last website to be affected by this.

After reading Web socialites succumb to ‘Facebook fatigue’ –
Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent – The Times –
February 22, 2008, I'm no really surprised at all. I have been involved in a number of social networking sites now, MySpace, Tribe, LinkedIn, OpenBC and a host of art sites, that when I joined Facebook, I found their host of add on applications quite annoying. I did like its interface far better than MySpace's terrible and ugly chaos. But after a while, I found that it offered nothing really new. It was painful to build up a profile from scratch again, when I'd already done it so many times before.

This is where the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) project is interesting. Instead of all of your personal information being locked away in someone's proprietary platform, your data stays with you. Which means you retain ownership and control over it, and you don't have to go through the painful process of rebuilding it, every time you are invited to some "new" social network.

Adriana Lukas blogs regularly on the subject. 

IBM joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.

IBM Throws Weight Behind OpenOffice.org Project -  PC World – Monday, September 10, 2007