You know when you were little and you went to your Grandparent’s house and listened for hours about what life was like, ‘in their day’? They used tin baths, outside loos and they didn’t have a telly. It sounded alien, especially the telly bit. I used to spend hours wondering just what they did to fill their time. Well, I suppose families were bigger back then.

It never occurred to me that stories I tell to my kids would make me appear just as archaic. I’m only 35, but it’s happened already. I was telling my 6 year old the story about how we didn’t have a telephone in our house when we were growing up. There was a phone booth at the end of the street that took 2 pence pieces and I used to organise my teenage social life from there. It would ring out and either be picked up by me at a pre-arranged time or by a local kid playing out. If it was the latter there would be a knock at the door of number 7, where I lived or a shout up at my bedroom window, “Helen, someone’s rung for you, it’s Louise.” I would put my shoes on and run down to the phone and spend hours racking up Louise’s Dad’s telephone bill.

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Do you like music? Okay, stupid question: I might as well ask if you like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, or Christmas Dinner. Everyone loves a good tune – with the possible exception of Andrew Lloyd Webber – and there’s nothing better than getting it for nothing. Remember how the holy grail of free music lured an entire generation into the open paws of that creepy Napster cat? Until the Recording Industry Association tied the bugger up in a burlap sack and chucked it in the Mississippi, of course.

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Travelling with kids can be a fantastic experience as you get to see things from their entirely fresh perspective. I’d always wondered why there were no kid’s travel guides around and thought i’d cleverly identified a gap in the market. Until I discovered the wonderful ‘This is..’ series of books by Miroslav Sasek and realized that someone had come up with the idea in the 1960s!

With dreams of a publishing empire in tatters I gave this charming book to my 6 year old daughter just before our trip to San Francisco this year. With every page turn the full excitement of the upcoming adventure began to delight and intrigue her. The book even beat Harry Potter as the chosen bedtime reading material in the weeks prior to the holiday. No mean feat for a book that’s almost 50 years old. Read more…

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that in September an edition of Entertainment Weekly in the US will feature the world’s first video-in-print advert. Previewing programmes from CBS’s upcoming season as well as adverts for Pepsi… the video advert will work by having slim screens inserted into the magazine that are activated when the magazine pages are opened – kinda like what happens on greeting cards.

Each chip that feeds the screen can hold up to 40 minutes of video with the battery that powers the chip and screen being able to play for about 65 to 70 minutes. This battery can then be recharged by plugging in a mini USB cord and once you’ve got bored of the content contained in the chip… you can download additional content from the Web. Sounds clever, and expensive… so will it take off?

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Podcasting, like most of the Web 2.0 technologies, is a young medium, strictly 21^st Century. The first Podcasts, or audioblogs, as they were first known, emerged between 2001 and 2003. It was the development of the RSS feed, allowing podcast listeners to ‘subscribe’ to shows and have new episodes automatically downloaded to their iPod or MP3 player overnight, that really caught the public imagination. In particular, the pioneering efforts of former MTV host Adam Curry, who was producing shows from mid-2004, helped to encourage the explosion of podcasts over the next two years.

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