YouTube last week announced that its service has become so popular that it is now experiencing more than one billion video views each and every day. That’s a whole lot of video.

“This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you,” YouTube’s chief executive and co-founder Chad Hurley, said in a post on the company’s blog.

Making the celebratory statement some three years after YouTube was acquired by Google, Hurley added: “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality… We’re working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world’s largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.”

So, YouTube has evolved from its very early days and has bigger, even better things in mind for the future. I’m intrigued.

Kind of. That’s the gist of a report from Down Under that has identified a possible link between children who rely on predictive text on their mobile phones and them not exercising their little grey cells enough.

Boffins at Melbourne’s Monash University have suggested that the laziness that predictive text brings with it could make children more impulsive and less thoughtful. Which, in theory, could lead to mistakes later down the line.

“We suspect that using mobile phones a lot, particularly tools like predictive texts for SMS, is training them to be fast but inaccurate. Their brains are still developing so if there are effects then potentially it could have effects down the line, especially given that the exposure is now almost universal,” Professor Michael Abramson, said in an interview with the Telegraph.

“The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave.”

What sort of mistakes and impulsiveness is on the cards we don’t know. It’s obvious that anything that does the job for us (whether predictive text to stop us typing a whole word or a microwave to cook our food quickly) will make us a bit lazy and less active (either physically or mentally), but I’m not quite sure it is a Sliding Doors-type life changing issue whereby those that don’t use predictive text will somehow go down a completely different and better path.

If you had to choose between eating or emailing, which would you go for?

Interestingly, according to a new study from O2, many would actually choose the latter. The mobile network’s Digital Families report reckons that some 11 million families are choosing to spend their cash on the net rather than food or utility bills as the recession’s grip gets ever tighter.

We’re also increasingly using technology to free up more of our lives to spend quality time with the family, according to O2 who has bracketed us into four different types of techno households:

1) The leaders 2) The resistors 3) The Followers 4) The Drifters

Social analyst Bob Tyrell, who compiled the report, said: “How parents control technology is key to maintaining work-life balance. Many may argue that the ability to stay in touch with work means we never completely switch off and relax, but the verdict from our report shows this does not weigh too heavily with parents.”

What do you do when you’ve got spare time on your hands?

When the amount of spare time in question is six months and you live in Australia, the answer may well involve an intricate project focused on the alphabet and Google Earth.

Yes, you read that correctly. A 30-something graphic designer from down under spent half a year searching out Google Earth images with the aim of creating a montage of the pics that doubles as the alphabet.

“I found them exactly as you think I might have. Slowly moving from page to page over the maps and visually scanning,” said Rhett Dashwood, the man behind the slightly bizarre but very pretty project, in an interview with the Telegraph.

“I put some simple restrictions on my project, like sticking to my home state of Victoria and not manipulating (rotating or Photoshopping) the images in any way. There were no short cuts to finding them, but I did sense patterns emerging the further I searched which helped to guide how long I spent looking in particular areas.”

It’s all a little pointless, but quite stunning nonetheless don’t you think?

I’ve always felt sorry for people who are born on 29 February. I mean, it’s hardly fair on the present front at the very least. But there’s one man I feel particularly sorry for, given that as well as being born on that day, he’s also the much unsung hero of the IT world.

Herman Hollerith was born on 29 February 1860. He was a German-American statisician who created the forerunner to the computing systems we use every day without a second thought.

His mechanical punch card-based tabulator was an absolute treasure in its time. Using his system he was able to speedily tabulate stats from millions of pieces of data – where would our modern-day transactional machines be without this man’s invention, eh?

According to Wikipedia, he was awarded a patent (no 385,782 to be precise) for his work. It read:

“The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.”

It would be an understatement to say that Hollerith’s invention was marvelous. His work for the Census office, for example, ensured that the 1890 Census could be completed in just one year, compared to the eight years that the previous Census (in 1880) took.

Fueled with that success, Hollerith branched out on his own and created the Tabulating Machine Company. His tech was leased by major census creators and insurers around the globe.

Several evolutionary changes occurred to his system over time, including the invention of an automatic card feeder and a keyboard-operated punch mechanism.

In 1906 he also dabbled in a bit of early programming by creating a wiring panel for his Type I Tabulator to ensure the same model could handle a varied array of jobs.

In 1911, a merger occurred with three other businesses, resulting in a giant called Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR). Not familiar with the name? Perhaps the name IBM rings more bells. For that’s the name the company has been known under since 1924 when it was renamed by then president Thomas Watson.

Whatever anyone thinks of Big Blue these days, good or bad, Mr Hollerith, we salute you sir.

Apparently today is the most depressing day of the year. It’s a while until pay day, we’ve already broken our New Year’s resolutions, we’re still paying the Christmas credit card bill and to top it all off, the weather is absolutely pants.

Other than having that ‘back to school’ feeling this morning, I was quite happy with the world. Until I picked up the paper, that is, and read a story telling me that I shouldn’t be filling so chipper after all. That kinda put me in a bad mood.

Isn’t there enough doom and gloom at the moment without putting labels on something that would otherwise be known, simply but understandably, as Monday? Just another Monday. A pretty crappy, bad-weather fest, penniless Monday, granted. But the same day that crops up in the same place once every seven days.

Perhaps I should be more positive. Glass half full some people say. Although we recently had a debate in the office as to whether a glass could indeed be half full. Some suggested it was only ever half empty. But using that reckoning, surely something is either full or empty, not in between? And if that’s the case, I’d rather think it’s half full as that means I have half a drink left, rather than - with it being half empty - I’ve already waved goodbye to half of it.

Oh well, I digress. But I feel happier for having digressed. Pah! That’s what I think of you Blue Monday. I’ve been to the gym, I’ve eaten a healthy dinner, I’m going to have a relaxing bath and then I’m going to have an early night. In fact, I’m anything but blue…

Yesterday I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as part of a special BT screening at the

This is the last blog I shall write as a 28 year old…For come midnight I gain another wrinkle, my gammy knee gets a bit worse and I start to feel, well, older.

Today’s been one of those days where I’ve felt sorry for myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily worried about getting older, it’s just I’ve always preferred other people’s birthday’s to my own. But in amongst my woe, I’ve realised I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. While I may have had youth on my side 15 or even 10 years ago I was very naive both as a teenager and in terms of technology.

My first introduction to ‘technology’ aside from the TV and phone was mucking around with Casio calculators as a kid trying to see how many rude words I could write by typing in numbers and turning the device upside down.

Fast forward a few years and I remember the old BBC computers we had at school. We had to share them and could spend lesson upon lesson just trying to print out a menu for our fake restaurant using a slow and clunky dot matrix printer with that horrible conjoined printer paper that may well have cost a bit but certainly didn’t look expensive.

Then there was the communications technology. Or lack of it. Not one person I knew had a mobile. In fact, I didn’t get my first mobile until I was 20 and it was a Motorola brick that looked much like a car phone. If you wanted to get hold of someone, you had to ring their landline and politely ask if they were home to anyone who answered other than them. And, you had to be respectful of when you called: I remember calling my school friend Emma up once at 9.30 and being told off by her father With mobile technology it would seem the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable (within reason) have shifted. Indeed if you don’t want to risk waking someone with a call you can text them instead.

My first proper job at the