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Twice this week I have seen a weird car driving around Wantage. A black Astra with a 5ft odd pole on top with what looks like 8 cameras pointing out in all directions. I commented at the time to family “wouldn’t it be cool if that was Google Street View, like they have in the States” and low and behold yesterday Google go an announce Street View for the UK!

Unfortunately on one occasion I was making lunch in the kitchen and the other time I was driving, so wasn’t able to snap a pic, but here is a pic from a quick image search…

So, look out for the mighty Wantage which is presumably just behind the top 25 UK cities to be added to Street View. In particular, look out for me in my kitchen window and sat behind it in my silver Astra at the traffic lights on Portway

Some people find it hard to believe that I use Internet Explorer. Many of these people because of their unwavering fanaticism towards setting woodland urban animals ablaze. In fact I use pretty much 6 browsers almost every day (IE7, FF, Opera, Safari, IE6 & Chrome). I probably spend the most time in Firefox (developing using the excellent Firebug), however IE is my default browser. The truth is I’m not so much a fan of IE as much as a fan of the Google Toolbar for IE.

This wonderful Swiss Army knife additional to my browser transformed the way I browsed the web, long before I was using tabs. Adding a handy search box, spell checker, in page search for keywords at the click of a button and bookmarks you can get access to from any PC were just some of the features I found incredibly useful; and still use today. Some of these (such as custom search) I’d seen before, but these 25px across the top of my window seemed easy to use. Even now, Firefox users are still catching up in this regard, with version 5 of the toolbar, with syncing widgets and buttons, fully released for IE, whilst it’s still in beta for FF.

Perhaps then this was part of my excitement when I learned that Google were going to be releasing a browser.