In Germany for a few days holiday. Report on e-government will come later. There is certainly a high degree of information automation on public transport. At the nearest S-bahn station to our hotel there are two machines; one for buying tickets, the other for giving information - the latter is particularly impressive as it mananges to do the almost impossible - print out details of the journey. Not only that, but supplies information in four languages - and we´re staying in the industrial suburbs of the massive Bayer factories, not in some cosy tourist bit.

On the buses you can buy a ticket from a machine on the bus - and again its multi-lingual - not like London where I ve watched many a bus I wanted to catch sail by as I struggled with finding 20p.

Although all this automation is not without its drawbacks. The station ticket machine wasnt working so we all had to traipse up to a garage to get change, and buses with conductors are probably one of the most user-friendly modes of transport.

Today I´m trying to find the Musikhochschule in Koln and navigating my way around a number of German language websites. Is the Musikhochshule the same as Hochschule fur Musik? And a metadata tag for `address´ would be very useful as addresses don´t explicity identify themselves - so search for ´address´of something and it can be difficult to find.

I am learning lots of German words to do with the internet and I´m now able to order a good breakfast.