Now that the computer industry has delivered what the users wanted – less capacity and less size at a lower price – the popularity of miniature laptops, netbooks, just keeps on growing.

Their minuscule size may actually cause us to regard our laptops as stationary and our netbooks as our main companions. We checked out some nifty new netbook habits (as actually exercised by an IT-professional friend of ours) in the:

Toilet: Forget about your toilet tabloid – with the cool small netbook you follow any news from just about anywhere without burning any body parts.

Shop: A killer application for cost-effective shopping – never forget to take five minutes outside the shop and check for cheaper alternatives nearby once you’ve found something you want to buy.

Kitchen: So you want to duplicate a divine dish offered by a relative or friend? Easy, take photographs and bring your netbook to the shop and the kitchen with pictures of the ingredients and the dish in different stages.

Office: So your company has issues with you chatting, emailing or browsing at the office. The solution is easy, just bring your inconspicuous netbook and be the only one in the organization to have access to your private email.

Café: Skype, surf, chat and take notes anywhere. With several netbooks offering a fair and improving battery life, you can keep them in sleep mode for instant start-up.

One thing you shouldn’t do, however, is to go mountain climbing above 10,000 ft with a netbook unless you have a solid-state drive. In a hard drive, the heads do not touch the recording surface. They float above the surface on a small cushion of air, produced by the spinning platters. If the air is too thin to create this cushion, the heads will connect to the surface, possibly damaging it.

Do you have any innovative notebook habits to share? Let us know.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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