International Information Industry Awards 2005

I've just found out I'm going to be one of the Headshift delegation to the International Information Industry Awards 2005 tomorrow night, as one of the main projects I've been working on over the past (nearly) two years - the NIMHE Knowledge Community - has been shortlisted for the "Innovation in knowledge Management" award.

I haven't been to an awards dinner since University! - and come to think of it, my tuxedo has been standing idle in the wardrobe since the final college ball... I really hope I remembered to clean it before stashing it away - 10 yr old beer stains are not something i want to see right now...ick...

I should mention that although I've been the technical lead on the project pretty much since I joined Headshift, it was already at version 0.9 or so when I picked it up - so kudos to Matt Perdeaux, now of Associative Trails, who kicked it all off in the first place and created such nifty features as the Vector Space Engine, and Andy Birchall, who's been doing the bulk of the recent work for the latest version (2.1.2) while I've been focussed on other things.

Best Firefox Plugin Ever : IE Tab

The open architecture of Mozilla + Firefox has been a great driver of innovation over the last few years - just when it looked like IE 6 was going to be as far as the browser would go, the explosion of Firefox has kickstarted the browser market into one of the hotbeds of development effort again.

For those of us who remember the Browser Wars of the 90's, this excitement is tempered by a wry smile and the occasional twinge of apprehension - for instance, although IE7 is going to support tabbed browsing, it's still not going to support full CSS 2.0 - but how can anyone fail to appreciate the power, elegance, and sheer all-round damn-fine-ness of something like the IE Tab View plugin for Firefox ?

Definitions of A Brilliant Idea are many and varied, but my favourite is "something which doesn't exist but should" - and this definitely falls into that category.

All it does is use the IE plugin to render a Firefox tab. So when you right-click on a link, as well as options for "View In New Window" and "View in New Tab", you also get "View In IE Tab" - and it does just that. Plus you get a little icon on the status bar which lets you switch between the IE and Firefox rendering engines for the current page within your current tab.

Simple, effective, genius. Love it.

What is Web 2.0?

At Headshift, we like to concern ourselves with big, deep issues that teh intarweb tends to raise if you take a step back. Issues like the emergence of order in complex systems, how to take the next steps towards the holy grail of the Semantic Web, and how to define this Web 2.0 term that has gradually pervaded the collective consciousness of the blogosphere.

Well, it' s heartening to know that The Register readership has cracked it - the results are finally in on their What Is Web 2.0? Poll. Feed to your marketing department one page at a time :)