A couple of useful Tablet PC links for the day, along with one for Firefox.

First, if you've switched to using OneNote as your default note taking tool (and if you're using Windows and Office, why aren't you using it?), and have lots of old Journal files around, here's a simple and quick way of converting them to OneNote entries.

Second, here's an interesting looking application out of Microsoft Research. InkSeine is a pen-oriented note taking application that's being used as a UI test bed. I rather like the radial menu concept - I suspect it's one that will translate well into touch interfaces as well as working with pens.

Finally, one of my favourite Firefox extensions has just made it to the Mozilla Recommended Add-ins page. Congratulations to sethop and the rest of the folks at Interclue. A truly useful piece of code from one of my favourite places.

Firefox extensions are very useful indeed - adding lots of extra functions to the browser. They're often small, quick to install, and simple to use. I've got a lot installed, and use FEBE to backup and manage them all. It also produces a formatted list of what you've installed so far.

After I ran today's extension backup, I took the list, tidied it up a little, and stuck it behind a cut tag...

( Here's a nice long list of all the Firefox extensions I use. )

So what are your favourite extensions? And do you have any recommendations for me?

Following links from the ever helpful Lifehacker, I came across Siteadvisor.

Currently in beta, it's a tool that informs you whether the link you've followed (or even are about to click on) points to a site that delivers malware, or spams you when you give it a registration email.

It's not too obtrusive - though it does add a rating icon to links on Google. You can use a JavaScript-driven pop-up to drill down to find out what was seen as to give a site a bad rating, whether it's sending spam or downloads with embedded spyware.

Rather useful - and available for both IE and Firefox.

Put this one on your parents' PC!

You'll be pleased to know that this blog gets a clean bill of health!

Web 2.0 aficionados talk about the two way web.

They're just reinventing history - Tim Berners-Lee's original specifications allowed web-hosted documents to be rewritten on the fly, then WebDAV promised a universal file system based on web protocols. We'll gloss over the PR problems Microsoft had when it introduced public annotation tools for Internet Explorer.

Now we have Google's Blogger Web Comments plug in for Firefox, which does much the same as Microsoft's annotations tools, but this time ties things into their Blogger blogging platform. It compares the URL of the page you're on with links posted on Blogger blogs, and pops up a little floating window showing recent blog postings. It's unfortunate, as Google could have worked with Technorati or PubSub to develop a better database of linking pages - using Blogger only is limiting, considering the number of sites hosted on LJ or Moveable Type or TypePad or WordPress or A.N.Other blogging tool. They could have even used their own blog search engine...

It's interesting seeing what people are talking about as you browse news sites or popular blogs - however, with this tool you never forget that you're only hearing part of the conversation.

It's a pity.

This isn't the two way web we were promised - it's more like the one and a bit way web.

And the bit isn't very much at all.

Word is that Firefox 1.5 will be hitting the download sites shortly.

Let's hope the sites are appropriately throttled...

[Update: downloading now from ftp.mozilla.org - the main site hasn't updated yet]