Planning is already well advanced for this year's Online Information conference, which runs alongside the Online Information show at Olympia in London. The call for speakers deadline hits this Friday 12 May, but if you have a hot topic to propose, I reckon conference organiser Lorna Candy might be persuaded to extend that deadline just a tad.

The organising committee, which met again yesterday, is led by conference chairman Martin White, whose wide-ranging knowledge of the industry never ceases to astound me. This year's themes are already starting to shape up, among them the impact of information on 21st century organisations, collaboration and communities, library developments (like how to put together a collection policy in a digital age), and the inevitable Web 2.0.

There's also a lot of emphasis on information discovery, enterprise search and knowledge management - all areas that will be of interest to show goers at the new "parallel" show alongside OI, Information Management Solutions (IMS 2006).

IMS 2006 brings together the various perpiheral shows from previous years (Content Management Europe, EDRM Europe) under one umbrella. Its visitor profile ranges across information managers, information infrastructure managers, IT managers and decision making units like finance, where information compliance issues are increasingly of concern.

Back at the conference committee, it was great to meet up again with Gwenda Sippings (who tells me she's just "shaken" herself free from her top job at HM Customs & Revenue, and is having some quality downtime before moving on to new pastures - somebody snap her up quick!) and Dr Hazel Hall, who reports she's getting a lot of value out of her secondment at TFPL.

Best chocolate of the day award, definitely went to Christiane Wolff - the Lindt Lemongrass and Vanilla slab, freshly flown in from Frankfurt, was a treat. What more could an editor ask for?