Today I'll be interviewing Buzz Bruggerman of ActiveWords on my weekly radio show. ActiveWords, for those of you who have yet to discover this productivity booster, is a Windows application that allows you to use a single word or phrase to invoke just about any action you perform regularly on your PC. It offers a number of add-in "wordbases" containing sets of definitions that address things like misspelling (auto-correct on the fly), Google search, replacing ASCII text with symbols and more.

I've posted quite a bit about ActiveWords in the past. There is a very active discussion form at the company's site to get answers to specific questions and to learn a lot about the scripting capabilities of this program. You can script just about anything and, despite the power of this scripting environment, getting going is pretty easy. ActiveWords offers generous 60 day evaluations of both their Standard and Premium editions.

Buzz is a tireless promoter of his company's tools and has his own blog as well. I'll be asking him about what's coming next for ActiveWords and will try to find out what the development future is for the Tablet PC in particular. Active Words offers a rudimentary text input tool to invoke your active words and, while it works OK, I want o know if the impending release of Tablet PC 2005 Editiion will provide opportunities for them to better integrate ActiveWords into the Tablet PC OS.

I've been working with Michael Linenberger, the author of Seize the Work Day, on an interview that will appear in the Tablet PC weblog on Monday. Michael has written a terrific book about using the Tablet PC for knowledge work that was a real eye opener for me as I was setting up my Tablet system. He has some rather unconventional ideas about handwriting recognition, whether you really need a PDA if you use a Tablet, and more that we'll discuss in the interview.