The UK Catalyst Awards are looking for inspiring stories of people who help their community by using social technology (defined as any internet, mobile or gaming software that lets you connect and communicate with other people) in new and exciting ways.

There’s a range of awards up for grabs, including the Shock for Good Award (where social technology has shocked people into doing something good) and the David and Goliath Award (for something little that made a difference to a something big and powerful). Find out all about the awards and how to enter on the UK Catalyst Awards website.

The folks at Social Innovation Camp have announced which of the ideas submitted to the project will be developed at their weekend-long event in April. The ideas include Barcode Wikipedia, a site for storing user-generated product reviews and info against a product’s barcode, and Rate My CV, a web 2.0 site to help jobseekers.

Web 2.0 tools have turned the online world into a social space and the idea behind Social Innovation Camp is to use this phenomenon to create better solutions to social problems in the real world. From 4-6 April 2008, 75 people will come together in an ‘unconference’ to develop the selected ideas.

You can read more about the selected ideas as well as other ideas that were submitted and are open for comments and suggestions. People interested in attending the event can register interest here.

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Simon Dickson’s Puffbox. Simon’s a web consultant who specialises in news and e-government. Like me, he’s a real fan of the Wordpress blogging platform and a number of his client projects push the boundaries of Wordpress to create exciting and innovative websites. You can read about Simon’s use of Wordpress here.

Simon’s recently adopted Google’s concept of ‘20 per cent time’ to develop onepolitics, a site that provides an at-a-glance view of the latest posts on political blogs by journalists and high profile bloggers. The site’s updated every 15 minutes and provides a simple way to keep abreast of political blogs, without needing to understand RSS feeds or manage your own blog subscriptions.

Nicely designed and easy-to-use, I think it’s a great model for feed aggregation - and the flexibility of Wordpress should mean it can easily be tailored to provide an overview of feeds on a different topic or even a variety of topics. Great work, Simon!