Pluto finally gets some love from the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Two years ago the long running battle of Pluto's status as a planet looked to be over. The IAU declared Pluto to simply not be a planet. Pluto, they said, was more like a comet with a relatively round orbit. Terms like dwarf planet and planetoid were used.

In 2003, at the IBM Business Partner Day opening session, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (who later returned as the Opening General Session speaker) declared "Pluto is not a planet. Get over it." The "Get over it" part of the message was actually well tied in with IBM's overall message that Notes was old news and Workplace was where all the new value was. Both messages were received with a bit of skepticism. IBM followed the week of over pushing Workplace with the most funereal closing session imaginable including Ronin Tynin (the Irish Tenor of the famed Three Irish Tenors). I'm not sure if IBM meant to be sending the message they did with these two choices for entertainment, but it sure seemed that way. They started the week declaring that something we'd known to be true -- Pluto being a planet -- was in fact wrong and we needed to get over it. They closed the week by having an Irishman with no legs singing "Danny Boy".

Well its 2008, Notes isn't dead, Workplace is dead, and Pluto now has an entire class of objects named after it. According this story by the BBC, the term "Plutoid" is now to be used for celestial bodies that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium, a (near-spherical) shape, but have not cleared their orbits of debris (a requirement for the term "Planet").

If it weren't for the truly abysmal marketing of the 2003 Lotusphere I probably wouldn't care a bit about Pluto being a planet or peanut. The tie in with Notes from that year however will always leave me rooting for Pluto and plutoids everywhere.