All the Way LiveOct 4

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

I had no idea what Ray Ozzie's "Live Clipboard" was about, but now I do. It's significant. And it's relevant to this blog because of the role played by RSS.

Ray Ozzie, of course, is now the chief software architect at Microsoft. And last year, he gave a "gift to the Web" called Live Clipboard at an industry event. It's a gift because he's imagining a way, that could have real teeth, of sharing data that rides, from app to app, on RSS.

But, let's slow down and just talk about this in the simplest of terms. Ozzie's big ephiphany: The modest clipboard enables us to exchange data on our computer - a process of sharing that we depend on so much that we don't even think about it. We just copy-paste, copy-paste all day long. Why not, then, a clipboard for the Web, too?

It's a brilliant idea because it recognizes that if you expose data or information to humans on the Web, they'll take it and put it where they want it (e.g., blog page, calendar, community profile). Just like they use their own clipboard. In other words, people are superb at mixing data. So let 'em.

(Here's some screencasts by Ray Ozzie's team that demonstrates how this works.)

But Ray Ozzie's idea isn't only to expose data by putting a standard iconic button next to it that allows you to copy it and then paste it somewhere else, it's also to markup that information in simple, standard ways that computers understand. Some of this markup is known as microformats, but the name isn't important, the idea is. And the idea is that a person can read "Brooks Jordan 721 NW 9th Ave, #240A Portland, Oregon" on the screen, and a computer (or browser) can read markup behind the scenes that tells it, this is a name and address, so feel free to add it to an address book, if appropriate (or a million other possible things a computer could do with that data if the appropriate markup was both presented and understood).

So Live Clipboard is about exposing data to humans while simultaneously making it readable by computers. Powerful. But there's a third piece to Ray Ozzie's idea that in my mind makes all of the difference. That is, to move this smart data all over the Web (as well as to desktop applications), we can use a very simple method of transport for updates and back-and-forth communication that is already well known and has a lot of support: RSS. In Ray Ozzie's words, we could "wire the Web" with RSS.

Boy, I think he's on to something. It's about alignment. It gets us visually-oriented humans doing what we do best: learning and sharing our information in a social context. It let's our computers do what they do best: digest and respond to rules in the form of markup. And it let's RSS do one thing very well: carry messages between computers (and people), Web to Web or Web to desktop, wherever it needs to be, completely transparent to the user.

With that kind of framework to create a mesh network of communication powered by all of us and our computers, I think we could get some real work done.