Opinion: Microsoft's Ray Ozzie demonstrates early work on "Live Clipboard," a facility for copying and pasting to and from the Web, including underlying metadata.The O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference is under way in San Diego, and a ballroom full of WiFi laptop users have already brought the network here to its knees. They've just apologized from the podium and promised to get it debottlenecked soon.
Early in the opening keynotes came Microsoft's
Ray Ozzie, with a talk entitled "Simple Bridge-Building" that demonstrated early work on "Live Clipboard" -- a facility for copying and pasting to and from the Web, not merely doing that with static stuff like text and images but doing it with underlying metadata. The clipboard, as Ozzie showed, automagically learns about new data types as it encounters them: things like linking an RSS feed into a personal mashup page become copy/paste convenient.
This would not be nearly as interesting without the ability, as Ozzie
showed, to chain these things together. From his cellphone's GPS
receiver, comes a dynamic feed of latitude and longitude -- which
chains to a service that converts those coordinates to a text string
describing his current location in human terms, like the nearest major
street intersection -- which can then syndicate that string so that a
Facebook or other personal profile page can show that current location
in a dynamic fashion. Paste the feed into something like Virtual Earth, and watch little tags representing you and all your friends moving around the map in near-real time.
"The Web has emerged from clever hacks -- because they're useful
hacks," Ozzie said, "but Microsoft can't do this alone. What will make
it happen is lots of people doing it, using it, agreeing on data
formats."
And if they get the network here up to usable speed, (i) that kind of thing will be more than a cool demo and (ii) I'll be able to post more
entries from the conference later today and tomorrow.
Read more from eWEEK's Inside Labs blog.
