Ray Ozzie’s new idea is a clipboard for the web. A brief summary of the idea follows; it’s fully explained on Ray’s blog, with screen casts. I watched #1 and #3.
Narrative
Let’s say you have two sites both of which understand calendar data. I want to move an appointment from one site to another. In Ray’s scheme, there’s now an icon on each site, next to each piece of data that can be transported. The icon is a picture of a scissor. Bring site A to the front, click on the scissor and choose Copy, then bring site B to the front, click on the scissor and choose Paste.
At first, you’d think it has to be some terrible ActiveX hack, but it’s not — it’s a hidden text field and a bit of JavaScript that moves the data around.
A political feature
And the crucial point is that there are now enough “standard” XML-based formats to make this kind of thing work, if developers work together and don’t create too many ways of expressing the same data, and don’t create to many different graphic representations. One of each will be enough and more than one will be too much.
That’s where the power of a leader like Ray, using a venues like Etech and Scripting News, skillfully, may manage to avoid the pitfalls. It’s an idea worth looking at, so let’s have a look.
Your ideas are welcome
Post your questions and comments here, and we’ll see if we can’t get you the answers. And if you have a demo of this idea on a non-Microsoft site please post a link here for us to look at.
PS: Photos of Ray giving his Etech talk.
Scripting News Annex 
