Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer, showed off a new live web clipboard application yesterday (March 7, 2006) at the O'Reilly eTech Conference enabling a user to easily cut and paste information from one website to another. The web clipboard runs on your machine and offers up a scissor icon (shown below) compatible pages offering the ability to cut, copy and paste data from one web page to another. To better understand the actual concept you might want to check out this screencast demo where an event is copied from Eventful to a Microsoft Live Calendar. Additionally Ray details the live clipboard in this blog post.
I think the live clipboard is a great idea and has value, however a standard needs to be set so forth so that the live clipboard features are on all on the same playing field from site to site. This means is that the data structures for events and other types of data need to be standardized which could be a big obstacle for success so we will see how Microsoft handles it.
