Tim Bray, one of the editors of the XML 1.0 Recommendation at the W3C, joined Sun Microsystems a couple of weeks ago.
On his Ongoing blog he mentioned a recent trip to Germany, OpenOffice , which included a visit to the building where the Star Office and OpenOffice.org development is being carried out.
Tim, so it seems, has a focus on RSS and XML according to his proto job description mentioned in a post entitled The Great Job Hunt .
So it's perhaps no surprise that he visualises a Blog This button in the word processor component of OpenOffice.org and Star Office. Since OpenOffice.org is truly XML-based that shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. That simple entry to blogging could, with suitable server side hosting, open up blogging to the masses in a way which has never been possible up to this point.
What would the masses blog about? Presumably there wouldn't be the focus on technology that features in many current blogs. Online diaries? Photo blogging? New business opportunities? Who knows?
Tim sees a great future for the Java Desktop System and OpenOffice.org / Star Office with blogging for the masses as one part of the whole. At the price of OpenOffice.org it seems to me that it could bypass Microsoft in countries where the mass of the population can't look at buying a legal copies of Microsoft Office. So I guess that this is part of the Big Software War too.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 28, 2004 08:06 PM | TrackBack