I’d heard about the Live Clipboard buzz at the O’Reilly conference, but as CogDog Alan Levine says, it’s the demo that does it. So when I read Jon Udell’s Infoworld blog on Microsoft’s Live Clipboard and did the demo, I had that a-ha moment, and it was pretty huge. I don’t think Jon’s assessment of this development (“blew the doors off”) is at all exaggerated. Suddenly the idea of Web Services got a whole lot more interesting. And the fact that the demo invites the user to copy and paste between Firefox and IE is elating–or worrying, depending on your paranoia threshold.

Then I read Jon’s InfoWorld column, where this little nugget caught my eye:

He [Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie] showed how RSS feeds acting as service end points can be pasted into apps to create dynamically updating views. Virtually anyone can master this Tinkertoy approach to self-serve mashups.

More on the possibilities here.

Maybe this is the good-angel version of the bad-angel Active Desktop. At the very least, I’m intrigued to think of the possibilities of a Feedbook app that I imagine as a dynamically updated text, but with a difference. Difference? The feedbook app would not just be an RSS reader on steroids, but a magic book, an application-as-book, in which each section is a continually updated portal within certain delineated boundaries and with certain dynamic or even interactive capabilities. The professor, responding to his or her sense of class needs, could tweak the mashup throughout a class. Each year the text would grow richer, and each year it would be a little different. And it would be like an app, not like a collection of feeds.

Think of a film textbook in which chapters included, embedded within generalizable analytical frameworks, dynamically updated trailers of current movies. Below the trailers would be spaces for students to take notes, share-able with fellow students. The whole thing could be exported, ripped/mixed/fed wherever, framed for evaluation or saved for further work. Dynamically updated showtimes for those movies in that area would appear nearby. Blog entries, related movies, Pandora-like suggestions for cognates, etc. All there, all presenting options for reflection, analysis, and directed browsing to the student, with partial bread-crumb trails leading elsewhere and inviting off-text exploration and serendipity. The lines between text and e-portfolio and notebook would be usefully blurred. Each text would be an invitation to another world, and a map of that world, and a record of one’s travels through that world.

I do not know what I’m taking about, really, but I’m intrigued even though I can’t articulate why just yet.