I added a link to Chris Pratley in my blogroll, because his is one blog I find myself re-reading recently. Chris is Group Program Manager for Office Authoring Services, and is one of the main forces (among several I am sure) behind OneNote. Microsoft employees have started public blogging like mad recently, and Chris is one of the new additions - thank goodness! It's great to see program managers and other non-programmers blogging now (not to discount the developers - that's great too!).

Side note: It was a discussion on Chris' blog and similar discussions elsewhere concerning OneNote and blogging that made me realize you can blog from OneNote, if you want to. So, I figured I would just try it and see - and it worked for the most part. And now it seems to be catching on a little bit - which is kinda cool. While it's far from a complete list due to Google lag, it will be interesting to see if the results of this search change much over time (assumes people will leave the OneNote footer in there of course). Already several bloggers have started using OneNote to post blog messages, and hopefully some of them will make the Google index eventually.

Now, for what it's worth, this is far from perfect, and may not even fit the semi-purists definition of “good.“ And I know DonXML and Phillip Rieck would call it a “kludge” (and would be absolutely correct in saying so), but still, it's a valid “coolio” option for some. My vote is to open up OneNote's publishing features to include true XML output capability, as well as a cleaner email format - and do it in a way that would enable the code purists as well as the multimedia people to do their respective things. Maybe even a plug-in sort of capability? And when I say publish, I mean publish text and images to the blog, put the .wma audio files on the Windows Media server with the matching .asx file on the web server, ship it to the Wiki, and on the SharePoint server, and on and on... I have a specific list of what I mean, feature-functionality-wise, and sometime soon I might just need to put that onto paper.

Er, I mean into Ink.