OneNote Personal MetaData Microsoft announced the launch of OneNote in their Office Suite at Comdex. Steve Gillmore highlights the potential importance of this product: "Mark my words: OneNote is the new center of the Office universe, relegating Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the edges of the architecture in a single leap. Billed as an Office add-on, in reality it's a smart device programmed to transform Office from a suite of applications to a grid of interactive components."
OneNote is Microsoft's platform for personal meta-data. The ability to add uniform meta-data in either text, handwritten or audio format on top of web or office documents is very powerful when combined with search and organization features. If the personal cost of annotation is low to produce requisite volumes of link-rich meta-data, the uses are manifold. Microsoft is supremely positioned to own personal perspectives of information, as Google owns the collective perspective.
You might recall all the companies during the boom that were going to create "Post-it Notes on the Web." Unfortunately, companies like ThirdVoice opted for more viral models that enabled their use like graffiti on public sites, instead of being useful annotation tools.
On the web, the closest thing to a link-rich annotation tool may be weblog and today weblogs provide one of the richest sets of meta-data. Anil Dash wrote a great paper on how Microsoft is entering the weblog market. And OneNote will be a key component.
There tons of fantastic ideas of how weblogs will evolve into a micro-content client. A OneNote is link-rich micro-content with ease of production browsable through a number of Office applications. Microsoft is further along in fulfilling this vision than we would all like to admit.
10:41:49 AM 
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