We’ve slept only a few hours today, to wake up early and drive in awful rain to Koper. Tim Bray was speaking at OOoCon 2005 and I didn’t want to miss it.

I wasn’t disappointed. He’s an excellent speaker and even though I can’t say I’m a dedicated user of any office suite, I found his talk very engaging and thought provoking.

As every WordPress user knows, blogging interfaces can be rather underwhelming. And WordPress is just an example, as the same can be said about most of them. But users are certainly not getting help from current versions of suites. Sad state of Blogger plugin for Word only exemplifies that.

Therefore OpenOffice of the future should recognize the rising popularity of blogs, wikis and personal voice on the web and do for them what yesterdays suites did for business communication (forgetting downsides for a moment). Making personal publishing less painful and more flexible.

If I understood Tim correctly, he wants to go even beyond that and imagines a world where OpenDocument is a sort of an HTML of tomorrow. Meaning it’s an open container for our data, that would get used by a different applications in myriad of ways, but would never lock our data in.

I’ve been looking at Atom and its publishing protocol lately and just thinking about it and about Tim’s talk, makes my head go dizzy from all the possibilities.

Update: You can also find video and audio of keynote and other talks here .