Ray Ozzie (MS CTO) gave an interesting presentation this morning about incorporating the functionality of the standard clipboard into the web. Deemed “Live Clipboard” he showed us examples of how it could be used to transfer structured content on websites between websites and between websites and Windows applications.

The interface itself is a modified text box which looks like a button. If there is structured data on the web page, the user can click the button to copy it to the clipboard. The first example was copying event data from Eventful to a sample website. The “pasted” data showed up already formatted into fields as it was on the Eventful site. It is stored as a modifed version of CFText in the clipboard so that it can be created in the same structure that it was copied from. Transfering the copied event to Outlook was just a matter of pasting it into a new event.

Ray then showed how he could paste profile data from his MySpace blog to his profile on Facebook as a “live link” that would be automatically updated if changes were made to the MySpace profile.

Finally he gave some interesting examples with Flickr: One-click copying and then pasting an image directly into Windows explorer as well as pasting an entire Flickr feed packaged automatically in a subfolder. A special file was created in the feed folder which would allow the feed to be continuously updated as new items are added.

While definitely a cool idea, Ray admitted it will take wide adoption to make it really useful to most people. It requires both the inclusion of a script on participating sites and the use of specialized microformats that the data will be wrapped in.

Ray said Internet Explorer 7 will have some of this functionality already built in when it is released. He has more details about the concept and the microformats necessary to support it on his blog post.

This could be extremely helpful for synchronizing information between sites that you have a presence on, for creating automatic downloads of files as they become available (using the updating RSS feed to Explorer) and just to make it easier to maintain your personal data both online and offline. I can see potential, if there’s enough momentum to actually implement it on a critical mass of websites.