We all bemoan the lack of a unified way to manage information about our dual roles as workers and family members. Combining our calendars, in particular, is a real headache. So it was refreshing to hear Microsoft's newest CTO admit that he feels the same pain, and by implication that his company's enterprise superplatform can't yet do much to take the edge off it.

It's high time we aired this piece of dirty laundry. True, the SOA revolution is finally forcing enterprises to rethink the walled-garden approach to security. As services begin to cross organizational borders, cross-firewall collaboration using XML over HTTPS is evolving into more nuanced uses of WS-Security, and that's great. But "WS-Heavy"-style SOA won't help us unify our professional and personal domains, at least not anytime soon. For that we'll need complementary "WS-Light" approaches, too, and I hope SSE will be part of the solution.

How simple are the Simple Sharing Extensions? As I noted on my Weblog back in November, that depends on your point of view. To Ray and Jack Ozzie and their team, with their many years of experience building decentralized synchronization software, spinning out an RSS variation on the theme must feel like a cakewalk. But the change-processing algorithm in the SSE draft specification is by no means trivial, and neither is the human interface that's needed to visualize and manage those changes.

I'm bullish on SSE, but I see it as just one of a number of ingredients in the mix. Others on my list include a couple of technologies that have been quietly percolating for a while: microformats and structured blogging.

Microformats create islands of structured data within less formally structured content. The strategy, one variant of which I've pursued on my own blog for several years, endows ordinary HTML pages with machine-readable properties. A page announcing an event, for example, might embed its time and location. Clicking a link injects the microformatted data into your calendar program.