Alex Barnett at Microsoft shares that you’ll able to author blog posts using Word 2007. You’ll then be able to publish directly to your blog.

Alex picked up the following from Joe Friend on the Word 2007 team:

That’s right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word…. We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become , Italic becomes , Heading 1 become

, Quotes become

and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn oflexf that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).

This would be a boon for law firms and professional service firms who are entrenched in the Microsoft Word world. Getting some firms to accept that authoring blog posts in Word and then cutting and pasting into the blog publishing platform can lead to problems has been tough sailing for LexBlog customer support.

But as one comment on Alex’s blog said, I’ll believe this when I see it. We’re still waiting for Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, which will take blogging and RSS to a new level when it finally gets out the door.