Blogs and Wikis are about words and pictures. A blogger can write and share photos, while their visitors can simply comment.

What if, like most business professionals, you are a non-technical user, but you also want to do more than that? What if you want to take a poll, or build a to-do list with your visitors? What if you want to connect in an interactive executable version of your calendar, or mash a project management tool in with your blog posts? On top of it all, you want to be able to build interactive executable tools into your web pages that actually look as good as the drop-down lists in Gmail or have the same interactive feel as Google maps?

It’s possible, and, it is highly likely that it will become common place in the very near future.

The technology that will make it all happen is called an AJAX Badge. The folks at BlueWire coined the term. Badges are a magic combination of simple web authoring tools, such as a blog, or a Wiki, a web server, such as Ruby on Rails at the back end, and AJAX. I believe that Badges will be most important application of AJAX in defining the true capabilities of Web Office / Web 2.0 and the amazing degree of empowerment it will bring to knowledge workers.

Here’s how it works:

BlueWire’s Calendar Hub is a great example. On Calendar Hub, you can make and share your calendar entries. If you want to extend the functionality, you can then cut & paste a Javascript AJAX Badge into your blog or wiki post. Suddenly, you have a dynamic little web application built into your page.

How do you build this at the back-end?

The easiest way is to use a model view controller framework, such as Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails separates out the code that provides the business logic from the way that information is presented. For someone building an application on Rails, it is a fairly trivial piece of additional code (in the controller and in a new view) to turn the original application into something that interacts with a badge.

What are the business implications?

For Web 2.0 companies, this presents both a tremendous opportunity, and a bit of a mine-field. Badges represent a way for any application to turn itself into something like Google maps. With Badges, bloggers will have even more reason to use something like Backpack’s ToDo lists.

However, there are also business model implications. What if all your users start to use Badges? Obviously, this might impact an ad revenue based model. However, it is not clear whether it would necessarily have an negative impact. For example, the badge could be designed so that simple interactions could take place within the blog, and more complex interactions would have to take place on the original site. Badges could then drive even more traffic. Badges could also represent an opportunity to open up a new revenue stream. Maybe the site is ad supported and free, but bloggers wanting to use secure badges would have to pay.

What are implications for Web Office?

Clearly, badges represent an amazing way to empower Innovation Creators. An enterprise Web Office platform will have to include a badging platform. In the end, that might mean something like Zoho Creator, which is Ruby on Rails powered tool for building mini AJAX powered Web 2.0 applications.

What are implications for Google and Microsoft and Web 2.0 within the enterprise?

Badges represent a huge threat to Office Live because they are out and available today. Badges also prove that it is actually fairly easy to tie all of these Web 2.0 applications together.

It will be interesting to see what amazing things people build as the Badging approach becomes widely used.