Word 2007 Integrated Blogging?

Ars Technica is reporting that Word 2007 is going to feature integrated blogging . Microsoft Word is legendary for producing for inefficient and ugly html, but it seems that maybe they've fixed that, according to the lead engineer (with the oddly disturbing name of "Joe Friend") on the project on a post from his blog :

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. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off 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).

Here's a screenshot, from the Microsoft guy's blog posting:

Here is the new blog account dialog, which giznankerously doesn't mention Typepad:

When I was blogging a lot to Typepad I used Word a lot, because it felt safer (no chance of browser giznank losing a long post) and because I am very used to editing text in Word. In Comet, I do actually compose using the rtf editor-because it's cooler, and there's a post recovery feature (which is huge) and the easy integration of assets.

That being said, I would actually be tempted to use this Word 2007 blogging feature if:

• it ends up in the Mac version of Office
• it supported Typepad (or Comet)

Those are both big ifs, of course. This seems like something worth keeping an eye on. Maybe someone should evangelize him to support 6A products as well?