Alf Watt is over here and I'm giving him a quick look at the engine behind the Snippets daemon. I can boldface, underline and do whatever else I want. It will take any HTML I want.
Think what it would be like to have an interactive publish/subscribe mechanism for blogs You'd be notified immediately whenever anyone updated an entry that you had commented on, on any blog, anywhere. You could then respond with an IM,and it would simultaneously get posted to the blog and also sent out to all the people (including the original poster and commenters) for a discussion to develop.
Web Services, Blogs, and IM - interesting, fertile territory.