If you don't have a few thousand dollars to blow each month on a data service that scans the SEC's database, aggregates the full financial statements (instead of summarizing them like Yahoo! Finance), and puts relevant information at your fingertips, I've got good news for you — you no longer need it. On Wednesday I sat in on a conference call with the SEC to discuss some upcoming changes to their EDGAR filing standards. XBRL will be the new standard, and it is very exciting for "regular" investors.

Without getting too technical, Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an XML-based specification for publishing business and financial information. In Plain English, it means that annual and quarterly reports filed by public companies will have to be "tagged" so that information is quickly and easily accessible. Once tagged, it can then be easily pulled from the SEC's database and quickly (and automatically) formatted and customized.

What This Means For Regular Investors

Before I give an example of now versus soon, let's discuss what this means. First, you won't have to pay a big company to get data. Those guys have supercomputers working 24/7 to scan documents and pull information, and then they have people in the background verifying it — and you would be paying for all of that.

Once XBRL becomes the standard, the company filing the report is responsible for creating a tagged, XBRL document that is ready to be read by a standard reader (like the SEC's reader, discussed later), or ready to be manipulated by a customized software solution. No longer will annual reports need to be "scraped" for content; no longer will you have to worry about typos or other human error.

Second, it means that you will get information the second that the big boys do. There will be no data lag. You won't have to wait for something to be filed, then read, then parsed, then verified, then made available. Will this greatly affect your investing? Probably not. But it levels the playing field a little more.

Test Drive XBRL

I can talk until I'm blue in the face, but you really need to try it to see how much better it is. The SEC has made a work-in-progress interface that you can use to really experience the benefits of XBRL. Let's walk through it to compare the future with the present.

First, go to the SEC's Interactive Financial Report Viewer. You'll see some companies listed on the left. Click the plus sign next to 3M Co. After a few seconds, a list will open and you'll see Annual and Quarterly Reports for the company. For this example, click Annual Report (2006-12-31) and you are taken right to 3M's Income Statement.