Microsoft Silverlight Presentation by Brian Goldfarb part 1

(Install Silverlight to view this video.)

The video above is part one of a keynote speech given by Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft at the 2008 CRE8 Conference. I attended the conference in Orlando and you can review my earlier posts from the show.

A cultural change is afoot at Microsoft, where the oft-neglected designer is finally getting a long-craved-for hug from the Borg. This time it really seems like they are serious about respecting user experience and good human-computer interface design best practices. For instance, Microsoft is part of the OpenAjax Alliance and they have even launched a full-on designer community.

Check out his presentation to learn about Microsoft's new approach to the entire "ecosystem of developers" which involves "collaboration between teams of partners". Microsoft is not only trying to provide tools to do tasks, but they are also addressing the need for workflow solutions. How do teams work closely together, freely exchanging ideas, files and deliverables? With the new products, a designer can open up a project that has been coded by a developer and vice versa.

Goldfarb leads teams dedicated to building upon Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), their unified application framework. Among other things, it allows developers to apply basic windows functionality (like spell check) into multimedia applications.

He spoke broadly about general changes in Microsoft culture and practice. He mentioned that their server is now standards-based, and the "browser is getting better, I promise".

He shared a variety of example Silverlight sites from their Gallery, including Break.com, HSN,and the mind-bending "Deep Zoom" technology on the Hard Rock Cafe site.

At the time of this presentation, Microsoft was seeing over one million downloads a day of the Silverlight plug-in.

The new products support HD video, adaptive streaming solutions, XAML, and DRM-ready features. Read my post about a recent all-day Silverlight training event I attended at Microsoft to learn more about all this stuff.

Goldfarb stressed that they are building demand. Now they need creative people to develop the supply. To that end, they are offering 10 gigs of free hosting! The video above takes advantage of this. They are encouraging the developer network by providing a free place to get started.

Silverlight is driving plugin adoption by offering content developers a free hosting and streaming service: "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac."

Aggregators Pointing to Aggregators: Is Real Content Dead?

The last few years have seen a tremendous rise in aggregators, sites that link to top news and entertainment stories located on other sites. Numerous cries can be heard that true journalism and thoughtful commentary are dead because sites are linking to anything they can find, from blogs to wikis to amateur movies. Does this signal the end of content creation as we know it? Will we end up in a world where links only lead to more links, endlessly in circles, till the end of time?

In the video above Guy Kawasaki talks about his recent aggregation venture, AllTop, with Drue Kataoka of Valley Zen. He is experiencing great success automatically gathering and posting news based on topics such as celebrities, science and politics.

Of course, one of the grand-daddies of this approach is Thomas Marban and his outrageously popular PopURLs site. One page. A bazillion links.

The examples of this phenomenon are extremely numerous: Google News, Topix, Newser, TechMeme, Digg, BuzzFeed, or any of the hundreds of other aggregators.

AdAge has a great recent article about these subjects called It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content Is King (Without Original Reporting, How Long Can the Aggregation Party Last?) They cover the doom and gloom side of the story well, but also point to the encouraging opportunities for aggregator sites and content creators. They also pull some great tidbits from The Pew Center's annual report on American journalism, The State of the News Media 2008. Both definitely worth the read.

I actually think all this is great news for modern digital content creators. As traditional publishing moves toward the digital platform, the market fragments. This separates the creators from the designers from the marketers from the distributors. Content developers are now on their own and this makes the content more valuable. When the giant content factories begin to focus on promotion and delivery, the individual writers and creators can shine. And they can charge top dollar for their product, whose value increases.