"This framework is designed to provide support controls for the sample Bing component, but also to provide an additional reusable view control toolkit for implementing and using some of the advanced data metaphors shown in the Bing search component," says Bing API Lead Program Manager Alessandro Catorcini. "Components such as the CloudView, TileView, BandCloudView and StackView can be used in any Silverlight application. All the controls in this assembly support theme-ing and accessibility."

Tthe Silverlight SDK page for Bing, the framework provides: 

- Support controls for the sample Bing component

- The Bing Silverlight service runtime itself – an assembly called Microsoft.Bing.Data. This assembly houses the service proxy for the Bing API, as well as a flexible interface contract for implementing search providers, and a concrete singleton implementation for use in data binding and consuming results from Bing.

- Rich documentation of all the types and classes used in the project.

On a separate note, Microsoft launched Page Hunt, which is a game where players guess the keywords that were used to retrieve specific web pages. Dana Oshiro suggests that the game could be designed to help improve search. Silverlight is required to play.

The new Silverlight release in particular is big news. Over 1/3 of Internet devices have installed version 2 since its launch less than nine months ago.

Microsoft also announced that MGM and NBC Sports are using Silverlight for different forthcoming video efforts.

"NBC Sports has evaluated many different technologies for delivering high-quality experiences online, and none have delivered the video quality, scalability and business value that Microsoft Silverlight has consistently brought," said erkins Miller, senior vice president of Digital Media at NBC Sports. "As we look forward to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver as well as other major championships in 2010, we will be using Silverlight as the preferred technology to deliver the best in next-generation online high-definition video experiences."

Microsoft says it has over 300 partners in 30 countries helping customers design and develop with Silverlight and Expression. These include leading content delivery networks, solution providers, and independent software vendors.

"Silverlight and Expression fill a clear need in the marketplace for a complete end-to-end solution that makes it easy for development teams to work together effectively, from concept to deployment, to create the types of rich interactive experiences today’s users expect," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft.

New features with these releases of Silverlight and Expression include: 

- Expression SketchFlow. Available to customers just four months after its initial debut at MIX09, SketchFlow provides development teams unrivaled capabilities to rapidly prototype applications and take their ideas from concept to reality.

- Out of Browser. Silverlight 3 provides the seamless ability to add out-of-browser, connected and disconnected scenarios for cross-platform applications, radically improving the productivity and capabilities over traditional RIAs.

- IIS Smooth Streaming. As part of Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Media Services and combined with Silverlight 3, IIS Smooth Streaming enables the industry’s first HDTV-quality (1080p) video experiences with rich interactivity for both on-demand and live video.

Silverlight 3 can be downloaded immediately. If you already use Silverlight, you should be automatcially upgraded. Expression 3 should be available in the next 30 days.

Let’s try to document the different existing relationships first.  In 2006, Google began to power MySpace’s search function.  In 2007, MySpace also joined Google’s OpenSocial developer initiative.  And on the other side of the equation, Microsoft gave $240 million in funding to Facebook.

Now, as a MySpace spokesperson explained in an email to WebProNews, "MySpace is building an integrated, mobile app for the next gen of Windows phones and will also allow MySpace developers to create engaging, custom OpenSocial apps using Silverlight."

So a wire or two definitely appears to have gotten crossed.  Nonetheless, this development sounds as if it’ll benefit Microsoft, MySpace, developers, and the average consumer.  Aber Whitcomb, MySpace’s CTO, stated, "Our relationship enables app developers to use Silverlight to create engaging MySpace apps and allows Windows Mobile users to have a more personal MySpace experience on their phone."

A discussion concerning betrayals and third cousins twice removed did not then follow.

Video and images along with interactive applications running on Silverlight work across major browsers on both the Windows and Mac OS platforms. The announcement by the league and Microsoft suggests more of the NBA’s archived content should emerge online.

“This will be a great application for us to further showcase both historic and current NBA photos and video on NBA.com,” said Steve Grimes, vice president of interactive services for NBA Entertainment.

Silverlight will get more of a workout than whoever gets stuck covering LeBron James when he comes back from his finger injury. NBA.com streamed 38 million videos in November 2007.

The April 2007 debut of Silverlight also featured an announced pairing with Major League Baseball. Several other firms, including Akamai and Brightcove, support Microsoft’s challenge to Adobe’s Media Player and other multimedia-oriented Adobe products.

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The monolith has touched the Web 2.0 crowd. No less an embodiment of Microsoft’s dominant business than CEO Steve Ballmer will chat with John Battelle at the keynote for the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, to chat about Popfly and other Microsoft technologies.

Ballmer will tout Popfly as a power to the masses type of technology. People will be able to build web pages, or content like gadgets and mashups to plug into existing social networking profiles, blogs, or websites.

Added content could include games, eBay auctions, or photo slide shows. A web page could be a mashup of schedules, maps, and rich media content from a soccer team’s games, with the components built as Popfly applications.

"Microsoft is committed to supporting new business models on the Internet, and has an exciting – and growing – portfolio of Web technologies that is helping to catalyze the growth of Web innovation,” Ballmer said in a pre-keynote statement.

"This is an incredible time for developers, designers, advertisers, marketers and consumers to plug into and take advantage of the opportunities to experience and grow businesses on the Web," he continued.

Leading edge Web 2.0 properties like Facebook and Twitter plan to help their partner, Microsoft, promote Popfly.

But the Popfly team really did the best job of promoting it, by tweaking Microsoft’s legendary reputation for mile-long, bland as oatmeal product names:

Q Why did you call it Popfly?

A Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, October 2007 Community Tech Preview Internets Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

Popfly will require Microsoft’s Silverlight, which runs on Windows XP SP2 and on Vista.

It supports Internet Explorer 6.0+ and Firefox 2.0.

The free public beta allows storage of up to 25MB for the creations of Popfly users.

LiveStation is a revolutionary new global network that will enable broadcasters to deliver live audio and video to a potential audience of hundreds of millions of broadband connected consumers.

Developed by Skinkers, a Microsoft participated company, LiveStation uses unique peer network distribution that is far more scaleable and economic than conventional streaming.

“LiveStation is based on real-time peer-to-peer distribution technology exclusively acquired from Microsoft,” explained Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Skinkers. “This allows broadcasters to take advantage of a managed peer network to reach large online audiences with live radio and television and reduce their distribution costs dramatically.”

The LiveStation player is also one of the first available applications to use the latest Silverlight technology to deliver a dynamic and distinctive user experience. Silverlight allows high-quality video to be mixed with rich animated vector graphics and text overlays. Future releases of LiveStation will use the capabilities of Silverlight to deliver VC-1 encoded video on both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX operating systems.

“LiveStation is a great example of the power of Silverlight, created using familiar tools and technologies, and enabling even lower delivery costs,” said Gabriele di Piazza, director of the Media & Entertainment Group at Microsoft. “Silverlight enables rich interactive applications such as LiveStation to enhance the end-user experience by seamlessly combining video with interactive graphics.”

Following a successful pilot, LiveStation will initially be available as a technical trial with services from selected broadcasters. Based on the extremely positive feedback so far received from broadcasters, many additional channels are expected to join before the full launch of the LiveStation platform in 2008.

So if you’re heading to IBC2007 (Amsterdam) then be sure to head over to the Microsoft exhibition stand to catch LiveStation being demonstrated for the first time in Europe.

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Hell Freezes Over: Microsoft Supporting Linux

Silverlight for Linux will be called Moonlight, and Microsoft’s Linux pal Novell will do the heavy lifting in porting the software. Microsoft made the announcement that to be cross-platform with Silverlight, they would extend support to Linux.

Miguel de Icaza and the Mono Project team at Novell will be the ones to take Silverlight beyond Windows and Mac. He had more details about the announcement on his blog:

The highlights of the collaboration are:

•  Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification. The same test suite that Microsoft uses for Silverlight.

•  Microsoft will give us access to the Silverlight specifications: details that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web; and specifications on the 1.1 version of Silverlight as it is updated.

•  Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser (sorry, those are the rules for the Media codecs).

•  Novell will implement Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 and will distribute it for the major Linux distributions at the time of the shipment. We will offer some kind of one-click install for Linux users (no "Open a terminal and type su followed by your password…" as well as RPM and DEB packages for the major distros and operating systems.

"This is an historical collaboration between an open source project and Microsoft," he continued. "They have collaborated with other folks on the server space (Xen, PHP and) but this is their first direct contribution to the open source desktop."

Microsoft’s "past contributions" to Linux have been much different, including an assortment of veiled threats, highly critical white papers, and other unpleasantness that has been revealed over the years through leaked memos and other accounts.

This is a significant change from the Microsoft that generated the infamous "Halloween documents" listing The Fear Microsoft had of Linux and its inroads into the lucrative server software market.

Once in place, visitors can view video highlights like Barry Bonds’ 756th home run from MLB’s ‘Silverlight-powered page. Microsoft said its Silverlight plug-in will work on Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003 when running IE7.

Older stuff like IE6, or Firefox 1.5 or 2, on Windows 2000 hasn’t received support yet.

Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in works on Windows or Mac, though Linux isn’t supported as an operating system. Like Adobe, Microsoft sees a future where much of the business of content distribution will go to the company that can give the best assurances about protecting copyrighted material.

A product called Silverlight Streaming should emerge as an option from Microsoft for those content owners. Microsoft described it as an optional paid turnkey offering for supporting DRM-encoded video.

• The article headline in which he scans for keywords.
• Graphics – Scoble mentions that images slow his scanning process down and this is how TechCrunch became popular, by introducing an image into each post.
• Number of Links – Scoble addresses links as "information density" and the number of links is related to the amount of research the author has done.
• Author – Scoble gives higher credibility to authors he knows vs. any "Joe Smith."
• Body Content - Factors such as content length and keyword density are important for this item.

Robert Scoble apparently checks his feed once or twice a day, so what does he really find interesting? Here are some things you can write about which might cause him to give your blog a second look:

• Technology which is dramatically new
• The Video Space
• Google vs. Microsoft
• Anything Apple related
• Battlefronts such as Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe flash

Check out the video for yourself: http://www.viddler.com/explore/masterlock77/videos/1/

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Mark says it’s worth pointing this out for a couple of reasons:

1. It shows how Silverlight can be used to deliver media in a branded advertising scenario and promote a product/service like Surface

2. More importantly, as a reassurance to the many designers and developers that are out there considering using Silverlight for production projects. I had one guy email me after last weeks MSDN Roadshow and he wanted help ’selling’ Silverlight to his boss for use with a client. Having examples of one of the highest traffics sites on the web using Silverlight is a good thing to show and also indicates that customers with Silverlight installed is growing well (as indicated by Sean’s post with the spikes in downloads of the plug-in).

Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx that is the United States Microsoft.com Website, the current UK Microsoft.com site points features links to help the police in their quest to find the little British girl, Madeleine McCann.

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