New Photosynth release

Photosynth v.2: Brady Forest over on O'Reilly Radar has a thorough post on the new release of Photosynth from MS, which (most significantly) includes the ability to create your own "Synths", all of which are shared with/hosted by the community, and which are built with heavy use of your local machine. Clever, and very exciting as far as creating views of museum objects goes. Obviously I have yet to try it out, and who knows, it might turn out to be cheaper and easier to spend a few tens of thousands on a 3D scanner instead, but somehow I doubt it.... Coolcoolcool

Two interesting ReadWriteWeb stories

Just a quickie. Two things caught my eye on RWW:
Confirmed: Microsoft Acquires Powerset. So MS moves into semantic search with the acquisition of a promising startup. Yahoo! will have to fight ever harder for survival if MS is really determined to do this. Anyway, it may be time to start talking to MS about how to work with all the yummy structured data we have in MLAs (yes, that means you EDL)
Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web. This is all about tackling the myriad interfaces and data formats of social software APIs. It's a comparable problem to that faced in our sector and the solution of a mediator is interesting mainly for that reason. It's also potentially directly relevant where we're working with data in social sites.

Slicing the market mini-, sorry Micro-update: TO'R on MicroHoo

In his piece MicroHoo: corporate penis envy? Tim O'Reilly makes lots of interesting arguments concerning where Microsoft should be putting its energy - as far as he's concerned, it should forget about trying to grab a slice of the search market and focus instead on building the internet operating system. For Yahoo!s part, it should realise it's the number one internet media company and make the most of it. There's lots here to chew on (and object to, as Michael Arrington does here, and I happen to agree with him and Jakob Nielsen that search, especially semantically intelligent search, is far from ticked off), but the paragraph that grabbed my attention concerned a couple of other players:

Apple's apparent success with an "own the stack, from the device to cloud" strategy is misleading. With both the iPod and the iPhone, a key element of success is precisely the device's openness to what Apple does not own. Imagine an iPod where you could only buy music from the Apple music store instead of ripping your own CDs (this is Amazon's mistake with the Kindle). Imagine an iphone without the Safari browser (opening a world of web apps to the phone) or the Google Maps application. Apple owns key elements of the stack, but it's a permeable stack, and getting more so.)

This is handy material for making the argument that museums shouldn't try to (or be required to) "own the stack". Far better to focus on a layer in the stack and make it permeable. iTunes (the music store) is clearly an example of trying to corner a part of the market outside Apple's home turf, but (a) they're big and ballsy enough to try it (and who else was doing so effectively at that time? Aside from Napster...) and (b) the core offering is still actually the hardware, and it allows you to acquire music by other means. Amazon and Kindle is interesting too. Perhaps it's too early to say they've made a mistake, though they probably have. I doubt it will stay closed and succeed. Nevertheless, as I acknowledged before, they are making a grab for more of the stack. But let's not forget, they're HUGE!

What can we learn? Well there's that point about openness/permeability. If we must insist on claiming the vertical market from top to toe, from collections management system to the end user's screen, then at least make it permeable and open. Otherwise your carefully grown fruit will wither on the vine, forgotten and increasingly past its sell-by date.

Microsoft's prototype chirpy cheap cheap multi-touch interface: Touch Wall

No point rewriting this post on RWW, this is cool though. Watch the vid. Shame there are not plans to "productize" now, but the cost sounds low and the interface intuitive (and obeying the conventions developing around multi-touch).

It's also worth looking at the Touch blog now and then. It's mainly about near-field communication (lots of RFID) but also touch interfaces (nothing on this MS thing yet).

That IE7 prompt issue...

So here's why: Working around IE7s prompt bug, er feature (includes a possible solution)
Damn their eyes!

EDIT:
There's an alternative, but similar, solution here: http://www.anyexample.com/webdev/javascript/ie7_javascript_prompt()_alternative.xml. Both solutions require a relatively extensive script and callback, so it may be best if I stick it all into an external JS file and embed and call this with the bookmarklet. However I also now know that it's a security setting, so I've fixed my own IE installation. If you want to do the same, you must enable "Allow websites to prompt for information using scripted windows". Seems to all work then.

MS new stuff: IE8 and super-cool image zooming in Silverlight

IE8 beta released, some interesting developments (the microformats list is debating the rights and wrongs of "web slices", which are based on hAtom and are intended to let highlight part of a page to treat as a feed)
Also from MS, SeaDragon (see also Photosynth) in Sliverlight 2. More than a bit useful for use cultural heritage types [edit] and I should add that the video on that TechCrunch page is of a cultural heritage application - Hard Rock Cafe's memorabilia application, which was the demo shown at MIX08. They talk about the role of imaging for authentication, for bringing objects to life, and though it's obviously a business, their business is really not so far from ours (albeit for profit)

The National Archives and MS

I'd wondered what to make of the news that MS are to provide a futureproofing "strategy" for TNA by giving them copies of Virtual PC 2007, apart from it being a pragmatic step, and fortunately Chris Rusbridge has done the thinking for me. I guess I agree also that the progress with Open XML can only be good, since it's pretty much irrelevant that they aren't using the same standard as Open Office - the point it it's an open standard and XML is designed to be transfomed.
I'd be interested to know how TNA plan to integrate the emulation approach with any need they may have to preserve non-Windows or non-MS Office formats.