Web 2.0 features are now commonplace—blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and the like are almost everywhere you look online. Now that these technologies are maturing, what are their common problems and challenges? How are these problems being solved? What similar challenges do Web 2.0 developers face, and how can they leverage the most common solutions? Here’s your chance to gather with other professionals facing the same issues and work together to identify solutions.  Find out more.

Congratulations to our own Jeff Weir for winning the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web award in the art category. He was recognized for his Viscosity application, which he describes as a modern art generator. He created it because, as his Web site explains, “it’s beautiful, relaxing, and turns anyone into an abstract artist”. Viscosity was one of just five art projects recognized as part of the 11th Annual Web Awards. A complete list of award finalists is here.

Jeff is just one of the talented and passionate user experience designers who help shape the vision of Live Labs. If you are as passionate about UX as Jeff, we're looking for a few great designers.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced new features in Silverlight 2, our cross platform rich internet application runtime.  One of the most exciting new features is Deep Zoom.  This capability allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

Don’t just take our word for it:.  Hard Rock Café is using the Deep Zoom technology to power the site showcasing their huge collection of memorabilia.

Deep Zoom is based on the same Seadragon technology that you have seen in our demos and in the Photosynth preview.  For the first time, we are enabling individual developers to harness the 2D capabilities of Seadragon to support smooth zooming interfaces on super high resolution images and collections.  You’ve been asking for the ability to use Seadragon yourself, now here’s your chance.

We have added a host of new features and improved designs to Listas today.  A fresh home page design and updated community page make finding relevant information even easier.  New community lists like popular tags, recently created lists, and top users are all now available both in Listas and through RSS.  For fellow GTD fans, there are now task lists.  Improvements to printing support, history and version management, and many other additions and refinements round out the update.  You can check out the newly updated Listas technology preview as always at http://listas.labs.live.com.

Today, we are announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Learn more about Volta and download it to try building applications yourself >

As part of our ongoing collaborations with product groups around Microsoft, Live Labs continues to help other teams improve features and add new capabilities to Microsoft's online services.  Recently, with the fall release of Live Search, our work with the Maps team paid off for users.  We worked closely with the team in developing two key improvements:

Single Box Search

Using Live Labs' entity extraction technology, a machine learning algorithm for classifying data, the Local Search team was able to combine the two boxes used for separately entering a business name and a location into a single search box. 

A much anticipated feature, it enables maps.live.com users to enter single queries without having to negotiate multiple input boxes such as:

• Philadelphia, to just jump to a map of the city;
• Chowder in Boston, MA, to search for some comfort food by the bay; or
• Chinese Food to search the current map area (or our estimate for your location if it is a new session) for some lo mein.

Bird's Eye in 3D

Both the 3D and Bird's Eye views in maps.live.com provide unique and valuable ways to look at the world, providing far more detail and more useful information than straight down aerial views alone can.  Until now, you had to switch back and forth between the 3D client and the Ajax version to see Bird's Eye Imagery.  Now, with a user experience reminiscent of Photosynth, the Virtual Earth 3D experience let's you see bird's eye images right in context, including a preview of the perspective of surrounding images with that familiar white outline:

Check out the newest version of Live Search Maps for these and many more great enhancements.  This type of ongoing collaboration with groups around Microsoft is what Live Labs is all about; stay tuned for many more improvements like this. 

At Live Labs, we are always experimenting with new ideas that we think will be useful.  Today we are releasing our latest technology preview:

Listas (http://listas.labs.live.com)

Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.  We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you can think of.

In the Listas Community Section, you will find a number of highlights of the most popular and random items from around the community of public lists such as the most used tags, the hottest lists, and prolific contributors.   You can even add others’ lists (or any RSS feed) to your own Listas so you are always up to date.

You can even create lists from all the things you find on the web, like search results, wish lists, videos, or all or part of virtually any page with the Listas Toolbar for Internet Explorer:

So, give Listas a try.  And, as always, let us know what you think.

In this week's series premiere of Wired Science on PBS, Microsoft Live Labs Architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a demonstration of Seadragon and Photosynth, sharing some of our vision for what is coming from Photosynth in the months and years ahead. Check out the video above to see how Photosynth is changing the way we think about our digital memories, and try the Photosynth technology preview today to see for yourself what's possible.

With the popularity of the recent collections from the space shuttle Endeavor, we continued to receive feedback that a few people with specific configurations were unable to install the Photosynth viewer.  We’ve made a few tweaks to the installer that should resolve the majority of those issues, including support for 64-bit systems.  If you were one of the unlucky few who couldn’t try Photosynth before, give the new installer try.

There’s no new functionality, just a better install experience, so you don’t need to do anything if you already have Photosynth installed.

As the seven-member crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour prepare for their return to Kennedy Space Center tomorrow morning. We are pleased to announce an update to our collaboration with NASA.

Prior to docking at the international space station the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a complete somersault enabling astronauts in the International Space Station to photograph the shuttle's bottom-side. The photos were then sent back to NASA for analysis.  The Space Administration has been kind enough to share those images with Microsoft Live Labs. We have taken the photos and created a “synth” so people around the world can take part in the NASA experience.

So here it is, your chance to take first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk .

Click here to install the Photosynth viewer and experience for yourself.

The Live Search Images team recently released a fun new feature to make it easier to find specific kinds of images.  Thanks to a collaboration with specialists in imaging from Live Labs and MSR, you can now search specifically for portraits, faces and black and white images.  To use the feature you simply have to add a filter your query, like so: 

• Portrait results return head and shoulders images, or what we often call mug shots.  For example: ‘Adrian Grenier filter:portrait’
• Face results are closer shots with the face the most predominant element of the image.  For example: ‘Aishwarya Rai filter:face’
• Black and white results are pretty self explanatory and works on any search type, not just people.  Example: ‘night skyline filter:bw’
• You can even combine some of the filters:  ‘George Washington Carver filter:face filter:bw’

This is one of many improvements you will find in Live Search and many of our other products as a result of the work happening here in the lab and all around Microsoft. 

More on image search at the Live Search Blog.