First up was skyserver, a sort of global standardization and sharing of astronomical data from telescopes all over. This allows astronomers worldwide to do their work at any time of the day or not, even when it's cloudy, without direct access to major equipment. Which is great. And equally, students and anybody else can use the data as well. Similar to terraserver, their project to provide satellite photos of as much of the earth as possible.

In a way similar but with more of a self-publishing flavor is world-wide media exchange (WWMX), an attempt to build a shared collection of location-tagged media. People can submit photos, stories, etc, tagged with time and location. Then anyone can browse by locations for interesting media.

He talked a bit about Wallop, MSR's social networking thingy. In introducing it he said something like "we wanted to combine social networking with blogging and sharing of media" and I thought "isn't that what LiveJournal is?" Wallop, I think, adds explicit support for images and metadata; he talked about how his wallop page has pictures of him and his wife and Neal Stephenson, with the pictures annotated as to who was who. I can see LJ adding support for metadata (and photo hosting) and enabling this stuff in perhaps a more organic way -- i.e., you can put this stuff in your journal or not, and if it's there people can search/browse for it, with access control based on friend lists etc. I'd like to try out wallop, but it's just in limited testing for now.

Next, he talked about something he called "human scale computing". Soon, a terabyte of storage will be affordable for many people. With 1TB, you could record everything you say for your entire life, or take a picture every minute, or record a year of full video. You'd never need to delete anything. What changes when this is true? Interesting. He mentioned the "Stuff I've Seen" project, which basically turns all your computer stuff and everything (and everyone) you interact with into searchable stuff.

Finally, he talked a bit about MS's smart personal objects (eg the SPOT watch). I was surprised to hear that they're FM sub-band network (or whatever it's called) can reach 80% of the US population. I didn't know it was built out.

I've been hearing that MS is thinking about bringing together the web and people's own stuff, treating it as one big data collection and improving search/browse over it. So what he talked a bit fit into this. I have to admit, the possibility of integrating some of these things (think itunes meets soulseek meets livejournal meets a9 or something) sounds good to me, though I'm not sure what MS wants to do with it is what I'd want to do.