Looking back on the keynote
Mike has done a great job of summarising the content in the following blog posts
In the Keynote @ Mix08Mix08 Keynote - ScottGuMix08 Keynote - ScottGu on Silverlight
Part 1,
Part 2 and
Part 3Apart from the obvious focus release of the new tools available for
download such as
Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 and the
IE8 beta the overall aspect that struck me was the focus on advertising.
The number of times that advertising was mentioned in the keynote was the same level as the number of times that Silverlight was mentioned. Ray Ozzie started off by emphasising the importance of advertising as the economic engine of the web.
This was followed up by a demonstration by Jon Harris using silverlight to create banner advertisements with integration into Atlas Ad Manager, to track and report on the metrics exposed by the banner advert.
Jon's demonstration was then followed up by Ari Paparo who demonstrated advertising integration within a silverlight application into their product DoubleClick.
Also inside the NBC Olympics application and America Online Email application they showed how they had made use of banner adverts and sponsored advertiser content to drive the monetization of the content.
Overall I found the focus on advertising intriguing and subsequently attended most of the advertising based sessions at MIX08 to see where Microsoft was heading and how it can be applied.