My first experience of Silverlight was pulse.sxsw.com, which covered everything going on at SXSW. Pulse offers a media wall of photos and video, where (reportedly) the smaller 1×1 blocks are flickr images, the 2×2 blocks are user-uploaded photos or video, and the larger blocks are official SXSW content. Microsoft attended SXSW Interactive in force, to push its Silverlight technology (what's with the logo that looks like crumpled contact lenses?). From what I gather, it's not only a direct challenge to Adobe Flash (they've unbundled the Flash plug-in from IE7) but also a bid to become the new platform for rich Internet applications, in combination with their Live services (APIs for search, Virtual Earth, messaging, plus other resources). Silverlight streams huge and high-def media files, and Microsoft will host Silverlight media files and applications (for a fee). Where Flash apps were notoriously opaque to search engines, Silverlight apps travel as text-based markup (XAML) that's Google-able, with no extra work by developers (as Flash requires). Silverlight also offers eye candy: it can reskin the user interface of a browser while the app is running, which can make it look more like desktop software. If they can get the performance up -- oh, my!