When I first say Microsoft Surface I was amazed at what a great input mechanism it offered. The iPhone and HTC Touch phones push the boundary of what can be done on a hand-held device but there's a middle ground of the UMPC and TabletPCs which are left out.

I wonder how long they're going to lag behind though with technologies such as InkSeine and LucidTouch evolving....

As I can't vote here in the US my interest in the election is pretty much the same as from before I got here.... scared that the folks who ignored history and repeated their mistakes will do exactly the same thing again.

Luckily there is something that allows me to keep up to date with a fairly neutral view of the candidates, what they stand for and what they are saying (often totally unrelated to what they actually mean... but politics is the art of the possible after all) - MSNs Podium '08 coverage.

Combining the resources of MSNs news team with Live search, and presenting it via a Silverlight interface it actually presents an overview of the contenders in a way I can quickly understand and evaluate.

I don't know if providing tools to educate and inform voters will ever have a significant effect in this age of media driven campaigning and short term memory... but if voters at least have the tools to help them think before they tick the box then there's hope....

While the war of relevance between Google and Live Search continues unabated one thing that the folks at Microsoft have been doing more around is questioning the paradigm of how we search and deal with results.... and making those experiments public.

You may have seen an early attempt to put a more human face on searching if you'd used MsDewey to query the internet but the latest project presents a much more usable face to search.

Tafiti (apparently meaning "to research" in Swahili) takes the current search paradigm a little further using a combination of Silverlight and the Live Search APIs to allow you to search and filter in a very dynamic manner, focusing on web search, blogs, images or a mixture - and storing the results in collections (which if you sign in with your LiveID you can even keep with you across machines).

It's probably not going to totally replace search as we know it today, but it certainly presents a great new way of thinking about how you interact with search engines to actually find relevant results and manage the data you get back. Have a look at this video of it in action, and check it out yourself...

As the internet hits its 16th year the user demographic will probably be slowly heading towards a more normalized curve (though I'd expect to see the peak certainly biased back towards the younger age groups at least until they discover some cool new medium and leave us old folks pioneers behind)

With that in mind I was very amused to see the error message when I was customizing my profile for the new Windows Live SkyDrive service. The minimum age of 18 tied in with the terms and conditions, but... an upper limit of 255! What do they know about the target demographic for Live services that I've not been told about yet!

Ever found yourself wishing there was a template to quickly do something in Windows Live Writer but didn't quite have the technical skills to go off and roll your own plug-in to do exactly what you need?

Well, thanks to a very neat dynamic template engine for WLW it's now possible.

You can create templates to easily insert common snippets of HTML or text or, if you're feeling more adventurous, you can write templates that are powerful enough to be considered "mini-plugins" in their own right, but which are still radically simpler to write and distribute than traditional Windows Live Writer plugins.

If you have ever written a PHP, JSP, or ASP page, you already have a good idea of how to write these kind of templates, but even if you haven't there's some great getting started guides on Joes page.

Have you ever come across a really cool site and wondered what technology they used to roll it? Does it support RSS, what do they use for Web Metrics, which Ajax library are they using, what server platform have the selected, DO they have a P3P policy?

Well, wonder no longer... just visit BuiltWith, tap in the URL and they'll deliver a wealth of information about the site you're interested in - along with a measure of what %age of their surveyed base is using the same technologies.

At the moment it's fairly new so the %age of people using a particular technology might be skewed but it's interesting to see how some of the apparently popular services are not scoring so well just yet... time will tell though.

Check out their blog for news of new releases and to discuss suggestions to improve it... though as it seems to do just what it says straight out of the can I can't think of anything I'd like to add at first glance (rare I know!)

If you've not yet grabbed the latest beta of Visual Studio 2008 then now is the time to go and get it and have a play.

Not only will you get access to a cutting edge development platform you'll have the opportunity to help test out a whole new distribution method.

Thanks to work from Microsoft Research in Cambridge this beta is available using the Microsoft Secure Content Downloader peer to peer platform.

Read all about it, and grab the download from here.

Like any other software Windows Live Messenger occasionally suffers from little problems, often related to an individual PC configuration - which makes it pretty hard for the team to test everything.

Trying to solve a problem with WLM on one of the machines at home last night I came across this site which consolidates a whole lot of fixes to common problems in one place - and if you're having an issue that's not listed they offer to research it for you.

I'm not sure where they get their information from, but MSN-Errors do a good job of fixing the problems.

The other place to go for information and help is the official WLM Newgroup where experts from around the world can often help out pretty quickly as well.

While you wait for news of Vista SP1 rest assured that the team are hard at work addressing some of the more common issues with the current Vista release.

Two packages have been released to address a number of performance, compatibility and reliability issues that have been reported by users with have either activated the built in Error Reporting service (sounds like a very good reason to turn it on and let it tell the mothership when something didn't work) or contacted Microsoft Customer Support Services.

The first targets performance and reliability issues and is documented in KB938979 (which includes links to both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions).

The second targets compatibility and additional reliability issues and is documented in KB938194 (and also has 32 bit and 64 bit downloads).

Both of these will become available over the next few days via Windows Update (you do have that turned on don't you) but if you're keen I'd suggest grabbing the relevant versions of both for your Vista machine as soon as possible.

Much less official (so be careful what you download from here - make sure you read the instructions in the KB article to be sure it applies to you, do a system restore, take a backup, make sure you're using Windows Home Server or whatever you need to recover if it goes wrong) is AutoPatcher for a downloadable collection of hotfixes, updates and tweaks you can use to upgrade an old machine (eg because it's got no/slow connection, you've got up update lots of machines, you just want a DVD in your kitbag for quick upgrades), or VistaSP1 site that's collected a list of over 100 Hotfixes for Vista in one easy to access place...

When I remember I Twitter. I'm not very reliable or consistent in my posting (and I'm more likely to use it from the web than SMS that maybe cuts down the spontaneity (must get a cellphone plan with including texting).

Just like updating my Facebook status or changing my Messenger status I'm not really sure that it adds much to the communications with my friends (though I get enough complaints when I go quiet for a week that maybe it is).

I've finally found an explanation for maybe why it is worth updating these status messages - this exhaust data confirms that the network is alive and well and it just performs a comforting action. I even found out there is a term for this sort of small talk - Phatic communication.

So no, Twitter isn't just noise... it provides social reassurance, confirmation that the network is working and... an opportunity to learn random titbits.