If you’re wondering how much work goes into setting up the keynote room for an event like MIX well – here is the whole 6 days in 6 and a half minutes :)

Sit back and enjoy all the hard work (and don’t forget to check out the keynotes at a slower pace on the official site)

The Day 1 keynote from MIX09 is well worth spending time watching, but as it’s all about me I wanted to highlight the partners I’d worked with this year.

So complete with short-cuts to their moment in the the spotlight here is the MIX09 Day 1 Keynote video (don’t forget to go full screen to really enjoy the experience)

• StackOverflow (Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky)
• Netflix (Kevin McEntee)
• Bondi and Vertigo (David Anthony and Scott Stanfield)
• KEXP (Tom Mara and Aaron Starkey)

• Netflix is making more money with Silverlight
• Bondi's Digital Archive of past Rolling Stone and Playboy (NSFW) magazine issues.
• Radio Station KEXP created a hot new seamless online/offline experience for video and music.

While I hate being on the pointy end of a camera it was great to catch up with the Delicate Genius from down-under at MIX09, and he even managed to get a good shot of my wrist on film.

Luckily I much prefer being behind the scenes rather than hogging the limelight so you won’t have to put up with too much of me talking ;)

Oh, and I’m no better posing for photographs – though it was late and the launch for PlayboyArchive (depending on where you work, probably NSFW) came at the end of a very long day and thanks to Bondi and Vertigo I’d been reading a lot of articles over the previous few days!

This was my third MIX (I joined Microsoft a few months after the first) and once again I spent most of the time behind the scenes.

At MIX07 I worked with one Keynote partner, at MIX08 I had partners with demos and presentations in both keynotes and for MIX09 I was the designated “Partner Wrangler” working with the non-Microsoft partners who had demos on-stage. I have to thank Mike (our Keynote owner) for the opportunity this year.

MIX this year was about the “Return on Experience” and was where we announced the final release of ASP.NET MVC as well as the developer beta of Silverlight3 so most of my focus was in those areas.

Once again I was lucky enough to be working with some really great partners who had great stories for us to bring to the event to show off the technologies – so all I really have to do is make sure they get the support they need to finish their applications in time for rehearsals that night before the keynote!

So, who was I wrangling?

The first partner demo in the MIX Keynote was StackOverflow – a great community site for developers to help each other, built on ASP.NET MVC (with standards compliant HTML) and optimized for Search Engine Optimization. Jeff and Joel have a great story and deliver it – like StackOverflow – simply.

The second partner I worked with was Netflix. Kevin McEntee talked about how Netflix has been using Silverlight both to improve the user experience on both PC and Mac, but also driving the quality of their roll-out to hardware such as the Roku or XBox360 platforms. Kevin and Steve Swasey from Netflix sat down with Tim Harris to give a bit more background on the story.

Much to my amusement I was called on to join Kevin on stage for a few moments at the end of his talk to drive a demo of the Adaptive Streaming technology in the Netflix Instant Watch player. What was really cool about working with Netflix this year was that they were the first partner I worked with back at MIX07 ;)

My third partner were Bondi Digital Publishing and Vertigo Software. They have worked together to create an amazing on-line magazine archive viewing platform that takes microfiche content, scans and uses OCR to grab the text, massage the meta data to add some intelligence (linking the contents to the articles, flagging adverts vs content etc) and then display them on the web. At MIX David Anthony from Bondi and Scott Stanfield from Vertigo demonstrated their “next generation” Silverlight3 based platform with Rolling Stone content but after the keynote they launched PlayboyArchive (NSFW!) using Silverlight2.

Tim also sat down with David and Murat Aktar from Bondi and Scott from Vertigo to discuss how they are changing the magazine industry.

My last (but certainly not least) partner was KEXP. As one of the most successful internet radio stations (and the most successful not-for-profit internet station) they have a never-ending challenge to improve their connection with their audience by delivering high quality content wherever their users are. Taking advantage of the forthcoming Silverlight3 features such as Out of Browser and Offline support combined with cloud services KEXP are looking to the future to make sure they stay at the leading edge. Tom Mara and Aaron Starkey talked about the business benefits as well as demonstrated a prototype of their work. They also provided more background in a video interview shot at their studios.

If you want to see how my partners fit into the overall keynote you can view the on-demand video, or check out Tim Sneath’s live blog of the keynote and of course don’t forget to mark your calendar because MIX10 is coming at Mandalay Bay 15-17 March 2010.

One of the simplest forms of exercise is walking, and the experts tell us that we should aim for 10,000 steps a day as part of a healthy lifestyle. People who use a pedometer tend to walk more than those who don't (on average around 2000 steps or about a mile) so getting a pedometer would be a smart idea.

I've been using an Omron HJ-720ITC (one of the few pedometers that has a USB connection to sync with your computer) for some months and a combination of their desktop app to keep a record for me and gtFtr to manually publish my steps (when I can remember) to help my friends encourage me to keep stepping in the right direction.

Now I've found a better way to track and share my progress though, and it uses a platform that's designed to securely hold medical data and share it under my control - Microsoft's HealthVault.

As a family we're starting to explore ways that HealthVault can let us consolidate the various medical records that at the moment are just hidden in filing cabinets around the house but we love the way we can also use it for day to day type activities...

One of the basic functions of HealthVault is that it allows 3rd party applications to be permitted access to certain data types - for instance the WalkMe application can read my pedometer data that is uploaded to HealthVault via the Connection Center (a simple application that runs in my system tray - once configured with my credentials you just need to plug in the pedometer, wait until it tells you it's grabbed the data and then unplug it and the data gets uploaded automatically).

In addition to letting me analyze my data when I’m using the application, WalkMe keeps my shared widgets and data up to date by automagically syncing with HealthVault (via a secure mechanism called "OfflineWebApplication access").

WalkMe lets me review the data in different ways to track my progress, set goals, compare to friends and ... if I want ... share my progress publicly using a variety of widgets or even an RSS feed.

If you're looking for some suggestion for routes to walk or help getting started you should check out the MSN RouteTracker which can also use HealthVault to help you keep track of your progress, and use Live Search Health to get some general fitness ideas.

Give WalkMe a try, and check out the rest of HealthVault while you're there. The service is in pretty early beta stages so your input can make a lot of difference right now so make sure you leave some feedback as to what features you'd like to see added or improved (or vote on some of my requests!)

I'm planning to wear my pedometer this year to MIX in Vegas. Wonder how far I'll walk around behind the scenes at that event - check back here to see the numbers change ;)

MIX09 is the Microsoft event of the year for all things web, so if you don't know what it is you should head over to VisitMIX and find out.

If you do know, you probably want to promote it... and just displaying the same old image for every visitor is so old fashioned, so I turned to my handy 4 lines of javascript to spice things up a little...

   1:  <script type="text/javascript"> 

   2:  var v1= Math.round(Math.random() * 6) + 1;

   3:  document.write('<br><a href="http://2009.VisitMix.com"><img src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/MIX09/MIX09_BlogBling_' +v1 + '.jpg" border="0" alt="Visit MIX09"></a>');

   4:  </script>

or... even easier is to just insert this one line of Javascript into your page and as I find new bling I can update it automatically

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

if you define two variables in your javascript before you call the random blog bing script then you can over-ride the width and height - just like this

<script type="text/javascript">

var bling_width=120;

var bling_height=160;

</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://blog.offbeatmammal.com/samples/mix09/mix09bling.js"></script>

and you can see the results here (just refresh the page to see it change)