AlexHopmann.com

Tafiti has just gone online- it is a new web search experience by Microsoft and Jackson Fish with a lot of the development work done by my Launch21 partner Peyman Oreizy.

There are two immediate things that strike me as cool about Tafiti- first of all, its built in Silverlight and is a great showcase for how the Silverlight platform can enable much richer web experiences than we have seen before.

The second aspect is as a different angle on vertical search. Rather than doing a vertical focus of topic (like CouponLooker which specializes in coupon codes), it focuses on helping when you are using search as a research tool. I probably won’t be going to Tafiti if I just need to do a simple query to find the name of a web-site I need to visit, but for drilling down into a topic across book results, news, photos and more, it provides some neat capabilities to “bookshelf” results as you go along and come back to them.

All done in a gorgeous UI that should help clarify the sort of thing that the Jackson Fish folks mean when they talk about great software experiences. Congrats to Microsoft for pursuing this project and finding great ways to experiment with new innovative interfaces.

Years ago I registered to vote by absentee ballot all the time. Its much easier to get the ballet in the mail, have a chance to study the candidates and issues with a computer nearby and make my decisions.

Today is a primary election in King County and the mail-in ballot at a reminder to remove the stub (tiny extra piece of paper) from your ballot or else it might push your postage over $.41 (a normal stamp). Which brings up a better question- why do you have to pay postage to vote anyway? Voting is our most basic government function and as mail-in voting becomes more commonplace, doesn’t the postage become a form of (very small) poll tax?

So let’s get our elections commissions to solve this problem- either via pre-paid postage envelopes or better yet a national postal service rule that ballots don’t require postage (much like congress gets to send free mail).