Microsoft Unveils Deep Zoom Michael Jackson Tribute

Microsoft has unveiled a tribute page to Michael Jackson on MSN, essentially a Silverlight application built by ShootHill by taking advantage of the DeepZoom capabilities of Silverlight. The main image of the King of Pop, who died on June 25th 2009, is put together using touched up variants of hundreds of pictures featuring the artist taken through the course of his life. Using the mouse, users will be able to navigate the images. Simply zoom in with the scroll wheel, then click and hold and drag the image in the direction you wish to navigate.

“Deep Zoom into Michael Jackson's life in pictures,” reads the invitation from Microsoft. “The image on this page is your entry point to hundreds of photos of Michael Jackson, his life, his work, his fans and tributes to his career as King of Pop. Click and roll your mouse to zoom in or move around the images easily. Please ensure you have installed the latest version of Silverlight in order to make the zoom function work. It is quick and easy to install from here if you haven't yet done so!”

Microsoft indicated that, in response to the huge and surging interest in Jackson's death, manifested by antediluvian traffic hitting its search engine, it had to interfere with Bing in order to bring the best experience to its users. The Redmond company explained that this was not the normal strategy it applied for its search engine, but that it made an exception, justified by the magnitude of the event. Fact is that news of Jackson's death has exploded to global proportions almost in no time at all.

“While we do want to respond to big events appropriately, our general rule is not to interfere with the normal algorithmic operation and to use what we learn to improve future releases. The only exception is for major news events where we see unusual activity and the results are clearly not being ranked in a relevant way. In these cases, we can respond more quickly to how we perform the ranking. This was the case when Michael Jackson died, and we quickly rolled out what we call a “news go big” experience to make sure we were providing appropriate coverage for this significant and sad event,” explained Jacquelyn Krones, senior product planner, Bing News.