I Never Thought I’d Be Blogging About Playboy

But cool technology is worth writing about, so here we go. 

If you were watching the MIX09 Live Keynote yesterday (http://live.visitmix.com/), you saw a couple of awesome applications which really take rich, Internet applications to a new level.  One of them, the Playboy Archive, is live now at http://playboy.covertocover.com/.  This is a DeepZoom application showing an archive of 53 issues of Playboy Magazine. 

Any Silverlight fan has seen DeepZoom by now, so we all know how cool that is.  But what was really interesting to me was how nice the fulltext search integration was.  You can see in the image below the word I typed into the search box, and how it’s then highlighted in the article I selected.  As the pages are DeepZoom-enabled, I can easily read the full text of the article.

One other feature I wanted to highlight is the Ads & Content locator feature.  While on one of the different 53 issues, you can click on “Content” at the top & have all of the content show up in a small frame for you to select.  You can also see the different ads shown and click on those to jump right to the page with the selected ad.

Overall this is a fantastic application.  It’s fast, easy-to-use and well-designed.  In a few months, a similar version of Rolling Stone magazine is also due out as well.  My guess is that it will be a bit easier with Rolling Stone to grab conservative screen shots for my blog while at work. :)

Cross posted from Martha's Blog.