I've been playing around with some new technology we've been working on at Microsoft. It's called Silverlight Deep Zoom, and it allows you to take a high resolution photo and put it on the web and then zoom into it, so that you don't have to download the entire image, it brings down more of it as you zoom. I've set up an example on my web site using some pictures of my own reef tank. I didn't post it here directly since it may require you to install a new control on your system if you don't already have it. And, yes, it's safe, and it will run on Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, and Safari on the Mac running OS X. It's beta software, so it's not quite done yet, and it may not work on all systems. If you want to try it out, go here Deep Zoom Reef and follow the instructions on the page to install and use the deep zoom system.

If you have any problems I'll try to provide what support I can, but again, it's early software, and I don't have access to every system (i.e. I don't have a Mac) and so I can't test everything myself.

Silverlight is the technology that NBC will be using this summer to provide Internet access to the Olympics on their web site, so it's likely you may see it in the future at other places as well.