Announcing the new MIX Online

I haven’t been talking much on this blog about what I have been up to at Microsoft these days. The reason why is that I have been incredibly busy working on a new project, a reboot of MIX Online.

MIX Online is a community site for web designers and developers who are building and believe in the innovative web. In the past, the site has given a varied perspective of what is happening on the web, a view into our conference called MIX, and interviews with amazing people with incredible ideas and stories on how designers and developers can take advantage of the web. MIX Online has always been a year-round companion to the event.

MIX Online moves forward by taking more of a scenario focus around emerging web trends. For example, Microformats is an interesting movement in the web community and we want to introduce you to it and give you some practical guidance around it.  MIX Online will continue to showcase our traditional blog, but we are renaming it under the heading “Opinions” that provides a more natural conversation with our small team. Also, MIX Online now provides practical articles with each scenario that are written by people in the community, not always Microsoft’s perspective. Best of all, MIX Online is providing freely downloadable, open source, and immediately useable prototypes. You are encouraged to use these prototypes for your own projects, but to also submit code to the prototype project on CodePlex to share with the community.

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this. I have a brutal (a good thing) team that is doing amazing work. I am a firm believer that the web is an incredible place for innovation and my heart truly belongs to this site.

What you are seeing is just the beginning of what we plan to do. So go check it out, subscribe, and download our latest prototype called Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit.