Not to exaggerate, but EVERYONE needs to check this out.

It’s called Photosynth.

Here is a bit of a description, but you have to watch the video about it:

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

I recently read this blog article where one of the members of the Excel 2007 team talks through the process that Microsoft used to redesign the charting functionality of Excel in the upcoming release.

There are a bunch of interesting things about this article, but the most interesting thing to me is that Microsoft actually employs people that they call User Experience Designers. I have heard from lots of Microsoft employees and all over the web when I read about the new version of office that this release is squarely focused on improved useability. Seeing these articles show that they are absolutely committed to it and as a beta user, I can’t help but give them credit. It looks great to me.

By the way, I used Writely to post this to my blog, just as a test, and its a fantastic blog authoring tool. Microsoft Word offers this as well, and actually does support WordPress, so I’ll try that next time.