In case you haven't seen it, part of my interview that I did with Scoble is up at Channel9. [BTW, big congrats to the Channel9 guys. The site looks great and it survived being slashdotted on its first day. How many dynamic sites do you know can handle a load like that so soon after launch?]
I did a long interview with Scoble and he asked me a lot of questions. It is interesting that he the topic of "Is Avalon a way to take over the Web" is the first that they put up there. I'm glad that it is though as this is definately a hot button topic. I'll be sure to keep an eye on the comments on the video and answer any questions that you guys have.
A little background on me: I joined the IE group at Microsoft in the middle of 1997 right out of college. I'd interned twice -- once on a forgotten product called TeamManager and the second time on the OpenGL inside of Windows. When working on IE, I was responsible for, mostly, the data model for how we stored HTML in memory for processing and rendering. I touched a lot of other code, but my original nickname was "Tree Boy" (to Eric Vasilik's "Tree Man" :) If you have questions on IMarkupServices, I can probably answer them for you.
A couple of years ago, I moved over to the then (very newly) formed Avalon Media Integration Layer and helped define the early vision of what we were going to do with 2D UI level graphics in Longhorn. (The DX team is all over 3D and games!) At one point all we knew that we wanted was CFS, which stood for "Cool Flying Stuff". We upgraded thaet to "Clickable Flying Stuff" and the graphics strategy for Avalon was born. Since then I've been hard at work helping to define and implement a lot of the graphics functionality in Longhorn. Seriously, I think that we are making a huge leap ahead for Windows and look forward to helping everyone understand what we are about. I'm also interested in hearing comments, suggestions and bug reports.