The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a tech blog post up from a writer who visited the nearby Redmond campus of the software giant, for a look at a different spin on the multi-touch Surface concept. It’s a silver ball that multiple users can fiddle with at the same time, the point of which largely escapes poor, clueless me. It has the usual satellite image of the world (which you can spin! … Whee!!!), photos you can stretch and slide around, and so on. The Microsoft researcher stressed this is just a test to see what kinds of surfaces this sort of technology can be applied to. Ok. My dumb-assed point of view is that maybe they try this out on some surfaces that actually have a commercial or consumer application. There are countless applications looking for an affordable solution, like multi-language wayfinding in public places. Why do we keep seeing demos of people flipping photos around???…