Bing Makes Big Changes to User Interface, Search Experience

Update: Bing has posted a closer look at some more new features including Bing News, Bing Finance, Combined Flight Answers, Auto Suggest, and Visual Search here. And here's more specifically on Finance.

Original Article: Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.

"Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing," says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. "We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive."

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Flickr Photo Pages Get a Change in Design

Flickr has launched a new photo page. Some elements of the page have been enlarged, or "embiggened" as Flickr puts it. Photos are now displayed in a bigger 640 pixel width and the photo page itself is wider.

"As you can imagine, this is the most trafficked page on Flickr, with our 85+ million visitors spending a good deal of time looking at the various images and videos posted by our members," Flickr tells WebProNews. " With the new photo page, we have made the experience Bigger (images are 30% bigger, Faster (on average 50% faster for users), Cleaner (hidden a variety of the actions under two simple tabs) while helping the Flickr member tell a more complete story." 

Photo titles have been moved closer to the description. "Photos represent a lot of information about the moment of capture – what, who, when, how and where. We’ve moved the photo title closer to the description to surface the ‘what’ better," says Flickr's Josh Nguyen. "The photo owner, dates taken, camera, and location of the photo are all within easy reach to the right of the image. The clustering of story elements has sparked many serendipitous discoveries around FlickrHQ – we hope you’ll find them a useful way to dig deeper into photos too."

"When you share your photos on Flickr, one of the more magical moments for your viewers comes when they explore all the rest of what you have on Flickr – your photostream, sets, groups, etc. So we’ve improved the navigation controls and performance on the photo page," adds Nguyen. "Getting from one photo to the next is fast, just a click away with the Newer / Older buttons above the photo. We’ve also rebuilt the film strip from the ground up to preview the photos surrounding the image that you’re viewing. The film strip is a great tool to dip into sets, groups, favorites and all the awesome rabbit holes that you can find on Flickr."

There is a new actions menu and a new light box view to spotlight photos. Also, when someone favorites your photo, that will now appear in the comments and favorites section.

Flickr says these are just a few of the changes it has made, and it will be rolling out the new page to all users over the coming weeks. However, signed-in members can preview the new page starting today.

YouTube to Reward Partners Who Put Ratings on Content

YouTube announced to is U.S. partners today that it has recently rolled out its content rating system to all U.S. partner-uploaded content, and giving away a prize to the first ten  partners that add ratings to all of their content by the end of July.

"Now, when you upload a video that does not have a specified content rating (i.e. MPAA or TV rating), we ask that the partner rate content in these five categories: Language, Nudity, Sexual Situations, Violence and Drug Use. Our content rating system allows you to assign ratings to your YouTube videos either during the upload process or afterwards," saysYouTube's Mahin Ibrahim. "The ratings are reversible, meaning that you can change or remove them at any time if you feel they no longer accurately describe your content."

YouTube says it is doing this because giving advertisers more options means potentially more monetized content for partners. "The vision here is that we'll be able to offer advertisers better ways to match their ads to content based on your self-assigned ratings; accurate ratings that allow for a better content-advertising match can lead to partners like yourself making more money in the end," says Ibrahim.

The prize is a YouTube t-shirt and cap. To win it partners are asked to add accurate content ratings to new videos and go back to all of their old videos to add appropriate content ratings to them as well.

Top 10 great blogging services that host your blog for free

A blog is a website which is run by individual or multiple authors. On a blog site, a user can share his/her life experiences or their can be professional purpose. Now a days people are blogging just for the sake of money but their still are souls who consider it to be a passionate part of hobby.

15 free and open source tools for web designers / developers

Their are very vast amount of free and open source tools for designers.Here are the 15 best open source and professional tools of the web savvy designer:

1. Agave – Agave is one of the best solution for designers to feel the color scheme, contradicts colors, soft colors & all with a fabulous outlook.
   
2. NVU -  The open source replacement for Dreamweaver.You can Design, develop, and maintain professional websites and applications and yes its absolutely free.
   
   

Top 50 Free Open Source Content Management System

WordPress – WordPress is a high-tech content management platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Many might know WordPress as just blogging platform but it has soon capturted the CMS industry with its customized and powerful plugins.

Joomla – Joomla is a well-known award-winning content management system (CMS) that let you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. With  Joomla CMS you are  free to add many extra interesting modules and components that would improve the value of your blog/website and can also enhance your visitors’ experience.

Drupal – Drupal is CMS package that allows users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Many have used this as a back-end system for different kinds of websites such as small personal blogs to large corporate sites.

Mambo – Mambo is a full-featured, content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. It is already been used all over the world to power government portals, corporate intranets and extranets, ecommerce sites, community sites and more.

Does the World Still Need Twitter?

From WebPro News

Twitter users know that the service goes down fairly often, but that doesn't seem to alienate them. While Twitter has certainly had its issues with user retention in the past, it continues to grow. Last month, the sitegrew by nearly 10% (over the previous month) by our estimates, with total registered users estimated at 122 million. That's not Facebook-like numbers, but it's pretty significant. One almost has to wonder if those numbers would be higher if the "Fail Whale" didn't make so many appearances. Twitter users, for the most part, don't seem to mind him too much though. 

The Downtime

Frequent downtime is nothing new for Twitter. It's been going on pretty much as long as Twitter's been around. You would think that by now, they'd have it under control, but no such luck. 

The latest post on the Twitter status blog from just today says, "We're currently experiencing a high rate of errors (whales) on Twitter.com. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are responding to the incident. One from Monday night talks about site availability issues. This is a pretty common theme on the blog. June 9th..."site availability issues". June 8th...site availability issues...May 5th..."site largely unavailable. April 22nd..."elevated errors." April 20th..."high error rate." April 12th...."high error rate." April 5th..."general site outage." March 25th..."high error rate." You get the idea. This is all scattered among posts about missing tweets, missing follower counts, and other issues. And I'm pretty sure there has not been a corresponding update every time I've personally seen the Fail Whale. 

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Will Google Buzz Find Mainstream Appeal?

Google Making Moves to Make Buzz More Useful

Google is starting to make some significant moves that may give Google Buzz a significant boost. For example, this week, a "Reshare" button was announced. This is essentially Google's version of the retweet. If you follow a Buzz user who posts an interesting update, you can hit the "reshare" button (down with the comment, like, and email buttons) to repost that post to your own Buzz stream. 

Reshare only works for public posts. Private posts will not have the reshare link. However, you can reshare posts yourself publicly or privately. If a lot of people you follow reshare the same post, the similar posts will be collapsed. 

"You'll notice that resharing creates a new post, effectively forking the conversation. To fork or not fork was a decision we debated for a while," says Buzz software engineer Sam Goto. "Ultimately, we think forked conversations help create more varied, intimate discussions around a single item. We realize people may want a non-forking version too, so we're thinking about how to do that as well."

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Google Wave Turns One

Exactly one year ago today, a product that was supposed to represent a new and innovative means of communication debuted at Google I/O.  Now, Google's celebrating Wave's first birthday by trying to convince a few more people to give the tech a chance.

That observation isn't necessarily meant to slight Google Wave or the team behind it; almost any time a company chooses to commemorate something, one purpose must be to attract new users (and/or reengage old ones).  It's just that an official blog post concerning Wave's birthday focused more on promoting it than distributing stickers or some other nonsense.

Anna-Christina Douglas, a product marketing manager at Google, appealed to ordinary individuals by writing, "[T]he ways I use Wave aren't revolutionary or groundbreaking - I communicate about everyday things, but it is these incredibly ordinary and important communications that are transformed in unexpected ways when you use Wave."

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Apple iPad Tops 2 Million In Sales

Apple said Monday iPad sales have surpassed two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3.

Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past Friday. iPad is set to launch in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

"Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. 

"We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone."

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