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.