Have you ever noticed how pirate treasure maps are like Sitemaps? While your website may not contain a treasure of gold and silver (unless its a metals commodities trading site!), if you have good content, that is certainly treasure to someone who is looking for it. Unfortunately, its buried on your website and no one knows whats there except you! But since you want to share your sites treasure with others,

Gradually Microsoft's massive promotional campaign for Bing and its search verticals may be starting to pay off.  The latest Hitwise statistics on comparison shopping tools for instance is showing that Bing Shopping's market share has increased quite significantly  from the week ending June 6 to the week ending August 8. Comparing the market share of Comparison Shopping Tools,

comScore is running an interesting look into the June search data of  Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.  Overall, the analysis is pointing to the possibility of the combined forces of Microsoft and Yahoo easily catching up with Google's overall search dominance or at least of becoming more competitive against Google. Citing June search market data, comScore's study showed that combining Microsoft and Yahoo's searcher penetration data will amount to 73.3%,

Madrona Ventures may invest in more Internet ad start-ups now that former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews is on board , but it's unlikely to take much interest in agency pure plays. In a brief talk with ClickZ this morning, McAndrews said the VC firm would consider investing in startups with a services component, but he said there would have to be technology attached in some way. For instance, he said Madrona might look at an analytics firm with in-house data analysts. He said,

Woohoo! Todays Google logo celebrates one of my favorite authors of all time: Hans Christian Andersen ! The danish author is best known for his childrens stories including Thumbelina , The Little Match Girl , and, my favorite, The Ugly Duckling . Born April 2, 1805, Andersen.. excuse me a minute. Someones IMing while Im trying to crank this post out. . . well, apparently Googles not celebrating Hans Christian Andersen , but Hans Christian ørsted ! Well,

Hitwise is sharing some information about how well Bing Shopping is doing. They have compared its performance from the week ending June 6th, just after its launch to its performance for the week ending August 8. In that time, Bing Shopping has increased by 169%, according to the information supplied by Heather Dougherty of Hitwise . Bing Shopping entered the firm's category of Comparison Shopping Tools at number 8, with 4% of visits within the category. Last week,

If youre a new Twitter user, youve probably stumbled over the correct etiquette for "retweeting" someone elses tweet. Do you use "RT: @andybeal." or "Retweeting @andybeal.." ? And what about those precious characters lost when you retweet? We only get 140 to start with! Well, Twitter has watched the practice of retweeting closely and thinks it has an official solution. The question is, will you like it? The plan is to add a "Retweet" link to each tweet in your timeline.

Where's the retweet? Can you see it? The big news today: Twitter will finally accept retweets and make them part of the built in system or simply put the Twitter home page. At first I was moderately happy about this overdue move until I read the fine print. In future Twitter will let people block your retweets.

by Mike Krumboltz So, there you are on vacation, enjoying the beautiful scenery, when you decide to take a photo. You want to be in the shot yourself, so you set the timer. You then hurry into position, hug your significant other, plaster a smile on your face, and wait. But just as the shutter snaps, a curious squirrel shows up and stands right in front of the lens. "Hi," it seems to be saying. "Would you rather have a picture of me, instead?" On "The Today Show" this morning,

It looks like video advertisements may become a more standard part of the Google search experience. Television and movie-related clips can already be found, and a report indicates that Google's thinking about running tests with product demonstration clips, too. Google first started experimenting with video ads about 18 months ago.