I had the opportunity to interview my fellow panelists on the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference session, Images & Optimization , taking place on December 7th at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago. Why Images are Important to Search Engine Optimization. Very simply put, search results are increasingly including much more than just text links.

Microsoft has announced the launch of a new Bing Maps beta, which incorporates Streetside and Photosynth imagery. "The new Bing Maps experience also features innovative new mapping applications such as Twitter Maps for real-time updates by area and Local Lens featuring hyperlocal, neighborhood content," a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. There are a number of interesting apps available,

This could be Bing's last hurrah for the year, as Microsoft launches Bing Maps in beta while at the same time announces a new Bing mobile app, a new toolbar and a visual search experience in the coming days.  While all these new features seem pretty exciting, Bing Maps beta which runs on Microsoft's Silverlight looks to be the most promising.

Today, Satya Nadella Senior Vice President, Online Services at Microsoft unveiled new Bing features at an event in San Francisco . The updates involve Bing Maps, the Bing Mobile App and a new Bing Toolbar. There was also Maps Streetside imaging - yes, that's Microsoft's version of Google's Street View. It's smart for Bing to compete with the Google monster on this one.

As I reported a few weeks back, News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said his company was considering blocking Google from being able to search its Web sites. I used my tabloid headline generator to create " Murdoch to Google: Drop Dead ." Today, the Google News Blog announced " Same Protocol, More Options for News Publishers ." If we run this through my tabloid translator, I think we'd get the following headline: "Google to Murdoch: Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry?

by Jennifer Laycock Back in part two of this series, I took a look at some of the most popular native Facebook Page applications and gave you step by step instructions on how to set them up. Today in part three, we're going to continue diving into the native Facebook Page applications so you can make sure you're taking full advantage of your Facebook presence. Today we're going to take a look at how to make use of the Photos and Video applications.

Hey everyone, As you know, we have been working towards empowering developers to create more feature-rich applications for Digg. Today we are releasing a revamped API that allows developers to write/contribute data using OAuth, a feature that many developers have been eagerly anticipating. In this release, Digging and burying both stories and comments are now supported. In addition to the revamped API,

Bing is on a roll, with even more new features announced today in the U.S. With this update, youll find broader availability of the Bing for Mobile App, a Bing toolbar, and a beta version of Bing Maps, powered by Silverlight. As always, new Bing.

According to research published in new Icelandic book on Internet marketing 80% of the Icelandic nation is using Facebook. Another research done by the international research company Capacent and published in the same book it's revealed that 72% of Internet users, fifty four or younger, in Iceland start their purchase phase by using the search engines when looking for Information on product and services.

by Josh Bernoff For several months now we've been researching "Harnessing the Groundswell", the followup book to Groundswell. The focus is on both empowered customers (think " United Breaks Guitars ") and empowered employees. In both cases, the empowerment comes from the pervasive social, mobile, video-enabled, cloud-propelled technology available to them. A funny thing happened during the research, though. We found that all the employee examples were in marketing, sales,