Some of the great features for Bing users in the UK are:

• The daily Bing Homepage image and hotspots are something that now will be localized in the UK, with unique imagery and hotspots.
• Visual Search using visual images and metadata to make search more visual and more compelling.
• More Instant Answers. Get quick response answers and results to searches, such as how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend?
• See who or what is being chatted about real-time with a global live Twitter feed with Bing Twitter search.
• Looking for the best deals?  - There is now an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK. With Bing you can search the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability. 
• With insights from our Multimap users, Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes.
• Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match.

Bing start rolling out features in the UK - I've been looking forward to seeing some of these including the Twitter search - its a bit frustrating that Google and Bing don't roll these out at the same time as the US, its obviously still the prime focus.

I'm still waiting for Google Social Search to kick in even though I signed up, no results seem affected - is this true for anyone else in the UK/Europe or is it just me?

Starting today, Wolfram|Alpha’s knowledge, computed from expertly curated data, will enrich Bing’s results in select areas across nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Wolfram|Alpha provides immediate, unbiased, and individualized information, making it distinctly different from what has traditionally been found through web search. By using Wolfram|Alpha, Bing recognizes the complementary benefits of bringing computational knowledge to the forefront of the search experience.

By using our API, Bing will be able to seamlessly access the tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data from Wolfram|Alpha, and directly incorporate the computations in its search results.

A significant step in Bing's assault on Google, gaining access to the powerful Wolfram supercomputer to aid in mathematical queries. Its another tool to help aid Microsoft's "decision engine", a subtle positioning away from Google which wants to "understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.", a fairly assumptive statement that relies on you wanting Google to know you implicitly - Bing's decision process puts the power back on the user, being more a tool people use than being used by the tool.

So in case it's of use to others who are thinking of doing the same, I've turned BIS's Twitter strategy into a generic template Twitter strategy for Departments (PDF file) [Scribd version ]

You're welcome to re-use this however you like, be that to adopt it wholesale or remix it to suit the needs of your organisation. Let me know any changes you'd make (I am sure there will be lots) via the comments below or get in touch directly.

For the next version of this document I’d like to set down how and when civil servants should support, encourage and manage Ministers' use of Twitter for Departmental business (and navigate the minefield of propriety this might imply), and add a light touch policy for officials who tweet about their work in a personal capacity.

Finally, some of the benefits I've found of having this document in my armoury are:

• To get buy-in, explain Twitter's importance to non-believers and the uninitiated, and face down accusations of bandwagon-jumping
• To set clear objectives and metrics to make sure there's a return on the investment of staff time (and if there isn’t, we’ll stop doing it)
• To make sure the channel is used consistently and carefully, to protect corporate reputation from silly mistakes or inappropriate use
• To plan varied and interesting content, and enthuse those who will provide it into actively wanting to do so.
• As a briefing tool for new starters in the team who will be involved in the management of the channel

I hope you’ll find it useful too.

Praise be to Neil Williams for putting together this fantastic template which can be used for business needs on Twitter, goes into real depth, explains the basics right through to needs Twitter can fulfill, and should be perfect to answer the question "How can my business use Twitter?" - it even includes a list of UK journalists to follow to get you started.

Probably needs an update to include Twitter lists, but we'll wait for the dust to settle down on that first, and the SEO passage ("Twitter ranks well in Google") I debate that only the profiles seem to rank, I've never seen a tweet rank on its own before, but of course we have social search approaching so it will only be more relevant in the future.

- VoteLinks

“Indexing and tracking applications treat all links as endorsements, or expressions of support. This is a problem, as we need to link to those we disagree with as well, to discuss why.”

By including the attributes: rev=”vote-for” or rev=”vote-against” we can indicate in the hyperlink whether we agree with the sentiment in the linked to post, or not. Cool.

Looking ahead, search engines will be able to have more insight into what type of relationships a website has with another via HTML5's VoteLink attribute, as well as the existing "nofollow" for commerical links.

Search results could start showing the equivalent of antonyms on viewpoints - a search for "Labour" could display the most vilified Conservative result as well. (quite difficult in today's centrist politics!)

Did you catch that? I changed <h2> element to an <h1>. But…but…but… shouldn’t you only have one <h1> per document? Won’t this screw up the document outline? No, and here’s why. In HTML 4, the only way to create a document outline was with the <h1>–<h6> elements. If you only wanted one root node in your outline, you had to limit yourself to one <h1> in your markup. But the HTML5 specification defines an algorithm for generating a document outline that incorporates the new semantic elements in HTML5. The algorithm says that an <article> element creates a new section (i.e. a new node in the document outline). And in HTML5, each section can have its own <h1> element.

To be HTML5 compliant, a best practice SEO standard of only one H1 per page would be broken - more markup around sections such as <article> means each section can have its on H1-6 structure, <hgroup>, meaning multiple H1's

Above the announcement video of IDNs (bit cheesy, but you get the idea - no idea what the rock riff at the end is about)

Good stuff, helping the web become international and not Western-bias by allowing local characters to be used in domain names.

One sideproduct of this could be using international characters to add uniqueness to Western URLS - will we see domains like ڡrکraح.com ?

Could we see an equivalent of ASCAII art for domain names?

And how will spammers/phishers exploit this? Already you get sneaky people registering domains like www.paypa1.com (a 1 instead of an l) - what will happen when 1,000,000 extra characters are added?

When Posterous can create duplicate content

However, if you use Posterous to post to a blog, it’s likely to create a duplicate version of your post in two places – on Posterous and on your blog.

That’s fine if your a casual blogger. But, if you are trying to build traffic to your blog you don’t want it competing with the same content on Posterous.

So, what can you do?

You could just make your Posterous mini-blog private and use it to publish out to your other blogs and profiles. But lots people like the way you can post to Posterous and create a link on your Twitter feed back to your Posteorus post instantly.

Or, you could block your blog from the search engine indexes – probably not an option for most though – especially if you reply on your blog to bring you search traffic.

But the best (though not ideal) option is to use the ‘noindex’ metatag for all your Posterous posts.

I don't agree this is the best way of dealing with the issue, and being as I'm such a Posteorus fanboy at the moment I just had to rush to Posterous' defence ;-)

First point - I don't think Posterous posts will cause duplicate content enough to damage your existing blog's SEO. In support of this, I point to Google itself who regularly cross post - look for example the recent announcements of Google Reader:

Google Blog
Google Reader Blog

Identical posts. Now duplicate content isn't a page penalty, rather it is a preference for one post to display in the rankings rather than lots of duplicates - so searching for the title of the Google blog post only returns one result:

Google SERP result

If Posterous does outrank your own site, which it really shouldn't as more links should be going to your blog, I would link to the blog post from the Posterous entry to make sure Google knows which is the preferred source - your blog. This should mean it is chosen to appear in search results over the identical Posterous entry.

Secondly, another method to make sure posterous doesn't outrank your own blog is to make Posterous your blog :-) with the custom domain feature you can transfer it over and enjoy Posterous' features. Edit the HTML to put in your site's header and footer and it should integrate pretty well.

Don't get me wrong, setting Posterous will certainly work, but I think I would prefer to leave it being indexed to increase web coverage and footprint.

A thought provoking slide-show by Sean Parker that Network services will overtake Information services, which in a nutshell means he believes Twitter/Facebook will overtake Google.

But Sean seems to have missed the reason for why Google is a success. Google's link profiling of websites is exactly how it grades search results now, using the very same laws he cites will be their downfall.

The power of networks is how Google serves up those relevant search results - as the number of websites increase, the number of possible connections squares, and the more information on grading those websites becomes available.

Search engines may present information in a linear way, but that information is gathered via network effects. And additional ways to measure those networks besides links is already being pursued, with measures such as social search and searcher profiles connecting with user social graphs from network services.

I agree that information services will always lose out to network services, its just the misclassification of Google that has led to in my opinion the wrong conclusion.

Its already happened - Facebook over took publisher sites a long time ago in pageviews - the top 10 websites in the UK this Feb 09 were, according to Robin Goad of Hitwise:

1. Google.co.uk
2. Facebook.com
3. eBay.co.uk
4. Google.com
5. mail.live.com (Hotmail)
6. Youtube.com
7. uk.msn.com
8. news.bbc.co.uk
9. bbc.co.uk
10. microsoft.com

BBC is the classic UK publisher, and commanded top spot for years until social networking arose.

Also, the risk to social networks Sean highlights is their problem with scale - all those new users means a squared amount of connections to deal with. Google is 5 years ahead of anyone on scaling website traffic, and regard it as a very high priority - the recent Caffeine update is one sign of their commitment to that. It is much more likely that Twitter and Facebook suffer traffic scaling problems than Google. When the recent DDoS attacks brought Twitter and Facebook down, it was Google who gave them advice on how to tackle it.

For example, I have a Google Profile here. On that page, I’ve listed my Twitter account. This means when I’m signed into Google, it can tell who I am and what my Twitter account is with certainty. Then when I search, it can offer to show me web pages that are related to other people in my Twitter profile.

More specifically, if I were do to a search relating to journalism matters, because I follow a number of people in the journalism field (not everyone might see this Twitter List yet), I’d get back both “regular” search results as well as those that are from people who I follow. News.com notes that Mayer said these would appear at the bottom of regular search pages.

Other links from social sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn could also be added to your profile (any link can be added to it). To the degree Google can see your network, those can be used to filter your results.

Above, Danny Sullivan on Google social search giving a foretaste of how it will work.

My own Google profile lists all of my friends activity across many networks, including music, videos, tweets and blogposts,all of which will influence my Google searches when I'm logged in.

A key account listed there is Friendfeed which collects all of my social activity at once giving maximum connection with my social web graph, including Facebook status updates.

Facebook is the missing piece for Google: fuller unadulterated access would mean searcher's closest friends and family habits could influence your search results - I can imagine in the future who you know heavily influencing what you find and learn via search. Facebook isn't giving this up in a hurry, its their prime asset - information about you and your relationships.

Just split up with your girlfriend? A search for life insurance favours single's policies. Terrible in some way, that your life could potentially be examined in such detail just to serve you up better ads.

Added to all this will be location based search - upcoming browsers and smart phones all having you pinpointed to a few hundred yards. And the results will be terrifically useful - I just hope we don't give up too much in return. I really see a big privacy issue brewing in the future - potential international political debates on user privacy - China's internet population offering huge revenues protected by the state.

Will the spammers of the social search future spend their time creating virtual AI personas? It already happens in chat rooms, Russian chat bots looking for personal details.

As the technology to manipulate your data evolves, the data's value becomes higher and higher.

How much are each of your tweets worth?

Dealing With Google: Much of the discussion at Twitter meetings throughout the past six months revolved around dealing with Google and Facebook. In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that “Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet.” But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, “Can we do to google what google has done to others?”

In a May 7 management meeting, Twitter’s search syndication strategy with Google is discussed, as is the desire of “every tech company” to gain access to “Hosebird,” an API Twitter is working on to deliver its full stream of Tweets to search partners and others. The attitude towards Google is cautious: “Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product.”

But by June 9, things seem to have progressed with Google. After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an “agreement for some period of time makes sense – with our parameters.” But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter’s own “search results page needs to be great – better than the landing pages on Google.”

The above is from the Twitter leak documents from July 09 which indicates how the new Google/Bing search deals may look like. The key point is about "Hosebird" the unlimited API which will mean Google won't have to crawl each tweet itself to show them in results.

This is probably the only way a deal would work - even with the Caffiene update I doubt Google will be able to crawl and index tweets as they come, which according to http://www.twitpocalypse.com/ is around 170 tweets per second.