In this article, Linda goes into depth with some of the new Facebook changes, which may help you promote your business in a more efficient manner in this medium

It's been a few weeks since Linda talked about social media. In this article, she expounds on some of the changes that have occurred at Twitter, Facebook and Ning...and, she introduces a few more sites that may help you network with other designers, future clients and even your geeky neighbour.

The Windows Browser Ballot, the browser selection screen that is being offered to Windows users in Europe starting this month, is already coming under fire. Slovakian IT news site DSL.sk decided to test the ballot and found that its distribution was very peculiar, with Internet Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the time when the ballot was viewed from within IE.

Opera Software today released Opera 10.50, the fastest Web browser thus-far produced for Windows computers. Opera 10.50 also includes a sleek and refined new design, as well as private browsing, where Opera hides all traces of sites you visit.

Google announced its latest acquisition on Monday, the online image editing service Picnik. In Google's own words, Picnik was "one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud."

The Opera team has released 10.50 for Mac and along with it some impressive performance numbers. Released on Thursday and powered by a new JavaScript engine, Opera 10.5 beat all comers to easily take the top speed spot.

What will Twitter’s long-awaited ad platform look like? Something like Google’s. That’s the general description of Twitter’s plan, according to people who have been briefed by the company.

Yahoo has begun to integrate Twitter posts into its search results, following in the footsteps of Google and Microsoft. The company began rolling out the first of a handful of Twitter-integrated features Wednesday, with most of the other offerings coming later this year. Eventually, Yahoo users will not only be able to see tweets in search results, they'll also see them on other Yahoo properties for specific topics and be able to use Yahoo portals to send tweets as well.

The Telegraph reported that European regulators have sent a letter to Google asking the company to explain how it ranks search results and advertising after complaints from European businesses such as Foundem, a price comparison site, and Ciao, another price comparison site owned by Microsoft.

A Chinese programmer with ties to the government has been fingered as the author of the program used to carry out the high-profile cyber attacks against Google and other companies earlier this year.

Google has announced that it plans to discontinue active development of Gears, a browser plug-in that enables Web features like local storage and geolocation services. The search giant says that emerging Web standards offer increasingly viable alternatives to the specific capabilities that are provided by Gears.

Adobe Photoshop, the software product that redefined creativity in the digital age, turns 20 on Feb. 19, 2010. Around the world, Photoshop fans were celebrating the impact their favorite software has had across photography, art, design, publishing  and commerce.

MobileMe has been updated to offer at least some functionality when accessing the me.com  page from Mobile Safari. It doesn't yet offer full access to MobileMe's features via the browser, but it does allow access to the "Find My iPhone" feature from an iPhone or iPod touch.

If you've ever wondered what the hubbub was about social media, this book may help you learn about the basics. And, if you're already involved with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn, this E-book may provide ideas about how to update your blog and how to become involved with online community development.

In this tutorial, you can learn how to change your masthead in your WordPress theme. This change may involve working with a CSS file, which Linda also covers here. You will need to use Photoshop or some other graphic program that can create .jpg, .gif and/or .png files.

Are you ready to add images to your WordPress blog? This tutorial can help you with your decisions on how to use images in your blog before you begin to upload images. Linda talks about placement, colour and resources on finding images for your blog.

If you've ever wondered what the hubbub was about social media, this book may help you learn about the basics. And, if you're already involved with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn, this E-book may provide ideas about how to update your blog and how to become involved with online community development.

The last three years has seen an explosion in new smartphone operating systems. The one company missing from that list is, of course, Microsoft. Though a long-time player in the smartphone OS market, Windows Mobile is outclassed by its competition. The recent 6.5  release has done little to redress the balance. Windows Mobile is slow, unstable, clunky, and fundamentally not designed for use with fingers. Yesterday at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft showed off its new phone platform for the first time.

At Mobile World Congress 2010, Adobe announced advancements to the Adobe Flash Platform including the unveiling of Adobe AIR on mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications to come out of the Open Screen Project, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe that has grown to close to 70 ecosystem partners.

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

A major European campaign, Safer Internet Day (SID), kicked off yesterday, with the intent of teaching children aged five and up the importance of protecting their online identity and not talking to strangers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, in association with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), took the opportunity to launch a new version of IE8 that makes it easy for youngsters to find information about staying safe online.

Microsoft said it was investigating issues in Windows 7 that affect batteries on certain notebooks after hundreds of users reported they thought the OS was to blame. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, has posted a lengthy response on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

The next major release of Firefox will not be compatible with Macs running Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This comes from a mozilla.dev.planing discussion on Google Groups started by Josh Aas, a Mozilla-employed developer working on the project. The change will go into effect later this year when the browser's Gecko rendering engine makes the jump from 1.9.2 to 1.9.3.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said.

You already may have child themes down and you've built a few from some WordPress themes. But, have you thought about building a child theme from another child theme? In this article, Linda shows how to accomplish this small feat, which is very similar to building a child theme from scratch.

A week ago we started a competition to give 5 copies of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's guide  book away! Today, after pointing out names in the dark, we have our lucky winners: Dan Trudeau, Arthus Woods, Kim Christensen, Michael Ryle and Peter Stevenson. Everyone will be notified via email, so you can get your books as quick as possible.

An online petition calling for British government agencies to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been launched on the official site of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Microsoft has provided some early testers with a near-final "release candidate" version of Office 2010 as the software maker works to make the suite broadly available in June.

About two weeks ago, a startup based in Alexandria, Minnesota by the name of Striquent quietly launched a new website that combines results from major search engines. "The idea for qrobe.it was born out of a discussion on if the search experience can be improved upon or as the saying goes 'one can't improve what is already perfect,'" Nisha Boban, QA Analyst at Striquent.

In a blog post, Aaron Boodman, the developer of the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox, announced that Chrome version 4 and later will support most of the JavaScript-coded Greasemonkey scripts without any additional tweaking necessary.