Having bid farewell to Bill Gates, Microsoft tempered its appetite for Yahoo,tweaked Vista, leapt into cloud computing, allowed a peek at Windows 7, and warmed up to open source. In any era of change, there are bound to be many stories underscoring tension and difficulty as well as others pointingthe way forward and laying out the new vision. Read more Silverlight is a new cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications (RIA) for the web.Silverlight integrates seamlessly with your existing JavaScript and ASP.NET AJAX code to complement functionality which you have already created. Currently there are 2 versions of Silverlight: Microsoft Silverlight extends and amplifies your existing development skills, empowering you to build new types of applications for the Web regardless of target plat form or browser. Read more WebProNews' Mike McDonald caught up with Matt Cutts of Google at the Hofbrau Haus in Las Vegas during PubCon to get his views on a number of topics Read more Google Earth had a great year in 2008 thanks to its continued growth in popularity, new features, and an enormous growth in new content both from Google and the people who use Google Earth. According to Google there have been over 400 Million unique installations of Google Earth since it was released in 2005. There were 8 major updates to Google Earth imagery in 2008. Read more Social marketing is the new search engine optimization. Reciprocal voting is the new reciprocal linking. It offers a fairly low barrier to entry, and the opportunity to drive a TON of traffic in a short period of time. Even more importantly, social media has become a cornerstone of the strategy for launching sites, or improving their link popularity. Read more