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Last week, to coincide with the launch of the rather swanky MSN Video Player in the UK, I interviewed Ashley Highfield who heads up our Consumer & Online division here in the UK.

Just seen the new Robin Hood movie trailer in HD!

This is really a very cool development for the MSN UK, built on the back of Ashley’s experience at the BBC with the iPlayer, now you can watch full time TV shows with no sign up or login and all in the beauty of Silverlight.

Not going to get much work done today now are you?

Just posted a video interview with Ashley over on the adCenter blog on the new Bing UK TV Ad and what it all means!

Did you see it? What did you think?

Remember this is a campaign……there’s more on the way!

…..who obviously hasn’t seen the news yet.

Just watched the live webcast from Spain on this new beauty!

Check out all the details and start saving – not too hard though – I’m sure they’ll be affordable!

Really very proud of this bit of writing.

The paper tells how our team came about and how we’ve worked over the last 4 years with social media – blogs, forums, Twitter & Facebook – to support, educate and listen to advertisers all over the world.

Download from our ad site using the link below and let me know what you think!

Learn & Earn – a B2B White Paper on Social Media

You can read a fuller explanation on out blog about our approach to social media and the paper.

P.S. Only last week we were called out as B2B Social Media Winners – must be doing something right!

I’ve just been writing about Spatial Search and Bing Maps on the work blog and have just been sent another example of Deep Zoom technology put to good use.

Last month I wrote about some snow pictures submitted to MSN which was awesome, but this Michael Jackson installation is Thrilling!

“The image on this page is your entry point to hundreds of photos of Michael Jackson, his life, his work, his fans and tributes to his career as King of Pop.

Click and roll your mouse to zoom in or move around the images easily. Please ensure you have installed the latest version of Silverlight in order to make the zoom function work. It is quick and easy to install from here if you haven’t yet done so!”

Check it out: http://www.msn.michaeljackson.shoothill.com

You have to laugh at the creativity here.

Not that I condone some of the conclusions drawn by my fellow compatriots, but it does present a different view of the social media phenomenon sweeping the globe.

I’ve never actually been to an SMX in the US, just London & Stockholm, but this one looks like a cracker as Danny Sullivan finally gets to meet & quiz Steve Ballmer.

Last summer, I got to meet and interview Steve – CEO of Microsoft in case you didn’t know – for a whole 81 seconds.

Why so short? Well it was for an internal video, I only had to ask a couple of questions, and he’s a jolly busy man.

A great character and incredibly close to the detail of what we do in search and the advertising business, I know that an hour with Danny will be one of THE search chats of 2010.

Check out my interview with Danny on what to look out for at SMX West 2010

Have fun if you’re going!

Wrote a post on in-game advertising earlier on the work blog, but thought it’d be cool to share here too.

I’m not a huge soccer fan, but this execution of advertising is, as my brother-in-law Chasen would say, “pretty righteous!”

Essentially the technology targets particular ESPN coverage information to what ever teams are playing in the game.

So if you’ve chosen Portsmouth as your team, the ads that come up will be promoting the next match they’re playing that’s going to be on ESPN.

Simple but effective!

From an article on the New York Times – “Microsoft really competes with everyone. It is on the desktop, in the cloud, on mobile devices, in your living room, answering search queries and navigating you to your favorite restaurant.”

Lots of debate in the comments section of the post too!