Carolyn Miller tells us Microsoft recently released the adCenter API V7 into production. Features from the adCenter Summer 2010 Upgrade and several key API improvements are now available. Microsoft will continue to support V6 for up to a year, but Miller suggests upgrading now to V7. She briefly runs down the seven features and improvements.

The book "Groundswell" was about social technologies empowering consumers, but Josh Bernoff's and Ted Schadler's new book "Empowered" discusses how empowered customers place demands on companies, and how it takes empowered employees to fight back. The book refers to those empowered using the acronym HERO, for highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

Christine Laubenstein gives us 10 tips for advertising on Facebook. She tells us that about 200 million people log into Facebook daily and spend 14 minutes on the site. So, Laubenstein walks through each tip, tells us why they are important and, for some, gives examples on how to use them. Most of the tips might appear obvious to the experienced marketer, but a reminder never hurts.

For those wanting to know how a search engine might use OCR to index complex printed pages, Bill Slawski believes he has found the answer in a patent updated by Google earlier this year. Slawski tells us why this is important and what it means to those searching on the Web for information. He explains that the patent application focuses on using OCR for printed documents such as scanned newspapers, but it also discusses how the different features and aspects of a newspaper page might be interpreted.

Are you prepared for the Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance? Kevin Lee provides tips on a variety of related subjects after discovering most companies are not prepared. For starters, marketers that don't have a Microsoft adCenter account, won't need one before the transition. One of the transition options is to have your Yahoo account settings and campaigns converted to an adCenter account. Lee advises against that option and suggests you open a new account now or, if you have one already, that you take a close look at whether or not this account is as well-rounded as your Google account.

Marty Weintraub has released the finding from a Facebook SEO ranking study that looks at what influences search in the social network under a variety of keywords, phrases and categories. The search firm began studying Facebook rankings last year, but built momentum to help clients understand how to best optimize campaigns in the network. The very long post provides a wealth of information. Grab a cup of coffee and clear the calendar for this one.

Joseph Kerschbaum discusses the new Opportunities tab, "Analyze competition," in Google AdWords, which helps compare your PPC performance to competitors. He explains the benefits and pitfalls in a comprehensive post with lots of screen grabs to help visualize the steps.

Courtney Rubin tells us about a single mom who lost her day job when her employer discovered her out-of-hours work involved blogging about her sexual escapades. The woman -- whose blog is called "The Beautiful Kind" -- was unmasked by Twitter search engine Topsy. That led to Topsy's changing the way it identifies users -- but, cautions Topsy spokesman Brian Merritt, the issue of user privacy "is not yet entirely solved."

Rebecca Wright gives us a list of nine critical items to assure you have the key SEO strategy covered. For example, it's obvious that SEO tools make your site more visible to the search engines used by customers to look for products. But did you know search engines calculate the percentage of text appearing on a page to determine whether or not that page is relevant to the requested search?

Peter J. Meyers summarizes a webmaster SEO video marathon with Matt Cutts. In total, there are more than 200 of them, with about 70 posted in 2010. He runs through his top 10 picks, provides links so you can view them, and comments on most. A few extra get honorable mentions. There's also "one shocking conspiracy."