If you have been paying attention to what Google has been doing as of late to improve its user experience, you might be noticing something strange. It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing. Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?

Display advertising, where Google does not shine as brightly as it does in search ads, could be coming to the image searching side of the site.

Researchers for Google recently presented a paper on applying the company’s PageRank technology to the world of product image search.

Adobe released its latest rich Internet application, an online version of its signature image manipulation program, Photoshop.

That it’s near the corner of Cedar and Shaft doesn’t help, and that Google Maps picked it up makes it a legendary prank. And if aliens happened to be flying over Hazelton, Pennsylvania around the same time the aerial photograph was taken, this is what they saw.

Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added)

It seems like Digg users have been asking for–and Kevin Rose promising–a category for images and photos forever. Well the long wait is now over and you can finally uploaded your favorite lolcats image.

At the Digg blog, Kevin Rose announces the launch of image support and also better organization of existing categories. Here’s what Digg users are waking up to today:

It took a while but Digg finally has an images category available for contributions and sharing with other Diggers.

On Picasa’s homepage, a slogan proclaims, “Fast and easy photo sharing from Google.”  The exchange now seems to work in the other direction, as well, since Picasa results have been integrated into Google Image Search.

Joint Photographic Experts Group, which owns the JPEG standard, has voted to make Microsoft’s HD Photo their new standard, under the name JPEG XR.

A high-resolution image of Da Vinci’s "Last Supper" will be posted on the Internet Saturday October 27 by an Italian technology company providing fodder for art enthusiasts and conspiracists.

Every company is a media company now – so sayeth Richard Edelman during his presentation.

Gone are the days when my mental picture of the community "out there" was shaped by the the hand-picked Letters to the Editor in the print newspaper.

Google Blogoscoped reports that Yahoo’s Image Search now particularly likes Flickr content, so this may be incentive for webmasters to use Flickr “as a kind of Yahoo search engine optimization”.

Internet bandwidth can be a scarce commodity in the midst of a product launch, so “hotlinking” or having someone post one of your images, audio or video from their website, blog or forum can reduce your total available Internet bandwidth. Here are a couple of fixes for this issue.

Search engines can’t read text in images, which can be a problem for image-heavy sites. A panel at SES San Jose explored the issues of indexing such sites, and working with image-specific search engines.

Looks like Microsoft is hell-bent on making it impossible to tell what’s a real image and what’s been doctored, and is intent on making it so anybody with a digital camera can do so.