14 DAY TRIAL // The evolution of Live Search to Bing is affecting the entire span of components that were intimately connected with the search engine. As Bing is slowly swallowing Live Search, Microsoft's latest rebranding exercise expands to all constituent elements. The past week, as Bing was starting to roll out, Microsoft revealed that it was rebranding both Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth. Even at this point in time users are able to access Bing Maps and Bing Maps for Enterprise. The new brand has even spread to the old Virtual Earth blog, which has been transitioned away from MSDN and made an integral part of the Bing Community.
“I’m moving on. No, not from Microsoft or even Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth), but from MSDN. My blog is moving to the new Bing Community site. In fact, if you’re reading this you’re getting the entry from the new site, so “Hello, World!” Yeah, I’m the only person that can say it and mean it,” said Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth (for the time being) technical evangelist for Microsoft.
In fact, the former Virtual Earth blog is not the only resource formerly associated with Live Search that has been moved under the new Bing Community. The old Live Search Webmaster blog and Live Search blog are also part of the new Bing online “society.”
“The new communities site will aggregate all of the greatest Bing Bloggers around Microsoft into a single portal. Now, my old Virtual Earth Blog will be designated as the Bing Maps Blog under the Bing Community. You can check out my new blog at Bing.com/maps. I’ll cover both consumer (Bing Maps) and enterprise (Bing Maps for Enterprise) as a part of my blog. It’s just the new community site and I’ll find ways to hack it up and make it mine over time. And, you may have to update your RSS readers and blog aggregators,” Pendleton added.