The Picasa team has opened a new blog dedicated to Picasa 2 where they may be posting tips and tricks on how to use Picasa 2.

The first tip is about Collage:

Making a collage in Picasa 2 is an easy and fun way to present a group of pictures. Here are a few tips for creating exactly the collage you want:

• By default, the image used for the background is the last one in your selection.
• Use captions! If you add captions to your pictures, they will appear in Picture Pile collages.
• You can shuffle the picture ordering by clicking on the preview (this will also affect the background image if you are using one).
• For Picture Piles, you can shuffle the picture locations by holding down SHIFT and clicking on the preview.
• Remember that your collage will be made from all of the pictures in the Picture Tray, so you aren't limited to the pictures in just one folder or label. Just drag all of the pictures you want in the collage to the Picture Tray before pressing the Collage button.
• Don't worry if pictures look a little fuzzy in the preview. The preview uses low resolution images, but the final image will be rendered using full resolution images.

Picasa 2 was on the official Google blog by Lars Perkins (General Manager, Picasa).

New from MSN today are a few more local versions of their Newsbot news search beta. Online today:

• Newsbot Australia
• Newsbot Canada
• Newsbot Canada (French)

Here is the list of all available versions:

Europe: Belgium France Germany Ireland Italy Spain Switzerland (French) Switzerland (German) United Kingdom

Americas: Canada Canada (French) Latin America U.S. (Spanish) United States

Africa: South Africa

Asia: India Indonesia Malaysia Philippines Singapore

Australia: Australia

(From SEW blog)