The Next at Microsoft blog highlights a video of a talk given by Stepahnie Horstmanshof and Kristin Dean at the PSFK conference, in San Francisco, about their work around the Bing home page picture of the day. This image, which changes daily, also appears as the background in the Windows Phone's search app. On Windows Phone 8 it can also be set as the lock screen background image.

The talk covers the history of the home page picture, but also provides an insight into how images are selected, the sources of the images, and people's reaction to them over time. It's a fascinating look behind at the curtain at something many of us see every day.

As a reminder, on Windows Phone 8 handsets, you can set the Bing picture of the day as your lock screen background image in the lock screen module of the Settings app. This feature is also being added to existing Windows Phone 7.5 devices, as part of the upgrade to Windows Phone 7.8, which is being released early next year.