Whatever browser you currently use, you are going to keep using.
Forget about Google Chrome. It will not add any meaning to your life, much less to your day to day internet browsing. For now anyways. Its a shell, a nice chassis. Wait for the development crowd to spend some time and add their special sauce. Read the rest of this entry ?
Is Google trying to tease Microsoft or just blatantly slap them across the face? The new Chrome browser, that we will here more about tomorrow, shares its name with a failed Microsoft product from 1998. I can’t imagine Read the rest of this entry ?
What could top internet browser news on the same weekend that Google and Firefox agreed to extend their contract (accounting for over 80% of Firefox’s income streams)?
Google Blogoscoped announced that Google itself is coming out with a new type of internet browser, entitled Chrome. It will be completely open source and promising some exciting new features.
The announcement was made with a comic book produced by Google and sent out to industry folks. And here is an official post from the Google Blog.They plan to release more details tomorrow, but for now, here are the high points:
“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” - Google
“We want browsers to find that sweet spot between too many features and too few, with a clean, simple, and efficient user experience.” -Google
Should be a kick in the butt for Microsoft and Mozilla to step things up for their Internet Explorer and Firefox offerings. Internet Explorer enjoys dominance of the browser market because it is shipped with every Windows machine. However, Firefox and Safari (by Apple) have been slowly gaining ground on IE. And any web developer will tell you IE is the devil. Bottom line is, Google’s new Chrome, if it is as clean and successful as most Google offerings are, should change the game completely. It will mean nothing but good things for the consumer and the open source movement as a whole.
span style=”color: #999999;”>Update: Screenshots here (not great quality, but better than none)
Want to reach a ton of people with a free online advertisement?
Flugpo is that service. Its kind of like “Myspace meets Craigslist,” only without the dark alleys, crime and spammers.
As one of many new social networks out there, Flugpo has created a good niche focusing on trusted classified ads, but with more transparency than existing online solutions. It focuses on representing real people authentically so that you can learn about them and earn trust.
Many of these people are entrepreneurs and highly connected web users in their own right, so the relationships have higher value. All Flugpo classifieds are also open to search engines, offering significant SEO and link opportunities. One user even got a call from the Rachel Ray show within 1 hour of posting a classified ad about her “kitchen remodeling contractor” business. Some speedy results.
Flugpo offers a free and effective classified ad section that should meet all of your advertising needs. These ads are picked up by the search engines and can produce big results. - Flugpo Blog
UPDATE: Since this post, we have launched YourSiteScore.com, a collection of online SEO report tools our own higher level SEO assessments (not free).
In the SEO world there are the pros, the novices, and then 99% of the people sit in between. Every webmaster, blogger, small business owner in the world should be learning the basics of SEO. And it does not have to be expensive to teach yourself some useful SEO lessons. There is a vast knowledge base available online, free to browse and educate yourself from, including many many free SEO tools, that can make the trip that much easier along the way.
We plan to add to this list inthe future, but feel free to suggest your own SEO assessment techniques or free tools with a comment below.
The last Olympics definitely had some online flavor to it, but live events? That didn’t happen. The Beijing Olympics is the first truly online Olympics, in the sense that the Obama Campaign is the first presidential campaign to really use the internet. It has happened before, but no where near this scale or value of product.
I remember growing up and being so enthralled by the 88 and 92 Olympics. The main media back then was some prime time replays and newspaper clippings. I remember our family would keep track of the medal count by cutting it out of the newspaper every day. I couldn’t wait to see that tally and add it to the clippings.
After the jump, see a list of places to watch the Olympics live and online.
Today, boy have things changed. Want to see a feature on the host city? Want to research the life story of America’s oldest Olympic athlete? Want to know everything about the construction of the bird’s nest? Its all there is excessive detail. And most importantly, if you want to watch the Olympics, every event, every game? Your only option is not just the 7 NBC networks feature the events. You can now watch everything online, with many events available online live (read more for a list of online live Olympic video).
The Obama Campaign continues to impress in their utilization of new media in this campaign. Here is the exact twitter announcement from the Obama Twitter bot:
Announcing the VP candidate sometime between now & the Convention by txt msg & email. Text VP to 62262 or visit http://my.barackobama.com/vp
Its pretty genius when you consider the immediate benefit he gains. One of the most valuable, after pieces of information in their campaign right now, will be given straight to their supporters. Its a great way to empower the supporters. Its right down the Obama “change” road. And of course he gets the cell phone number for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of his most fervent supporters (and the entire press corps).
I imagine this will be a great tool in increasing supporter response for calls to donate, which they had already mastered better than any other past campaign. Here is the text from the form on the Obama site to sign up to get your text message about the VP announcement:
Be the First to Know | Barack is about to choose a running mate, and he wants you to know first. You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be part of this important moment.
Sign up today and we’ll send you an email announcing Barack’s running mate.
You can also text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone
Yes, sign me up to receive periodic text updates and send me a text of who Barack’s VP nominee is…
What will they think of next?
As we build out the initial character of The Stratius Blog, I am going through the motions of some simple internet marketing steps that I always put in place when launching a blog or website.
These steps are the easy ones, the free or very cheap ones that anyone can do to take care of initial design, SEO, and Social Media efforts. These steps can go a long way, over the course of a couple weeks, towards giving you some good initial traffic. Make sure your content is good and they will keep coming back.
Social Media is fast approaching market saturation, or at least it seems that way. Facebook and Myspace have become mandatory for the young, mobile and even Corporate America. The Obama campaign has certainly made it a mandate that all future major political campaigns have a Social Media or New Media Director. Next up? Our Congressional Leaders.
Qik (live internet video via cellphone) received a nice share of coverage today from First Congressman John Culberson when he used Qik to interview House Republican lawmakers and gain some insight on the discussion about rising energy costs and gas prices. The livestream was embedded on the CSPAN homepage with plenty of comments and discussions going on in the video’s chat. You can view the video here. - ReadWriteWeb
Twitter has seen some congressional love and live blogging. The topic has recently been brought up on the floor to ask the question as to whether it was keeping with congressional rules. The C-Span of tomorrow might just be the I-phones and Blackberries in the pockets of congressional leaders. Perhaps some new insight in the Washington DC culture is soon to follow?
The launch of Cuil, a new (supposedly superior) search engine, has indeed been bittersweet. The product is no where near as cool they seem to be marketing themselves. However, an important question is raised. Is the next trend in online startups the Google killers? And by Google killer, I mean attempts of course, not necessarily success.
In today’s social internet, the next Facebook, Twitter, etc. is right around the corner. New networks and tools pop up every week, but search - search has been relatively stable. Google, MSN, and Yahoo are the big 3, have been for some time. Cuil is just today’s anti-google. Others have tried, and from what I am reading in big start-up news from out west, everyone wants to try and bring Google down. I’ll believe it when I see it though.
Cuil (pronounced [kuːl], “cool“) is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008. - Wikipedia
Cuil was indeed formed, in large effect, by former Google employees, however Cuil is no Google and no Google Killer. Why? Well, I would suggest you test it out for yourself, but the success of searches is not there. The photo thumbnails themselves rarely seem to be relevant. And I much prefer the simlicity and keyword clustering over at Clusty.com, much less hype, better performance.
Apple stands atop the mp3 player, online music, and touch phone markets with countless ipod and iphone killers trying to take their market share and all of them so far failing. Knocking Google off their block seems almost as impossible a task. One thing is clear, do get anywhere close to the big 3 in the search engine game, technology is the answer.
