It was only after I did the research when I realized that a lot of hard work really went into the development of Google Chrome for Mac OS X. In fact, it literally took over one year to release into beta. In September of 2008, software engineer, Mike Pinkerton, was assigned to help with the Chromium Project and Google Chrome.

Prior, he had accepted a position at Google back in September of 2005 to do work for their Firefox team, and four months later moved to Google’s Mac Client Team. Pinkerton has many years of experience in the web browser industry starting in 1997 with Netscape Communications. But interestingly enough, it was during that time when Mike Pinkerton and his partner began working on the Camino web browser.

Camino is a Mozilla based browser developed specifically for Mac computers. Camino is a very fine tuned web browser. In fact, just last month, Camino 2.0 was officially released. Now the ironic part to all this is the fact that while Mike Pinkerton was developing Camino, he also was developing Google Chrome at the same time. Active users have been eagerly waiting over a year for the release of Google Chrome for Mac and the update on Camino, and interestingly enough, both came within a month from each other.

The great news is that Google Chrome is finally here for Mac and also a great alternative to FireFox is available as well. I’ll provide a review on Camino in the near future. In the mean time, I’d like to dig into Chrome for Mac and explain some of the features.

To begin with, Pinkerton explained that it was important to make sure that the Mac version of Chrome was fast, stable, and secure, just like the Windows version. He stated that they completely rebuilt Chrome for Mac from the bottom up and made many fo the useful Mac OS X features apart of the Google Chrome experience.

Some of these native features include integrating the Mac OS Spell Checker. Another is Keychain. They wanted to make it so that passwords created by users could be stored and accessed centrally even when created by other web browsers. Additional features unique to Mac include sandboxing support which helps make Chrome even more secure.

To learn more about the key features of Google Chrome and more details about Google Chrome for Mac, I recommend tuning into Mike Pinkerton’s presentation video below:

One of the key features that I personally enjoy the most is the Omnibox. Becuase of that, I want to also include a second video that explains more about it and how it can benefit you:

All in all, I am very glad to see Google Chrome finally available for Mac. Keep in mind, this is a beta release and there’s going to be a lot more work done before it’s final. Also, beta for Mac is different than beta for PC. For instance, Google Chrome for Mac doesn’t support extensions yet which make it difficult to customize, although as of writing this, TechCrunch has some updates about that. You can check out the post on Google Mac Blog and the post on Google Chrome Blog to learn more. If you want to learn more about Mike Pinkerton, you should check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.  Over the next few weeks I am going to use both Chrome and Camino and write a future article depicting their differences.

When Google Chrome web browser was first introduced, instantly I was hooked. The browser performed beautifully, it was super fast, and amazingly stable. Seriously, it never crashed. But keep in mind, the browser wasn’t perfect. Simple things bothered me such as the lack of add on features, inability to auto discover RSS feeds, and huge complications with setting Chrome as the default web browser. these imperfections, while they might seems severe, were nothing compared to dealing with Internet Explorer crashing, and FireFox performing slow. Again, using Chrome is literally like riding on a greased lightning bolt. It’s fast, super fast.

Google Chrome has other important features that I enjoy, such as being able to use the address bar as a Google search bar:

With all that goodness, unfortunately, my use for Google Chrome came to a sudden end when I purchased my first MacBook computer. Talk about bitter sweet feelings. First off, your next computer purchase totally needs to be a Mac. I personally recommend it. I will never use a Windows based computer again. Mac computers are so well built, I had to take a few minutes to figure out how to turn my MacBook off. I literally had my MacBook running for two months before I finally needed to restart it, and I simply didn’t know how to do it.

That said, here’s the conflict. In my opinion, Google Chrome is by far the best web browser available. It blows Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari out of the water. The interface is very clean, simple, and extremely condusive towards a healthy browsing experience. But since I purchased my MacBook, the problem is that Google Chrome hasn’t been available for Mac. The great news is that this has all changed. Google Chrome for Mac is finally available via their early access release channel.

Installing Google Chrome on your Mac computer is very easy. It took me less than a minute. Simply visit the early access release channel. Click on the Mac Tab and proceed to download the Dev Channel: GoogleChrome.dmg. After the file has been downloaded, extract it and then drag the Chrome appliction into your Application folder:

Once Chrome has been installed, you can access it by opening up Finder and navigating to your Applications Folder.

For convenience, you may want to drag the Chrome icon into your Dock. I hope that you’re as happy as I am being able to use Google Chrome again. Now Mac users have the best of both worlds. we can all use the best web browser on the best computer available.

So far you’ve probably noticed that Yahoo! has shut down many of their old services such as Yahoo360 and GeoCities. And then you may have discovered that Yahoo! has released a new marketing campaign, homepage, search engine, and have started going nuts about selling ads in their new search result pages.

A lot is changing with Yahoo!, and even the famous yodel is subject to change. In fact, earlier last week, Yahoo! set up a mobile recording studio in the middle of Times Square and invited anyone passing by to record their version of the yodel. Lucky winners with the best yodel will become famous and earn bragging rights that their yodel is the official Yahoo! yodel. The yodel was one of the things discussed in the interview with Elisa Steele.

She offered assurance that Yahoo! was going to continue using the original yodel; however, to align properly with their promise of making Yahoo! all about about person relevance, they are going to be collecting personal yodels around the globe. In fact, in addition to setting up mobile studios, such as the one in Times Square, Yahoo! has created a web based Yodel Studio.

So you might wonder why would Yahoo! want to re-brand after 15 years of being one of the most widely recognized and successful companies in the world. It may seem strange that Yahoo is investing time and money into creating one of the largest re-branding campaigns ever. Yahoo decided to launch their new brand campaign is to remind consumers where Yahoo! is today, and the kind of services they can offer people in the modern era of the Internet today. Check out this video below that captures the exclusive thoughts of Elisa Steele behind the new Yahoo! marketing campaign.

This Q&A with Elisa Steele is the first in a new series of videos called Yahoo! Yodelcasts, hosted by Nicki Dugan, blog editor for Yahoo!

To stay on top of current events and news about Yahoo! I recommend reading their Yodel Anecdotal blog and subscribing to their RSS Feed. It wouldn’t hurt to pick up a subscription to their YouTube Channel as well.

What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo! and do you think that their new marketing efforts will cause you to switch to using Yahoo! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I have been using TwitterFeed.com for about a year and quite honestly, I have not been able to find another service like it. TwitterFeed.com is a free service that allows you import various RSS feeds and each time they update, TwitterFeed will automatically post a tweet will on your Twitter page.

That said, I received an email from TwitterFeed today informing me that their team has been hard at work making improvements to their system. And, I’ll admit, it’s been awhile since the last time I logged in, and indeed, a lot has changed. Over the last year, TwitterFeed has grown a lot and today there’s over 350,000 publishers pushing out almost 600,000 feeds, all of which generate around 5.5 million total clicks daily.

Dealing with this explosive growth, the staff at TwitterFeed admit that it was challenging to maintain a level of reliability, and at times they would experience floods of traffic that would overwhelm their system. In an effort to accommodate the quick growth, they have been working on expanding their system by building a completely new architecture which will capable of handing millions of posts sent to FaceBook, Twitter, and other places daily.

The great thing about TwitterFeed is their newly released features. For starters, they’re now working with Pubsubhubbub, which means that on some sites such as TypePad and Blogger, users will be able to publish their TwitterFeed posts in real time. Soon features will become available to WordPress.

The feature I am most excited about is the FaceBook integration. On TwitterFeed, you can now automatically publish your RSS feed entries into FaceBook. Additionally, you will also be able to track statistics. Specifically, you’ll be able to differentiate between FaceBook traffic and Twitter traffic, and ultimately see which place is delivering more traffic back to your site.

Tracking statistics is important, and that’s also where their new Google Analytics Integration kicks in. TwitterFeed now includes special ‘UTM’ tags within each post so that you can study traffic patterns and gain an understanding of how and where people are coming from within FaceBook and Twitter.

The staff is in the process of rolling out these new updates today. They do warn that it may be a few days until everything is complete but assure that once the migration into the new system is complete, everything will operate much smoothly and expandability will occur with ease. If you’re looking for an easy and automatic way to share your RSS feed content on FaceBook and Twitter, I recommend getting a free TwitterFeed.com account. Signing up is totally free, and the benefits are invaluable.

In my previous article I wrote about a tool called Google Moderator, and how it can help you as a site owner collect valuable feedback from your visitors. I realized that creating polls and surveys is another excellent way for you to gather feedback from your visitors. With Google Moderator, you give visitors open access to submit ideas, ask questions, or offer suggestions.

While that’s very important, perhaps there’s a few specific things that you’d like to know? And with that, that’s where PollDaddy.com comes into play.

PollDaddy.com is a site that offers you the tools to build your own custom polls and surveys which then allow you to engage with your audience. Polls and surveys are useful because it makes it possible for you to find out how your visitors feel about certain things.

PollDaddy.com has many helpful features such as real time reporting, and data exporting via XML, CSV, Email, or even RSS. Additional features include customizable skins, an advanced survey editor, and 11 question types to choose from with multiple options for each.

I have used PollDaddy.com many times on my own blog in the past and so have leading companies such as PCWorld, Read/WriteWeb, WIRED, TechCrunch, and FOX. You can sign up for a free account which includes all the tools needed.

You can sign up for a Pro account or a Pro2 account which gives you even more features. Take a minute to compare accounts to find the one that is right for you. Lastly, to make the best of their service, PollDaddy.com offers tips and tricks on their blog. Their blog is updated often, so I recommend subscribing to their RSS feed to keep updated with their latest entries.

Google Voice is a very useful service that allows users to sign up and acquire a free telephone number that includes unlimited voicemail, unlimited SMS messaging, and voicemail transcriptions. Needless to say, Google Voice is totally hot, and I am surprised that there isn’t more buzz being generated about the service. Ironically though, it wasn’t until yesterday when I realized that my Google Voice account has some value to it. Watch the video below to discover how you can use Google voice to get free unique and keyword rich content for your blog or website without having to write it yourself.

It all started back early in 2007 when I created a free account on a site called GrandCentral. I used my account as a way to communicate with my blog readers. I posted my telephone number and readers were able to call and leave me voicemail. This in return gave me ideas for things to write about in future articles. A few months later, I stopped using GrandCentral and it seems that Google also purchased them later that year in July.

My account remained inactive since then and it was just recently when I logged back in due to receiving an email notification of a voicemail received. At that point I realized the value my account held. I soon discovered that Google Voice is available by invite only and that my GrandCentral account was migrated automatically. Naturally, I took more interest in Google Voice once it registered in my mind and I discovered that I had something that wasn’t available to the general public.

Google recently announced that they are starting to load accounts up with invites. I haven’t received any invites loaded into my account as of yet. However, when I do, I’ll be more than happy to share them with you. In the mean time, if you’re really eager about getting a Google Voice account, you can look on eBay, as many people are selling their invites there. This isn’t uncommon. Gmail invites as well as the more recent Google Wave invites both have seen the auction block on eBay. At any rate, share your thoughts about Google Voice, we’d like to learn more about what you think.

If you’re interested in learning how to increase your AdSense earnings, then on November 5th the Content Revenue Strategies team will be available to help you get the most from AdSense, and ultimately help you increase your earnings. The event will be held in New York at the Javits Convention Center during the ad:tech New York conference. The full ad:tech conference will be from the 4th thru the 6th; however, CRS will be held on the 5th.

It’s claimed that CRS is the first and only conference and expo dedicated strictly to AdSense and contextual advertising. It’s geared for small to mid-sized publishers who want insider tips on how to maximize AdSense earnings and increase revenue opportunities. Equally, CRS caters to advertisers who want to learn more about buying advertising across Google’s network and how to maximize targeting of advertisements to get the most of out campaigns.

Early registration price is $395 and includes a full day of education for bloggers, individual publishers, social media publishers, video publishers, advertising networks, search advertisers, search engine marketing agencies, search engine marketing service providers, and search technology vendors.

Of course, if you want to attend the full ad:tech conference, the price is $1195. You’ll be kept real busy with the full schedule of events and exhibiting companies. A few that may interest you include: FaceBook, Google, and Website Magazine. At a minimum, if you’re looking to really make the most of the AdSense program and increase your earnings, then I recommend attending the CRS. It’s affordable, far enough in advanced to make plans, and you’ll be aligned with some amazing and knowledgeable people.

As a blogger, there’s many times when I need to create online video tutorials to share with my readers. Adding videos to your blog posts can help capture people’s attention, add different incoming traffic ports, increase the number of people who read and subscribe to your blog, and boost your organic ranking in search engines. The question is, where is the best place to upload videos to?

I can say that determining the best place to upload your videos to is up to you. The reason is because there are advantages and disadvantages with using different services. Below, I have included a copy of the same video that I uploaded into multiple online video sharing sites and also included are my opinions about each. You can review each video and read my opinions about each and determine which online video sharing site is best for you.

YouTube.com

YouTube.com is the most popular online video sharing site online. I would recommend using YouTube because of the added SEO value and traffic you can pipe back into your web site and pages. The disadvantages of using YouTube is that your videos will degrade in quality, and they can NOT exceed ten minutes in length. Because of the time limit, I was not able to upload my video to YouTube.com. Another thing that bothers me is that YouTube.com doesn’t inform me that the video isn’t going to process.

Yahoo! Video

I was actually quite impressed with Yahoo! Video. It has similiar qualities to YouTube.com, but doesn’t have the time restriction. The quality seems to be the same as YouTube.com. The disadvantages, in my opinion, is the lack of traffic, and SEO value. Uploading and processing the video didn’t take long at all, about 15 minutes.

MotionBox Formally AOL Video

AOL Video has been discontinued and traffic is being redirected to a service called MotionBox.com. I decided to give MotionBox.com a try and I am pleased with their service. The process of uploading a video was very clunky and not very systematic. The end result was a video higher in quality compared to YouTube.com and Yahoo! Video. The audio didn’t render quite as well. The disadvantages of using MotionBox.com is the clunky interface, lack of traffic, and I am sure lack of SEO value.

Vimeo Video

I enjoy using Vimeo a lot. It’s one of my favorite places to upload videos to. The interface is very user friendly and the uploading process is conducive to productivity. The problem I have with Vimeo is that it can take up to 30 minutes to batch videos if you have a free account. While this is annoying, I do understand and appreciate their business model. A premium account can be had for under $60 / year, which is very fair. The video and audio quality is amazing. The sharing features are brilliant. One of the things I enjoy most about the sharing features is that Vimeo will do the math for you when you’re customizing proper sizing.

Viddler Video

Viddler reminds me a lot of Vimeo but slightly lesser in quality, but much better than MotionBox, YouTube, and Yahoo. Viddler doesn’t quite match the quality that Vimeo can produce, nor do they offer the robust sharing features. A neat feature about Viddler is the fact that you can record videos on the fly, meaning you don’t have to use desktop software, such as Camtasia, to create the video. With Viddler, you can use record directly on their site.

Where Is The Best Video Sharing Site?

My vote goes to Vimeo. I would recommend upgrading to a premium account simply because it’s affordable, gives you a ton of more features, and it supports their efforts and helps keep them online. In my opinion, even the free account is superior to the other services.

After publishing this article, my strategy will be to use YouTube.com for it’s natural resource of traffic and SEO value. From there I’ll use Vimeo to actually display the videos direct on my pages so that readers can experience the best quality and ease of sharing with others.

Today marks Blogger’s 10th year being online and to commemorate the moment,  birthday presents are being released  as a way to show gratitude to the number of people who have used Blogger. Back when Google acquired Blogger in 2003, the site had around 250,000 visitors per month. Today that number has jumped to over 300 million. You can check Blogger Buzz for the full list of Birthday Presents. I’ll talk more about my favorite Birthday Present below.

Of all birthday presents available, the gift that interests me the most is the new and free Blogger App for the iPhone called BlogPress Lite. The full version of BlogPress has been around for some time, but it isn’t free. Not that I am opposed to spending money on an iPhone App, it’s just nice to see free things for the iPhone. BlogPress Lite was created to celebrate Blogger’s 10th Birthday.

BlogPress Lite will be available soon for free download; however, if you want the full version, which works for WordPress, TypePad, Blogger and more, the cost is only $2.99. I think BlogPress is very capable software and is also a must for mobile bloggers such as myself. In the near future, I’ll provide a complete write up on BlogPress, including BlogPress Lite.

Blogger has grown a lot over the last 10 years. Here is a screenshot of Blogger taken by the WaybackMachine on October 12th, 1999.

Even back in 1999, Blogger’s purpose remained the same as what it is today. Blogger then and today is an automated weblog publishing tool that allows users to make posts to your weblog by submitting data through an online form that gets published onto webpages. Also, since the beginning, Blogger has been free to use and still remains free to this day. Here is a screenshot of the current version of Blogger seen today.

A lot has changed over the last ten years. In fact, there are many new features that I wasn’t aware of myself. For instance, I was aware that you could use domain names on Blogger.com, but the last I checked, users had to pay for their own third-party web hosting. Today that is not the case. Users who want to use Blogger.com can pay for their own domain name and Blogger will provide free web hosting. Many more experienced bloggers such as myself tend to steer away from using Blogger.com. But, I have to reconsider this because Blogger always had very decent SEO capabilities and today their default or standard templates come with AdSense monetization built in.

To be quite honest, I haven’t used Blogger.com in years. I have been very fond of self-hosted WordPress. But, I have to admit, Blogger looks very appealing. Especially, after discovering that they provide free domain name web hosting. All that is now needed from me is about $10 dollars and from there, I can have all the tools needed to run and maintain a professional and search engine friendly blog. I very well might start using Blogger again.

That said, I do want to wish Blogger a Happy 10th Birthday and congratulate Google on a wonderful acquisition. I think purchasing Blogger.com was one of their smartest moves. Even a few years ago when I toyed around with Blogger, I thought the services were cool. Today, things are ten times better.

Blogger VS WordPress: If you’re a WordPress user, when was the last time you logged into Blogger? Do you think you might start using Blogger again? If you’re currently a Blogger user, what are some things that you feel that WordPress lacks? Ultimately, which do you think is the better, Blogger or WordPress? And, why? Look forward to reading your comments.

Opera version 10 is available free for download. This is a brand new web browser that comes packed full of innovative features and is skinned with an elegant new design. If you’ve never tried the Opera web browser in the past, doing so today might not be a bad idea. Check out their very attractive video trailer below.

There are three elements that make Opera stand out above Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. First element is the new Opera Turbo. Simply put, Opera Turbo is a new compression technology that offers some excellent solutions for users with slow connections. Watch the video below to discover exactly how Opera Turbo technology works.

The second element is their new and elegant design. Their new design in version 10 has a very sleek and beautiful interface unlike anything available on other browsers. It is very streamlined and considered to be of world-class design. The third notable element are the tabs. Opera is one of the pioneers in tabbed browsing and with version 10, Opera reveals brand new resizable tab bars, and full thumbnails of open tabs.

Other features include: Super-sized Speed Dial, Automatic software updates, Spell Checker, and an amazing Email Client. Opera is available in 43 languages and can be installed on Windows, Linux or Mac systems. And also, unlike previous versions in the years prior, Opera Version 10 is totally free. To learn more about all the features of Opera 10, I recommend checking out the Opera Software YouTube Channel and viewing the official Opera 10 press release. You might also want to check out the Opera 10 Press Kit and more importantly, their guide and video tutorial.

In my opinion, Opera version 10 raises the bar high. I find it odd that Google, a company that’s doing very well financially, can’t release a Mac or Linux version of Google Chrome. Other web browsers such as FireFox, Safari, and Opera are made available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Opera version 10 is also available for all three operating systems, making it even more appealing to me.

Personally, I use both PC and Mac and one things that I can’t stand is using a different browser on each computer. Unfortunately, I really enjoy using Google Chrome but I recently purchased a Mac computer quickly discovered that I wasn’t able to use Chrome on it. My choices were Safari, Firefox, and Opera. In the past, I never really paid much attention to Opera; however, after watching their

What do you think? Download and install Opera 10 on your computer and report back your findings here. Share your thoughts and feedback about this new web browser. Let us know how you think it compares to other browsers. Use the comment form below to speak your mind.