With less than an hour to go in Mozilla's 24-hour attempt to set a record for the most downloads, I check in with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland, about the launch of Firefox 3. Despite Mozilla's temporary site outage, it appears to have been a success, both with the numbers (7 million plus) and content.
As a Firefox user myself, I initially switched over for the tabbed browsing and some of the third party add-ons. Little did I know that I was building my "nerd cred" by choosing it over Internet Explorer or other browsers. As Shankland explains, being a fan of Firefox is almost like being an Apple fanboy: there's a certain cachet and a "stick-it-to-the-man" (that'd be Microsoft) attitude among its users. Who knew that the browser you chose could up your stock?
I'm a Firefox user, how about you? If you're part of the roughly 20 percent market share using Mozilla's free, open-source Web-browsing software, you're probably looking forward to Tuesday, June 17th's release of version 3. In fact, the company is hoping that 1 million of you are excited in hopes of setting a record for the most downloads in a 24-hour period.
In Friday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET Webware.com's Rafe Needleman about what to expect with this version. He's been using the release candidate for a few weeks and says we can look forward to faster browsing, the "awesome bar," and more security features.
(Credit:
Barracuda Networks)
The Web may be the last bastion of uncensored speech, but things get a bit more locked down once you browse it from within the walls of your employer, according to a Barracuda Networks analysis of data contributed by thousands of its Barracuda Web Filter customers. In fact, the data shows that 50 percent of businesses using Barracuda Web Filters are blocking MySpace.com or Facebook.
Social networking may be hot with employees, but employers tend to discriminate between sites, preferring the more grown-up Facebook to MySpace, with 44 percent of the companies using Barracuda Web Filters currently blocking MySpace, while only 26 percent block Facebook. Nineteen percent block both.
Are employers leery of employees getting a life and socializing? Not really. It's a security thing, and not just a social-networking thing, as a separate Barracuda survey of 228 IT security professionals shows:
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If you were waiting for YouTube to roll out a maps feature to browse geotagged videos, the solution has come in the form of a new Google Earth layer released today. With the layer enabled, videos will pop up anywhere you are on the map and play on the video's page on YouTube if you click the thumbnail. PC users get a slightly better experience than Mac or and Linux users, as the videos will play right inside the application.
Like other layers in Google Earth, you need to turn this one on to start seeing videos. You'll find it under the "featured content" section. Once enabled, each video shows up as a little YouTube logo that can be clicked for more information, such as a video thumbnail preview, how many views it has, and a community rating.
If you're a YouTube user with submitted videos, you might have noticed that the geotagging feature hasn't always been there. The option was soft-launched in mid-June, but nothing had really come of it until now. The good news is that you can go back and to add geographical locations to any of your old videos by going to the "date and map options" settings of an uploaded clip. There's also handy search box, which will let you hunt for the city or street address, and see it on a map.
It's not clear if Google's showing every geotagged video submitted to the service, but certainly quite a few are on there at the moment. In some cases, clicking one icon will pull up multiple videos and let you choose which you'd like to see. I wouldn't mind seeing a similar feature on YouTube (sans the neat 3D effects or need for the application), similar to what Flickr has done with their geomapped photos.
Hey look, it's a YouTube video on Google Earth. If you're a Google Earth user, go play with this new layer, it's fun.
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