Google's Chrome just passed Apple's Safari as the number 3 browser on the market today. The number 1 and 2 spots are still held by IE and Firefox respectively:

• 62.9% IE
• 24.61% Firefox
• 4.63% Chrome
• 4.46% Safari
• 2.4% Opera
• 1.16% Others

For details, check out Market Share.

I am asked often about the ins and outs of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They aren't looking for nitty gritty nuances of scripting with the API of the Elastic Compute Cloud, they are just interested in the general overview of how the 'cloud' works.

We've all taken monsterously long URLs and pasted them into documents, emails and elsewhere. We've also seen shorter URLs - very often used in print material like magazines - that point to odd domain names like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. These shorter links are created by pasting the long URL into one of the many online URL Shortener service providers. Basically, they take your long URL, shorten it into a URL on their site and simply redirect all traffic from the short URL to the long URL you provided.

In addition to the announcement of EC2 Spot Instances, Amazon has also announced the unlimited beta availability of their VPC service offering. The Virtual Private Cloud extends your local network over a VPN connection to the EC2 environment.

A few days ago, Google announced the availability of the Google Public DNS. This is a replacement for the DNS service you may already have in place and Google positions this service as being more secure and faster than the average service provider's DNS response time.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I like words. But frankly, I don't always spell or use them correctly. I might get it right 99.9999% of the time, but there is still the 0.0001% when I need to check on usage. I will also hear a new word in a particular context and want to use it in my communications. If you are like me, then here's a quick tip to expand your lexicon by using new words you hear or read from others.

Although few truths are absolute, there is one truth that is indisputably absolute. That truth is that you know something that others do not. And, Wikipedia wants you to be bold and share this knowledge with the rest of humanity. So, be bold and go to wikipedia and contribute this knowledge.

The well known mono project has just released the new Mono Tools for Visual Studio 1.0. This commercial product plugs into your existing Visual Studio IDE and allows you to develop and debug mono apps. For those unfamiliar with mono, it is a .Net environment for Linux and MacOS machines (although it also runs on Windows and other platforms).

Amazon Web Services is now in a beta release of its newest service called the Relational Database Service (RDS). The announcement states that RDS is:

If you have ever maintained a Drupal site, you know that keeping up with the continuous stream of module updates can be a daunting task. If you manually download, unpack, install, then run an update for each module you might as well get a good cup of coffee and be prepared for some sysadmin time.

October 24, 2009 - Whitehouse.gov is now based on the open source content management system Drupal. A press release to the Associated Press on Saturday reports that a software package purchased at the end of the Bush administration was ill suited as an online platform for the tech-savvy Obama team.

Ever try to delete a file in XP and watch as it takes 20 or 30 seconds?

The delay is because XP searches the recycle bin for similarly named items before deleting them (i.e. adding them to the recycle bin). This takes time - don't ask me why, since it takes nearly no time in Linux.

I have never really liked Acrobat. It is very heavy weight (in the many 10s of megabytes), it loads up slooooooooowly, and it provides no real tools to make it easy to read/bookmark/markup a PDF.

Chrome lovers will be thrilled with the new release of their favorite browser. Google Chrome v2 was released today. This major release has several hundred bugs cleaned up and is touted as more stable and faster than before.

One nice feature is full-screen mode. So, if you write your presentations in S5, then you can go into fullscreen mode and have a much cleaner look for your audiences.

Amazon Web Services has recently announced a limited beta of an Import/Export service for handling physical, portable storage. So, if you have several terabytes of data that you want to place into S3 for crunching using a hadoop-based parallel application, then you can send them tapes of the data and they will load it up for you.

If you deal with oil-well geological data, large imagery data, human genome data, or any number of very large data sets, and are planning on using AWS as your cloud vendor, then this Import/Export is the way to go.

We've all done it. Searching the web, reading from dozens of good sources for information on a specific topic. Sometimes we go down wrong alleys. Other times we find a gem of an article and bookmark it. After a few hours, or days, we go back to find key information we read - only to not be able to find it in any of our bookmarks no matter how hard we try.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) users will be happy to hear about one of the new features of the Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). The Elastic Load Balancing(ELB) capability does what many of us have solved using a special AMI instance. Specifically, instead of making an instance with a load balancer such as NGINX or Squid so as to maximize performance of a system, you can now use the ELB instead.

Amazon Web Services is frankly the best thing since sliced bread. We've been using it for over a year and it gets better and better all the time. The APIs are robust, and the structure of the compute and storages services is such that you must think in new ways to make a solution 'elastic' to conserve resources (and reduce costs).

Imagine the day when we look back and laugh that we measured the performance and speed of hard drives by how fast their platters were spinning. Boasting of a RAID array composed of 15K SAS drives will seem ludicrous.

Marketers are an amusing group. They have many lists of same-lettered words that try to clarify a particular aspect of their profession. For example, there are the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion). Some call it the 5 Ps and add "People". They also have the 5 Es, which have a surprising application to the web.

The 5 Es are the five different Experiences that you, as a web presence, need to focus on for maximizing customer delight. Specifically, the 5 Es are:

We have all heard about rogue websites that can, by merely loading a page from these sites, infect your browser and system with malware. That is a scary prospect for many of us who get into a surfing frenzy and might click a link before thinking whether it is safe or not.

If you aren't capturing statistics about your website visitors, you won't be able to identify and implement beneficial changes. Changes that could easily increase your visibility and value to your customers.

If your system needs just a little bit of computing power most of the time but it also needs to suddenly scale to significant horsepower, what exactly do you do? Get some cloudware.

More specifically, use services that allow your system to scale up (and possibly scale out) as necessary. Cloud computing is increasingly emerging as an important configuration to consider for critical systems. Part of cloud computing is the concept of "cloud infrastructure" which provides enterprises with an Internet based datacenter.

Recently, Firefox reached a milestone of surpassing 20% of the browser usage on the net. Data at wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) shows a very respectable increase of Firefox over the last four years. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer has had a steady decline. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is Microsoft's previous attempts to lay unilateral claim to the browser as a proprietary platform.

I remember back in the heady days of the Internet boom talking with the strategy director of a web-based startup company we were putting together. She was adamantly defending the notion that selling online, or generating a company-sustaining level of advertising revenue was not important. What was important were the eyeballs.

A couple of years later during business school, the program director gaffawed at the notion that startups were focusing just on 'the eyeballs'. It was his scholarly claim that eyeballs don't make payroll!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the ecosystem that surrounds your web presence with the specific goal of moving your search result ranking toward the top of the list. The process is complex and SEO firms have developed a set of artful tools to assist in getting results. Long gone are the simple days of merely setting a snappy collection of keywords in metatags. Today, its about link-ins, link-outs, cross-chatter, clarity of copy, purposefulness of page titles, cleanliness of the markup and a host of other items that take careful and constant attention.