If you use Firefox but you dislike animated elements on web pages when you’re reading (like ads – increasingly served from Google AdSense, too), here’s what you can do:

• Use the Flashblock extension (provided you have Flash installed in the first place). This will put a placeholder over any Flash, allowing you to click it before the Flash shows. (To specifically allow a website to show Flash you can open the Tools -> Add-ons -> Flashblock options dialog and enter e.g. “www.youtube.com”.)
• Disable animated GIFs. To do so, type about:config into the Firefox address bar. Look for the entry “image.animation_mode”, double-click it and set its value to “none” (no quotes).

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Mac OS X only: So you erased your hard drive to install Leopard, and now you've got to load your Mac up with all your essential software. I kept a detailed inventory of the downloads I hunted down all over the internet to load on my Mac this weekend, so I thought I'd save you a few clicks. Here's a list of 20 (mostly) free apps with direct links to their download pages.

All downloads are free except when otherwise noted. In alphabetical order:

• Adium (download) (more info) Multi-protocol chat client when even iChat's improvements aren't enough

• Caffeine (download) (more info)
  One-click sleep from the menubar, good for presentations and media servers

• DiskInventoryX (download) (more info)
  See what files are taking up the most space on your Mac

• Firefox (download)
  When Safari just doesn't cut it

• GeekTool (download) (more info)
  Desktop text/image overlay

• Google Earth (download)
  Mapping tools with a built-in flight simulator

• Growl (download) (more info)
  Universal system notifier

• Hazel (download) (more info)
  Not free: $22 license, free 14-day trial available
  Clean up your Stacks with automatic rules-based file and folder actions

• InstantShot! (download) (more info)
  Screen capture utility with more features than Grab

• iSquint (download) (more info)
  Convert video files to iPod-friendly format

• KeePassX (download) (more info)
  Secure password database. NOTE: KeePassX version 1.5 is not Leopard-compatible by default. Here's how to get KeePassX running on Leopard.

• MagiCal (download) (more info)
  Menubar monthly calendar dropdown

• Mozy (download) (more info)
  Online backup utility, 2GB space for free

• Quicksilver (download) (more info)
  Application launcher and keyboard interface to your Mac. (Note: Qucksilver's main hosting site is unavailable at the moment, which means plugins are also unavailable. Use this mirror to get the initial install image.)

• TextExpander (download) (more info)
  Not free: $30/license, free trial available
  Global text substitution utility expands user-defined text snippets to phrases and form letters

• TextWrangler (download) (more info)
  Full-featured text editor that beats the pants off of TextEdit

• Thunderbird (download) ( more info)
  Ok, so it's debatable whether Thunderbird is better that OS X's built-in Mail, but I tend to think so—if only for its extensibility. Here's a free skin for T-bird if you want to give it that Apple Mail look.

• Transmit (download) (more info)
  Not free: $30/license, free trial available
  The best FTP client you'll find on any platform

• The Unarchiver (download) (more info)
  When StuffIt Expander doesn't know what that .TAR file is, the Unarchiver will.

• VLC media player (download) (more info)
  The Swiss Army knife of media players, VLC will play all the movie files QuickTime chokes on. It can rip DVDs, too.

Note: The excellent SuperDuper! isn't yet fully Leopard-compatible, or else we would've included it here—and it's boot cloning capability is still very useful, even with Time Machine. We haven't yet tested Carbon Copy Cloner on Leopard.

For more great Mac downloads, see our Top 10 free Mac downloads and Top 10 Mac utilities. (Note: a few of the apps in these lists are now obsolete due to new Leopard features, but most are still useful.)

Other more expensive, specialized licensed downloads and box software I installed included Parallels Desktop, Quicken, DEVONthink Pro, Photoshop CS and Microsoft Office.

How about you? What were your must-have-right-now apps that you grabbed the moment you booted up Leopard? Let us know in the comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m seeing a number of new sites showing PageRank updates tonight, and assume that it has to be happening elsewhere as well. This of course comes on the heels of the PageRank massacre earlier this week.

There’s not too much to post right now on this as more information comes in — but I wanted to spread the word and see what others are seeing as well. Having expected a global update in July and never seeing it, this is certainly exciting news for those in the search marketing industry.

If you want to donate money for the people affected by wildfires in Southern California, Google has a page up. The Associated Press collected a good list of other organizations as well.

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google’s PageRank shuffles – or at least the part of it visible to outsiders – are continuing. YouTube.com, both with “www” and without, now has a PageRank of 3 out of 10, Ionut Alex. Chitu noticed in the forum. (You may get different values depending on when and where you check.) “PageRank is Google’s view of the important of this page,” the official Google Toolbar explains. [Thanks Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Last Wednesday, Microsoft acquired a 1.6% stake in social network site Facebook for $240 million, outbidding Google (which is stock-priced at $674 today). You probably heard of this, and it got more chatter started asking... is this a bubble? Here are some related quotes.

The Washington Post:

<<If you blindly accept the generalization that Internet investments are “a bubble,” you’re being had.>>

From David Henry, USA Today:

<<The bull market money machine has been running so long that you no longer hear much from those who say it has to stop. “Most of the naysayers have been discredited and are on the run,” says Jim Bianco>>

Chet Dembeck comments:

<<I believe the IPO bubble is not in danger of bursting anytime soon. In fact, I don’t think it’s even reached its peak inflation>>

David Gardner writes:

<<It is ALL THE RAGE to say that the Internet stocks are insanely overpriced, a “bubble,” or at the very least, way ahead of themselves. In fact, that herdlike conventional Wisdom is exactly what enables Rule-Breaking Fools like us to make good money on the markets.>>

From Business Week’s Christopher Farrell:

<<... simply wagging a finger at the excesses misses a fundamental point about emerging markets and Net startups. In both cases, we’re talking about frontier economies with few rules or traditional guideposts. It’s a Wild West where no one really knows what will work and what won’t.>>

Joelle Tessler in the Wall Street Journal.

<<Looking at the smaller, more speculative names, Steve Harmon ... said these companies “have been given a chance to prove themselves in the Internet space” – and now must do just that.

“They were undiscovered and now they are discovered,” he said. “Now they have to produce the goods. ... People are expecting a happy ending.">>

I should probably add that these quotes were picked very selectively. And that they’re all from the years 1998 and 1999.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

When you cannot bring the Internet to the people, bring the people to the Internet.

Yahoo Vietnam’s Yahoo! powered Internet Cafes are opening around Vietnam’s Hanoi and Ho Chi Mihn City in an effort to bring Internet to people and effectively brand Yahoo services. The Yahoo Internet cafes are sponsored by Yahoo and exclusively offer Yahoo services such as Yahoo Search & Yahoo! Questions and Answers (Yahoo Answers for Vietnam).

This is a smart and highly respected move by the Yahoo company to further expand their brand to a growing population of Internet users, by setting up storefront cafes in cities.

Sponsoring Internet cafes or Lan Houses can be a solid move in emerging Internet markets and is a bit different and more realistic than the $100 Laptop Movement which Google is sponsoring.

Cafes can pop up in poorer neighborhoods where broadband access is unheard of and representatives of the search engines can educate users with tips on how to search, check email and avoid phishing and scams, while developing a strong relationship with these new users.

If government and tax funded school systems can let search companies influence the way they teach our children to research information, why can’t they make the same effort outside of the scholastic sphere? Yahoo Vietnam is doing just that.

Nacho Hernandez is a strong advocate for search sponsored Internet Cafes and composed a Google Cafe Proposal last year outlining his thoughts on the subject. I highly suggest reading through his presentation.

The first search engine I ever used was Yahoo (a directory at the time) and I still associate it today as a starting place to the web (with the Google toolbar and Firefox search boxes in my back pocket). Strong branding goes a long way.

For a while now, Google has been testing behavioral targeting in their search result pages. And while behavioral targeting may be the next big thing, it’s already putting AdWords advertisers at risk by costing them money and decreasing their quality score.

I’ve opted to use video here to help illustrate the progression and assumptions Google tries to make. (I know it’s not a high quality video, but I hope you can see the examples used and how this can impact you as both an advertiser and search engine user)

Clearly, advertisers are put at risk with their ads being served up on irrelevant result pages. To make matters worse, it’s clear that the maximum cost per click associated with an ad can allow it to effectively dominate keyword markets it has no business being in.

Make Google Accountable

If you have an AdWords campaign, do your research and make sure you are covered here. Google’s AdWords system is something that you should use to grow your business effectively. Wasting money on poorly targeted visitors is bad enough, but with behavioral targeting your quality score takes a hit too as this waters down your click through rates.

What’s Your Experience?

Please, sound off using the comments feature below. Have you been footing the bill of bad behavioral targeting? Are your ads suffering from “poor” or low quality ratings because of Google?

Please share your experience here with other Search Engine Journal readers. A big thank you goes out to Paul Mancini at Search Marketing Corporation for passing along examples of behavioral targeting in action here.

Every few weeks I like to call for Google bugs. I’ve got a joint meeting tomorrow with several people to talk about potential bugs, so if you know of any, feel free to mention them in the comments. To remind people of what I’m looking for, here’s the guidelines:

Just to be clear, pruning will be ruthless for this post: I only want to see specific queries that seem to show bugs, and the more concisely you can explain something, the better. I’ll probably keep just the first example of what looks like a bug. I’ve got a meeting at noon tomorrow to talk about search bugs, so I’ll probably lock the comments after that.

Please don’t include stuff like “it’s a bug that you (do something I don’t like, don’t index/rank my site as much as I want).” Instead, I’m looking for specific bug reports to pass on.

In addition, I’d be curious to hear about any international bugs that you know of. If we don’t handle the top-level domain of Serbia correctly, or if we don’t do a currency conversion correctly, or concrete things like that are welcome..

I’m trying to decide what to be for Halloween this year. At various times, I have been Google’s original chef Charlie, a punk rocker with blue hair, and Inigo Montoya. Last year, I thought about going as Silent Bob from the movie Clerks, but Ask.com had killed Jeeves that year, so instead I dressed as a zombie version of Jeeves.

Any costume suggestions for me for Halloween?