Last night, Firefox 3.5 crashed and I finally had enough …. didn’t even bother to start it again, today.

I’m finding Firefox as a browser, for whatever reason, is so unstable, has crashed so often, no matter how much Firefox is updated, it’s become fundamentally unusable for me, and this has been the case of multiple computers and operating systems.

Google Chrome, which I haven’t used much, performs much, much better and is far more stable - and boy, is it fast.  Plus Google Chrome is now releasing extensions - see The First Google Chrome Extensions: Block Ads, Check PageRank, and Use IE8 Accelerators in Read/Write Web including Page Rank for Chrome and Cleeki, an extension that delivers the functionality of IE8’s Accelerators to other browsers, a list that now includes Chrome.

Fast …. means a lot now.

This week (I call it a task because it’s not the kind of activity one wants to do often) updating some Web Analytics site tracking code across 180 profiles in WebTrends was cut down to 1/8th the time to do and with much less effort and mental fatigue.

That means a lot to me …. THANKS GOOGLE CHROME!!!!

You want to know what I care about?   I care about not ...

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Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides a wealth of information directly from Google. Once you have verified a site with Google, they’ll give you access to all sorts of information.

Here are just a few features of Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Errors
Google Webmaster Tools will show all sorts of errors with a site. Not only does it show broken links on the site, but also links that are driving traffic to the site for which there is no valid page. Google even tells you pages it knows about but has been restricted from crawling. That’s good to know incase someone accidently blocks to much.

2. Set Site Defaults
Tell Google to show your page with the www or without, set a geographic target and select if you want the images show up in Google’s enhanced image search; aka Google Image Labeler.

3. Analyze Meta Descriptions and Title Tags
Google will provide a list of URLs that have duplicate title tags or duplicate meta descriptions as well as if there are pages with to short, or to long, meta descriptions or titles.

4. Top Search Queries
Ever wondered what people search... read more >>

There is a lot under the covers of Google Latitude that you do not really notice they have made them so subtle.  After you get a Google account (I publish under IdoNotes at that google dot com thing), here are some starters:

Adding friends:
When you are adding via either the mobile device or on the web (I prefer the web for a lot of contact management, one or two is fine mobile) then look for the blue square icon next to their name.  It means they are already using Latitude and you just need to set sharing controls.  Everyone else gets email and not every checks it.  I grow more by posting a tweet then using the email service.

Privacy Controls:
This is a huge area and needs your attention.  Google can automatically detect where you are through GPS (3.0.2 for Blackberry) or the best location by cell towers.  Unless you want your every moved watched, I do not suggest this one.  I prefer setting it manually.  You could hide it from everyone, but since Google does not offer any history, who cares?

At this point you now decide how much information each person can see.  Sharing for friends ofers some options which in turn affects our next section on icons and what you see.

• Sh....

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Keyword research is one of those things that most of us hate to do but know we have to in order to get traffic to our site. I have seen a lot of internet marketing blogs that recommend to run wordtracker and/or google adwords external to do keyword research. It is recommended so often that many believe these tools to be accurate. The first part of this post is nothing more than a preliminary SEO session I recently made with a client. The final part gives two “tips” on how to verify keyword volume….use them as you want….

This happens to nearly everyone who has been doing internet marketing for any amount of time….

• You are researching keywords looking for a possible “in” into a market. 
•  You just happen to run across a keyword that is getting a decent volume of traffic that doesn’t look to have much competition.  
• You jump, banking that the keyword research done is accurate enough.
• You throw resources such as time and sometimes money into your site.  
• Your site makes it to the top 10 and then….NOTHING. No traffic.

Ironically, sometimes the keyword data is so screwed that what looked to be a decent keyword with a large volume of traffic (1,000+ per month) only gets 1-5 visits a day…even ... read more >>