I was a huge fan of Amy Stephen's Open Source Community.  The site's mission was built on a desire to be a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues".  OSC shared a similar goal of mine in which I have a strong desire to bring people together from competing Web CMS projects, products, and organizations and compare perspectives (though I have interest in propriety systems as well as open source).  Unfortunately OSC went offline last April with only a promise to be back up sometime in the future.

I will be taking the site down sometime tomorrow evening and will likely be down for awhile. It could be a week - maybe two, but one day, it'll be back! Thanks!

Recent discussion here at CMSReport.com brought the whereabouts of OSC back into question.  I personally don't know when OSC will ever be back online.  However, I think perhaps the better question might be, if you liked OSC.org what other sites should be considered?  That is a very hard question to answer.

By now you've heard of Google's new Chrome browser which is currently in beta.  But did you ask yourself, why would Google want to enter the Internet browser market?  There are a number of reasons to why Google may have developed this browser, but I believe the explanation given by an article posted at CNET's Webware is the most likely reason.

On the Web, a site that responds a few milliseconds faster can make a big difference in people's engagement. It's for this reason that Google believes its new Web browser, Chrome, is a project worth investing in rather than a footnote in the history of the Internet.

Chrome, Google said during its Tuesday launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Google's hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today's Web-based applications...

...Why speed means money
Google benefits materially from fast performance. First, when it comes to search, Google discovered when its search page loads fractionally faster, users search more often, which of course leads to more opportunities for Google to place its highly lucrative text ads. Second, a faster Web application foundation means that Google's online applications for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and calendars can become faster and fuller-featured.

Mozzila released the final version of Firefox 3.0 today and you can download it at Mozilla.com.

Available today in approximately 50 languages, Firefox 3 is two to three times faster than its predecessor and offers more than 15,000 improvements, including the revolutionary smart location bar, malware protection, and extensive under the hood work to improve the speed and performance of the browser.

While I've been talking about Firefox 3 since late 2006, I have to admit that I haven't been into Firefox 3's development as much as I did with Firefox 2.  While there were some bumps on the way with the alphas and betas, Firefox 3.0 is definately a well polished product (I'm using it as I write in this post).  My first two impressions of Firefox 3 is that it is fast and that I don't quite get the awesome bar .

SitePoint: "Instead, we wanted to clarify the issues surrounding site valuations, and give site owners a clear picture of the factors that were affecting their sites' values. We wanted also to provide starting points from which you could work to translate those factors into dollar values."

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It looks as if Laura Scott, pingVision, had some free time on her hands. There are reasons free servcies on the Internet are free. Laura wants you to start asking yourself, "why?".

Is the future really free?

It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?

Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube. [Read more at Laura Scott's Blog]

Personally, I'll need to read her post a few times and soak in on the information from her excerpts. Some things to think about...

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14 is now available.  The update is a security and stability release and this explains why Firefox users might have been seeing more crashes than usual.

Fixes for security problems in the JavaScript engine described in MFSA 2008-15 (CVE-2008-1237) introduced a stability problem, where some users experienced crashes during JavaScript garbage collection. This is being fixed primarily to address stability concerns.

I knew something wasn't right with my favorite Web browser.  You can download the latest Firefox (and Thunderbird) at Mozilla.com.

Linux.com: When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

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The number of users browsing the Web from a mobile device continues to rise, yet most mobile web sites are still sub-par.

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