It has been around for a while, but the Optimal Title plugin is still a great tool to add to your blog.

What the plug in does is set the name of your blog post before the blog’s name. Your blog post will most likely have keyword content that will be picked up by the search engine’s, and blast your post ahead of the competition.

What do you get when you mix the best browser with the best mapping service?

Yes, you get aerial photography of a huge crop circle of the Firefox logo.

Curious as to how the Firefox Crop Circle was made? Here are all the behind the scenes details.

The latest full version of Firefox, the sexy open source browser from the fine folks at Mozilla, has been released.

I’ve discussed some of the changes to the search bar in this version in the past, but there’s a lot more new stuff to play with.

Here is a list of all the new features.

• I really like that spell checking is integrated in the browser now. In previous versions I used an extension to handle that, but it always felt kludgey and not very stable.
• The new theme struck me as a bit too “pretty” at first, but I got used to it quickly. The way the Go button is tethered to the address bar is nice.
• The built-in phishing protection will be nice for protection less savvy users from scams. It’s based on the Google Safe Browsing extension for previous versions of Firefox.
• The tabbed browsing changes seem useful for some, but I’m a huge control freak about that kind of thing and I use the Tab Mix Plus extension. Although it hasn’t been updated officially for 2.0, their development build is working perfectly for me.

Here are the full release notes for those of you that like all the details.

Don’t forget to go to Firefox Add-ons to check if there are new versions of your extensions.

No, I’m not going to start making overly impassioned political posts, I’m talking about Democracy. Democracy is a video player, but it’s also much more than that. It’s mixes RSS feeds from various video sites and a Bittorrent client to make finding and saving videos to your personal collection a nicely integrated experience. Being free and open source doesn’t hurt either.

Democracy’s interface is reminiscent of iTunes, which I guess makes it easier for Apple’s users to switch back and forth when they get tired of overpaying for shows and movies on iTunes Store. The sidebar on the left has a pre-built list of RSS feeds for video sites, but you can add as many others as you want. The default feeds aren’t bad for a start, though. Video Bomb, for example, is sort of a Digg for internet videos. They link and embed popular videos from the other big sites like YouTube and Google Video and allow you to vote on themYou’re likely going to find a lot of videos that you’ve already seen elsewhere, but there’s also a lot of original content that you might not have come across before. When you find a feed you like, Democracy will automatically download the new videos for you as they are posted.

Democracy showing a custom RSS feed.
(Click to enlage.)

The player itself is nothing extraordinary, but it works. I did have some issues with a few videos, like flickering, but considering how many different formats this thing plays, that’s not that surprising. The volume slider has an annoying habit of getting stuck to the pointer if you slide it too far in either direction without letting go of the button, but these issues are small and I imagine they’ll be fixed in time for Democracy 1.0.

I was playing around with the new Google Talk feature that lets you show your contacts what song you’re currently listening to, which led me to Google Music Trends. Now, I realize that this is still just an experimental project from Google Labs, but it seems a lot less useful than most of Google’s other endeavours.

In its current state it’s just a list of the top 20 songs that Google Talk users have been listening to recently. Some of the results are a little baffling, making me wonder just how many users have gone through the trouble of opting-in to the program (there is a setting in Google Talks’s preferences for this). The songs and artists also link to Google’s nifty music entries. As I write this, the top song is Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers. Well, actually, that’s a lie, the Peppers were second. The top song was You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, but come on, can you blame me for lying?

Anyway, all I’m saying is that Last.fm doesn’t have anything to worry about for a good while when it comes to the user-influenced music ranking business.

After many years in production, Internet Explorer 7 seem to be nearing release. They’ve given the browser a new look, added real tabs support, an internal RSS reader, and to further achieve parity with Firefox and Opera, they’ve added a search bar to the main interface.

It’s nice to see them adapting to the browser market and adding many of the features people have become used to. I just hope that all the evil CSS bugs that have plagued IE6 have been fixed. I know quite a few rapidly balding web developers who would be very happy if this turns out to be so.

I wonder if Microsoft is timing the release of IE7 to coincide with the imminent release of Firefox 2 in an attempt to steal their thunder.

Pretty much everyone carries around a little USB drive with them these days, but most people aren’t utilizing them for much more than carrying around a few Word files and some mp3s. If you’d like to make better use of these things that dangle off your keychain, The Portable Freeware Collection is a great site to find free programs that are either built from the ground up to work on a USB drive or, by following their usually simple directions, can be made to work on one.

You can search by categories such as audio/video players, editors for most media types, system utilities and even games. They also update quite frequently, so the site won’t feel like it’s stagnating as some other freeware lists out there do.

It’s mostly due to this site that I’m running out of space on my drive.

Some of you may have tried the rather nifty Google Suggest that auto-completes your search entry based on the most popular searched for queries. If you liked it, you’ll probably be glad to know that this functionality is going to be included by default in the search bar in Firefox 2.0.

Here is a shot of it in action:

Yahoo! also seems to provide suggestions in the beta, but I was unable to find a version of it on their site.

If you can’t wait for Firefox 2.0 to get out of beta to try this, here is an extension that will do mostly the same thing for current versions of the browser. The extension was coded by Google themselves, so hopefully that means it’s stable.

Apart from an internet connection and a computer, what else do you need when you want to search for something online?

Yes! A browser.

It’s true that many people still seem to think that the little blue e (or the little compass, if you’re on a Mac) is the internet, but more savvy users like yourselves know that a browser is just another program and that it can easily be replaced.

Mozilla Firefox has become amazingly popular in the last couple of years, but for those of you who still don’t know about it, allow me to pimp it out a bit. There are many security and usability reasons why you might like Firefox better than other browsers, but I’ll stick to pointing out its integrated search features.

By default, Firefox comes with a search bar positioned to the right of the address bar:

Other browsers such as Opera have this, and it seems that IE7 will add this whenever it is actually released, but I prefer the way Firefox does things. You can enter your keywords, including any other search syntax, such as Google’s site: command, and the search results will be displayed in the browser.

The default search engine used will be Google, but you can easily change that by clicking on the G icon. You can also add other engines by clicking “Add Engines.” This takes you to the Mozilla Add-ons site from where you can add new inegrated search engines.

If you dislike using the search bar, or if you get rid of it because it takes too much space, you can enter your search directly into the address bar, which will do a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. This can be changed to use something else since sometimes the results don’t seem all that lucky, but I’ll leave the details of that for another post.

If you want to use another search engine from the address bar, first go to the site and then right click in the entry area and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”

The keyword search is saved as a bookmark. A dialog will open asking you for a name, the keyword that will activate the search and where you would like to save the bookmark. I recommend the Quick Searches folder which should already be in your bookmarks.

Now searching with Ask.com is as easy as entering “ask anything” into your address bar. One cool thing to remember is that if you hit ALT + Enter, your search will open in a new tab, which in case you didn’t know, is one of Firefox’s best features.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about searching in this browser. What are you waiting for? Go download and make your searching more efficient.