Hey, here is a great way to start the day. I was finally mentioned on the Blogebrity Web site.

Furthermore, Blogebrity’s purpose, unlike that of Memeorandum or Blogniscient, is expressly to focus on the top bloggers and treat them as celebrities. It’s fair to criticize topical news systems for systemic bias. To accuse Blogebrity of this is to accuse Entertainment Weekly of “only covering the big stars.” It’s silly and needlessly dismissive.

I’ll take back my statements as far as the blog part of Blogebrity goes. There is a lot of good original content there. The thing that I have had a problem with though is the list. It needs more than just your casual tip, it needs a more dynamic background so that regular folks can give input in real time.

Personally I’m just tired of seeing the same names and faces mentioned, no mater what RSS feed I subscribe to. That is the real reason why I think we need a blogging renaissance.

It’s that time of the week you get curled up with the Web Hosting Show. Why? You need to know what is going on in the world of Web hosting. Web hosting is the backbone of the internet as we know it today. Without Web hosting you wouldn’t have your Googles or your Yahoos. You wouldn’t even have your Lockergnomes of the world either. This week we had a lot of Halloween fun, but also we did discuss some of the wars going on in the Web hosting world.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said that it had reached an agreement to settle a longstanding legal fight with VeriSign, operator of the .com and .net registries. These folks have been going at it for a long time. Here is what the WHIR had to say about it:

The settlement covers all legal disputes between the two parties. Foremost among these was the controversial Site Finder service VeriSign introduced in late 2003. With Site Finder, Internet users typing in addresses that did not exist were served Web pages suggesting where they could go rather than given error pages.

Critics argued the service was an abuse of power by VeriSign, since it received money from those who benefited from the traffic. VeriSign gave in to the pressure and suspended the service. It then counter-sued ICANN, alleging the organization was impeding its efforts to offer new services and generate revenue.

The second war this week that came to an end was between Level 3 and Cogent. Level 3 and Cogent Communications said that they had agreed to a new peering arrangement, ending a nearly month-long dispute. Hopefully now we don’t have to worry about them playing with turning the Internet on and off in some regions anymore. I said a few weeks ago the behavior of both companies seemed childish at best, and yeah… I still stick by those thoughts.

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The TabBrowser Preferences extension gives Firefox the options and customization for tabs that it should have been born with. There are even a few perks to having this extension that I probably wouldn’t have thought of before using it as well. So what does it do? It gives you full and total control of your tabbed browsing experience.

Here are only some of the features included: open URLs in the URL bar and searches from the search bar in new tabs, open the homepage in every newly created tab, select tabs by moving the mouse onto them, instead of clicking on them, moving the tab bar to the bottom of the browser window, opening URLs from the Extension/Theme Manager and the Help window in new tabs, opening the throbber in a new tab, control the focusing/unfocusing of various tab-creating functions, such as the File, New Tab command, per-tab locking, to force left-clicked links to open in new tabs, compatibility with Tab Clicking Options, and ability to drag and drop URLs on the new tab button on the tab bar.

TabBrowser Preferences makes using Firefox a better experience. For those folks out there who are picky about having only one browser window open, it gives them the options to control that type of surfing better than before.

So try something new when it comes to tabbed browsing and put this extension inside your version of Firefox. I bet after you do, you will not know what you ever did without it.

I am getting tired of services like Blogniscient.com, Tech Memeorandum, Blogebrity and others that do the same thing. What is the topic point this time around? It goes back to the argument of giving the circular pat on the back to all the “top bloggers” out there today. These services and others pretty much do the same thing, each one just has a different twist on things. Lets just take talking points and posts from the most famous of the blogging world and give everybody else and their grandmother the finger.

Which one is more exciting though? Reading the same old content from the same old folks, or finding something new and original to enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, what some of these bloggers do is good, some is even great. The point of the matter is that in the “A-List” blogging world, there is no room for growth. It is nothing more than a boys’ club. With podcasting and other “Web 2.0″ ideas that are out there, the main focus seems to be finding new content. It is about reinventing the wheel so that folks have more choices and flavors out there to choose from.

So who is going to do the Star Search or American Idol for the blogging world? I think that might be the only way some of us can get out from under the thumb of not being “popular” enough with the in crowd. I feel like I’m in high school all over again.

A lot of folks might say that Firefox is good. Many more folks would say that Firefox is great. One thing that we can not ignore though is that not every Web page looks good inside of Firefox. Due to some companies only supporting some browsers, Firefox has been left out in the rain on more than one occasion. There is hope though. You can make it easier to switch from Firefox to Internet Explorer and back again.

This tip came to me via a Lockergnome reader. Chuck told me that he often uses these two extensions to switch back and forth between Firefox and Internet Explorer. The first extension is IE View. IE View adds an option inside of Firefox so that you can “View in IE”.

From within the IE View extension, you can also set that certain pages always open in IE. So if you know a Web page is never going to work in Firefox, put it in that box and every time you launch it, it will launch in Internet Explorer.

What if you want to go back to Firefox from Internet Explorer? Well that is where the second extension comes into play. Firefox View is to Internet Explorer what IE View is to Firefox. Once you install Firefox View, then you will have an option from within Internet Explorer to view a Web page inside of the Firefox browser.

By installing both of these, you are able to switch between the two browsers. You might not be solving world hunger, but you will be letting two browsers who don’t usually work well together both exist side by side on your machine. Many thanks to Chuck for the tip, and if you have one you’d like to share just get ahold of me.

When is the right time to work with a data center and when is the right time to just go through a Web host instead? There are a lot of questions surrounding collocation in the Web hosting industry, and hopefully I can get more than a few of them answered for you today. I got an E-mail from a Web Hosting Show listener the other day. Shane wanted to know what I thought about Web server collocation. When you should do it, when you shouldn’t do it and so on. So here we go.

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I love to tweak things as much as the next geek around me here. Sometimes, though, I can admit I don’t know everything, and I have to look at outside sources to get my information. One tweaking guide I have grown to love is the Firefox Tweak Guide over at TweakGuides.com. It has twelve pages of tips and tricks that will keep you busy on a slow weekend afternoon.

This guide is filled with a plethora of information for folks new to the Firefox experience and people who know what they are doing with the Firefox browser. Here is only a short sample of the introduction.

Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox for short, is just a free Internet browser. It’s not a cure for cancer. It doesn’t wash your car or make you a frothy coffee. So why all the fuss and hype over Firefox? In a nutshell, the reason is simple: Firefox is a true open source competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Sounds great already, huh?

So check out the Firefox Tweak Guide and let me know how you do after tweaking up your Firefox install some. Hey not every browser is perfect, but at least Firefox gives you the ability to change what you don’t like about it.

Firefox is a great browser, nobody can say that fact is false. For somebody just getting into the Firefox world though, alot of the options, extensions, and features can be scary. How do they know what themes to install, what extensions to start out with, what features to use. That is where the Firemonger Project comes in. It is there to make jumping into the world of Firefox simpler.

Here is what the Firemonger Project is all about:

The Firemonger project is an attempt to create a multilingual easy-to-use compilation CD with Firefox, Thunderbird (more about Firefox) and the best extensions, themes and utilities. Both of these programs have been created through collaboration overseen by the Mozilla Foundation and are free for use by anyone.

Over time it has been created and contributed to by many people who enjoy using Firefox and Thunderbird and want to spread the word. As most people interested in the Internet and software already know about Firefox we especially aim to make our CD easy for the average person to install and learn everything they need to know about Firefox and Thunderbird. Our CD has become a way for Firefox users to convert their friends.

The idea is simple, it creates a file that you can burn on a CD and give to a friend. That friend will then install Firefox and Thunderbird. Along with the programs they get a plethora of extensions and themes to choose from as well. This takes some of the “geek” out of having to run Firefox and knowing what to do with it. Want to know what will be on CD you burn? Take a look at all the features that are included.

Using keyboard shortcuts is second nature to any geek who is worth his weight in pocket protectors. For the rest of us, remembering what key combination does what can be more than a little hard. That is why I am happy to say that the folks at Mozilla have put together a great chart outlining all the Firefox shortcut keys there are.

The keyboard shortcuts Web page doesn’t waste time with a lot of fluff. It gets right to business with all your key combinations. It also has a few notes for Mac OS X users so they don’t get confused either. There is a lot of information here. Who knew there were so many keyboard shortcuts for this little browser?

Some of them are easy to remember. What does the “Ctrl key” plus the “B key” do? It opens and closes your bookmarks sidebar. Did you know though that if you hit the “Ctrl key” plus the “T key” you will open up a new tab? Pretty nifty stuff.

Internet Explorer and Opera users aren’t out in the cold either. The folks at Mozilla have even listed keyboard shortcuts for both of these other browsers as well. For the most part I think it is to show how many more shortcut key combinations there are in Firefox compared with the other two browsers.

So toss your mouse out the window and get to becoming more friendly with your keyboard.

Now I am not going to play the roll of Chicken Little here. For most of us in the Web hosting world, the sky isn’t falling just yet. I do have to say that the new Google Base (link via Chris) does look a little scary as far as Web hosting alternatives out there go.

Could this be a small step for Google into the world of Web hosting? Even if it is, I don’t know if we have much to fear just yet. I mean, when Google entered the blogging realm with Blogger, it didn’t really take that over. There are still better and more reliable services out there. I have a feeling that this will probably be turned into another way I can learn about growing my hair or making parts of myself bigger. Google has done a piss-poor job at keeping spam off of Blogger, how are they going to do with this?

So is Google making their own Internet? Maybe. If history says anything about the subject though, it will be filled with the same crap, spam and junk this Internet has had for years.