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Popularity: unranked [?]

There was a lot of chatter yesterday on the web about a new browser from Google hitting the tubes. Well, Chrome was officially unleashed today for Windows XP and Vista sufferers users and it seems to be a VAST improvement over the current three leading browsers (IE, FireFox and Opera).

I have to say, I wasn’t too fond of reading the whole Comic Book on chrome to get to the end and not have a link. Not that I actually read it, but still. You get the point. I did manage to point my browser at the chrome home (ET!) and get the download link. Unfortunately, at the moment, its for Windows Only, they do plan on releasing a Linux and a Mac version shortly though.

I won’t bore you with the whole history behind chrome or the code beneth it, plenty has already been written about that. What I do want to do is let you see some of the cool features. First is the top screenshot. Chrome displays DoG alright, there are some alignment problems, but that can probably be corrected by actually fixing the website code itself.

The browser does render quicker than either Firefox or IE (which is a plus) and it incorporates the tabs to the top bar (where the minimize and close buttons are) which is taking a little time to get used to, but its cool all the same. There isn’t too much to the “settings” so far (take a look at the screenshots) but that is bound to change as they continue to add more features. After all, this is a beta.

I do like the “recent pages” that display when you open a new tab. Outside of the speed and some minor differences though, it appears to be “just another browser” upon first inspection. If anyone else out there is using Chrome (or trying) I’d like to hear what you think about it. Maybe I’m missing something.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Almost 6 months after Obama appeared in the Halloween edition of Saturday Night Live (SNL) Hillary made a stop on the set and met face to face with her twin played by Amy Poehler. Clinton was on in response to two sketches the troupe has done now based on some of the more recent debates where the anchors seem to give preferential treatment to Obama and play hardball with Clinton.

While I agree she does have a bit of a point, that it seems unfair that they’ve chosen their Golden Boy and this time around its Obama, I do think that if she really wanted to have any affect on it, she should have made an attempt earlier in the season to make an appearance (Granted, the strike took SNL off line for a while).

For instance, Huckabee is a favorite on almost all the late night talk shows, making appearances on Colbert, The Daily Show, Late Night with Conan, The Tonight Show and others. This appearance by Hillary almost seems to be a last ditch effort to gain votes coming in to the crucial Ohio and Texas primaries tomorrow. But who am I to judge??

On another note, I seem to have made up some of my PR loss from the fall when I dropped from a 4 to a big, fat zero. Now I’m sitting happy at a 3 while Gruntled is still an Oh!

Popularity: 33% [?]

With all the brouhaha over the google bitchslap that took place towards the end of 2007 (in case you didn’t know, google penalized sites who posted links with out nofollow for payment) something was bound to step up and take its place. The question is can a new comer survive in the shark eat shark world of SEO and Page ranking? IZEA (payperpost’s daddy) hopes so and it thinks it has a winning product with RealRank.

RealRank (RR) is Izea’s answer for its affiliates on how to retain a ranking system that doesn’t care how or what you link to so much as traffic quantity and quality to your site. The idea is that the realrank weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK (Izea tool Kit). While the idea was just released to the public, Izea and the PPP crowd have been using this since December ‘07 as a way to rank websites in order to maintain the level of advertising as before. From where I sit, the only down side is that advertisers have been slow on the uptake of the new ranking system, prefering PageRank still despite the fact that anyone who would even consider posting about their products has virtually no PR at the present time.

The realrank system is a pretty nice system with some nice looking graphs. According to the ranking, Delusions of Grandeur is some where around 452 for the day with a weekly average of somewhere around 588. Not bad when you consider the 100,000 blogs that Izea/PPP is potentially already tracking. A nice feature about RealRank is the ability to keep the stats private. While I personally do not mind if others see how successful I am, it might not behoove a smaller site to have its stats public until they’ve built up a good base.

According to the realrank site:

RealRank is a more accurate ranking than Alexa and Google PageRank because it isn’t based on a small sample of a site’s visitors or on a censored link-weighting algorithm. It’s based on real traffic.

One of the other cool things is that they have an open api so anyone can develop for it with out any penalty. Already, there’s a rank badge available and its only a matter of time before there are more and more things developed.

We’ll have to see if RR makes a difference. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit IzeaRanks to check out your blog, create an account and get the tracking code for your site. It could help boost your traffic!

Popularity: 48% [?]