If you’re a Firefox user, then you no doubt know that Mozilla has released a small update to its popular web browser. Firefox 3.0.1 delivers everything that 3.0 delivered, only slightly more bug-free. It’s not a major change - you probably won’t see a difference in performance - but anything that improves stability is welcomed by us.

Firefox 3.1, on the other hand… now that’s an entirely different story. Mozilla’s next major update will reportedly contain several new features that were left out of the 3.0 release, including better tab switching. As you can guess, Firefox 3.1 is nowhere near ready to be used by the general public. Still, if you’re the adventurous type like I am, Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 pre-release is available on the Mozilla FTP.

For those who would like to try the new tab switching scheme but are wary about loading anything with the word “alpha” in the title, then the Ctrl-Tab add-on is for you. Ctrl-Tab allows users to see snapshots of their open tabs, similar to Alt-Tab in Windows. I’ve been using Ctrl-Tab for awhile now. It’s an extremely handy way to keep track of your tabs. As with all Firefox plug ins and add-ons, Ctrl-Tab is completely free.

If creating new “skins” and themes for Firefox is more your thing, then Personas is definitely for you. It lets anyone theme, skin and modify Firefox on the fly. No actual coding knowledge is needed. All of the changes you make are applied instantly and are easily undone. While Personas helps with the creation of new themes, it doesn’t actually give the user more artistic skill. Darn… still out of luck.

Ah… the clipboard. Best friend to the trio known as “cut, copy, and paste.” If you want to expand your clipboard’s horizons past your desktop, we suggest giving the Clipmarks extension a go. Clipmarks takes the text that you have designated for your clipboard and posts it directly to their site. The new clips are then available to a variety of social networking and blogging applications, such as Facebook and Wordpress. Handy and fun, Clipmarks just might be the clipboard upgrade that you didn’t know you needed.

And finally:

If there’s one thing that we know around here, it’s search engine optimization, or SEO. The Firefox add-on Niche Watch Tool knows a few things about SEO as well. It allows you to track everything SEO, from backlinks to keyword appearances to page ranking. It also has the added bonus of comparing these results to the results of your competition. Despite the unassuming and, frankly, boring name, Niche Watch Tool is perfect for those who want to bring a little “SEO” into their lives.

Just when we think we know all the answers concerning Internet marketing, Google changes the questions. Internet marketing expert and StomperNet faculty member Ed Dale is reporting that Google has altered the way that the AdWords Keyword Tool reports keyword search volume. Each report now accurately states how many times keywords or strings of keywords were searched, all using real numbers. Thanks to the new update, the end user will be able to know whether or not a keyword or a string of keywords are worth pursuing. We are currently testing the system for accuracy ourselves. We will keep you posted on the results.

For those of you who still want a bit more out of your data than what Google is giving, we suggest giving Woopra a try. From all reports, the featuring list on thing is nothing short of “massive.” According to developer iFusion Labs, Woopra is designed to do everything a developer would want, from tracking hits to sending real time notifications. Although still in beta, Woopra already has those “in the know” talking. Woopra, like most of tools featured on the Free Line, is completely free.

With the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the term “social media marketer” has become the Internet’s new buzzword. But as those of us in the business know, a real social media marketer is more than just a person with a smattering of SEO knowledge and a passion for friend’s lists. On Techipedia, journalist Tamar Wienberg talks about what it takes to be the very best with the people who know it best: actual social media marketers. “A social media marketer’s job never ends,” says media strategist Reem Abeidoh. “They usually work 70 hour weeks and need to be extremely flexible. There are days when marketers may have to serve as internal evangelist by introducing key stakeholders to social media. There are other times when marketers may have to launch a multi-platform outreach campaign. It just depends on the needs of the client.”

The practice of using social networks as a business tool are not limited to the “social media” kingpins mentioned above. Lawyers are now using Twitter as a way to find prospective clients. The key, according to Law Firm Web Strategy blogger Steve Matthews, is to remember that Twitter is based upon “pure, personal reactions.” By staying personal, the marketer or lawyer will have an easier time “exposing one’s practice and expertise online.” Great words to live by, no matter if your product is legal services or or web developing.

As many of you already know, hosting and maintaining a blog can increase visibility of your website. Hosting several blogs on varied, yet still relevant topics could be huge for your business, but could also cause massive headaches for either you or your IT team. Our solution is simple: WordPress MultiUser, or “MU” for short. WordPress MU makes it easy for users to host, track, and update several different blogs hosted on the same website. It also makes it a breeze to start new blogs when needed. So start blogging. The world is waiting to hear what you have to say.

At the Free Line, we love product launches, because it’s a great way to get free stuff. Plus, if you’re an internet marketer, there’s nothing like selling a few million dollars in an hour to keep the lights on in your business. At StomperNet we’ve done that a few times now and it’s fun. Plus, it lets us pay for the best faculty of world class internet marketing experts ever assembled. And yesterday, StomperNet CEO, Andy Jenkins released a new free video — all about using video to sell more online. It’s 45 minutes long and you won’t want to miss it.  It’s a behind the scenes Director’s commentary on one of the most successful videos StomperNet ever produced. And of course, it’s free.

Speaking of product launches and free stuff, the the smoke has now cleared and Mozilla’s Firefox 3 Download Day has been a roaring success. Within the first hour of the launch the numbers zoomed past 1 million downloads. Which is amazing, considering the fact that the servers kept going up and down, making it hard for most people to participate. If you were a part of download day - congratulations! You’ve been a part of history.

A majority of plugins don’t work with the new version of the browser, so before you get frustrated, check out this link that lists up to date plugin compatibility for FireFox 3. If your favorite plugin or theme isn’t listed, don’t worry. We’ve also got a tutorial that shows you how to get past that pesky problem with only a few clicks of the mouse and get any of your old plugins working fine.

Now that you’ve got your bright and shiny new version of FireFox, you might wander what new power is under the hood that you’re not taking advantage of yet. We’ve got a link that can show you some little known features that can really make things shine. My favorite? Being able to use Gmail as the default email program in FireFox without using a plugin. Sweet.

And to celebrate the occasion of FireFox Version 3, the folks at Microsoft sent them a cake. A big cake with a giant blue E, the trademark symbol of Internet Explorer. The IE team did the same thing for the release of FireFox 2, so it looks like this might become a tradition of sorts between the two rival companies. So far, we have no idea how good the cake tastes, or whether it was vanilla or chocolate.  But it sure looked delicious.

Speaking of Internet Explorer, we’re starting to get some information about Internet Explorer 8, the new version that’s on the horizon. Due to complaints across the web, IE 8 will be 100% standards compliant, right out of the box. What does this mean? It means a lot of websites need to stop slacking and get things up and running using proper web code, or else it might not work in Internet Explorer. What’s so important about being Standards Complient?  Until now, people had to write special code just to get a website to look the same in Internet Explorer as it did in FireFox and Opera.  Once IE8 goes live, new websites will be easier to create an mantain.

Today we’ve got a special treat for you- we’re going to cover some of the coolest new search engines to grace the internet. These engines are gunning to be the next Google, and they are using interesting combinations of old technology and new to embrace what the web has to offer.

Clusty is one of the most prominent of the engines we’re looking at today. They’ve been around for a short while, and are starting to pick up a fan base. Clusty searches and returns results in clusters. A cluster is like a group or folder of related information. So, if you search for hats, you will get several different kind of hat clusters as a result, such as “cowboy hats” and “ball caps.” So, it narrows down your search for you and makes searching for related data a snap.

Topicle, on the other hand, is a much more limited search. It only retrieves a set of websites hand picked by the community. The community aspect to Topicle plays a big part in the quality of your search results. This pretty much wipes SEO out of the equation. If you want to be found on Topical, you have to impress real people with you content, not just spiders. It is easy to sign up and starting adding your own choice picks to the engine, so go ahead and give it a try. Think of it as a MySpace for web searching.

Next up we’ve got Wikia Search, the brain child of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. We’ve reported on WikiaSearch in the past for the Free Line, and it has come a long way since then. The first open crowd-sourced search engine, this also relies on the community to tag, edit, and rate webpages. Is this the future of search? I’m not quite so sure. But the same thing worked well with Wikipedia, so we’ll see.

Of course, not everyone wants a large community of strangers choosing their search results. Wiki’s do have their downside, and if someone isn’t constantly editing, someone can easily sneak in and spam the search results. Mahalo is a search engine that has a set of engineers who work day and night creating great searches for you. It’s not based on a community, but rather an editorial process with several editors.

And finally, Strands plans on taking Amazon’s Select head to head, by creating an open and free suggestion engine for businesses. If you sell something online, you can have it referenced and stored in Strands. It quickly serves up recommendations that are fairly accurate, almost as good as Amazon’s. If they keep this up Amazon will have some real competition on their hands, and they’ll probably just buy them.

今天我们为你准备了特殊的内容，我今天将给大家介绍一些可能改变互联网的新型搜索引擎。这些引擎都梦想成为下一个Google，同时它们也是今天互联网新老技术的一个完美结合。

Clusty是今天我们主要要来关注的一个搜索引擎。它们发布已经有短时间了，并且已经有了自己的用户群。·Clusty的搜索结果是分成小堆的，一个小堆就类似一个有关联的组或文件夹。比如如果你搜索帽子，它就会出现不同小戳的帽子信息，这也是搜索关联信息变得更方便。·

下面要说的Topicle，是一个更专注的搜索引擎。 ·它只显示社区成员挑选出来的结果。所以社区成员的意见对搜索结果的质量有很大影响·。你只需要简单的注册之后就可以参与挑选搜索结果了。可以把它看作天涯版的搜索引擎。

接下来看一下Wikia Search，·它是Wikipedia创立者Jimmy Wales的另一作品。我们之前在免费帮介绍过WikiaSearch，结果它不断的跳票·。它是第一个开放的搜索引擎，同时它也依赖于用户、标签、编辑和相关网页。这是搜索的未来吗？还真不好说。但是Wikipedia就是这么成功的，所以我们拭目以待吧。

当然，不是所有人都希望得到一群不认识的人选出来的结果。所以维基风格确实有弊端。·Mahalo是一个由一群工程师日夜为你编辑的搜索引擎·。它的结果不取决于用户，而是由网站编辑们暗自商量的。

最后，Strands·打算通过建立一个免费开发的推荐系统来完全模仿亚马逊的推荐系统。如果你在网上卖东西，你可以推荐并存在Strands里。它可以快速的找到非常精准的推荐结果，跟亚马逊不相上下。如果它们一直做下去亚马逊恐怕就会面临一个不小的竞争对手了，或者干脆把它给买掉。

The 12th Annual Webby Awards announced their winners on Monday, including a list of celebrities who have used the internet in new and interesting ways.

Nine Inch Nails‘ frontman and freeline enthusiast Tent Reznor is entire new album for free. It’s called The Slip, and it comes with a simple note that reads, “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.”

StomperNet is preparing to re-open its doors to new members for the first time in over a year. StomperNet made some great changes over the last years, including recruiting a dozen world class faculty members and adding one-on-one personal coaching for all members. We’ve just released the first in the third series of free videos entitled “Going Natural”. The first in Going Natural 3.0 will give you a taste of what being a Stomper is all about. We’ve got the link to this very informative video about maximizing your AdWords campaigns — and you won’t want to miss it. I wouldn’t sit here day after day expounding the virtues of the Free Line, with out putting my money where my mouth is. So got get yourselves some free knowledge. “This ones on me”

On Tuesday, Yahoo launched a partnership with McAffee, allowing Yahoo to integrate Site Advisor scanning into their Yahoo search.

Amazon is suing the state of New York over an internet sales tax that requires out of state companies to collect sales tax from shoppers in New York This is the first State to pull this maneuver, since most States require only that companies within the State have to pay retail sales taxes to that state.

Summize is a simple Twitter search engine.

Travis Campbell sent us a video tutorial on some free software that can search through images and videos in a snap. The software is called Picklens, and it works in almost every single web browser on the market.

AT&T launched its own streaming video service yesterday, allowing MobileTV capable cellphones access to all of your favorite television shows for just 15$ a month.

We have a link to a free and informative video on WholeSaleTraffic.com that will show you how to beat Google at it’s new game. The video shows you how to get your Adwords clicks at wholesale prices, make over ONE MILLION dollars in less than 9 months and easily TRIPLE your ROI from Google Adwords. If you took a monetary hit from Google’s recent change in the way it does Adwords, you need to watch this video.

People wanting to see a fight between two web giants will be disappointed, as Microsoft walked away from its Yahoo bid on Saturday, after raising it to 47.5 billion dollars. Yahoo turned down the higher bid, and instead of taking it to the shareholders like Microsoft originally threatened, they just let the whole thing go.

Pingg is a stylish, web 2.0 enhanced online invitation website.  It can send out invitations via email, or through Facebook and MySpace, and the plus version even allows you to send out the same invitations through the snail mail.

Presdo is a new online web scheduling application that is simple yet powerful.

Videophlow is a new web application that gives you a live chat interface for discussing online video and photographs.

Search Engine Land has an article with a list of tools for dealing with all the social media sites. It can be very time consuming, Twittering, updating MySpace and Facebook, etc., and the applications they list can help you streamline everything and keep up with everything in less time.

Last week Microsoft revealed exactly what its new Mesh platform is like, and opened it to an invite only beta. This application allows users to easily drag and drop files and other media between Windows machines, whether they’re online, a Microsoft embedded device (like an Ultra Mobile PC, or a Zune, or a cellphone) or just a plain Windows XP or Vista computer.

Wesabe just released a new tips feature that gives you advice on where to shop.  They show you places that carry the same stuff you usually buy, but at a cheaper price.

Here is a link to a free tutorial that shows you how to build a sleek website in Photoshop.

The MySpace Application Gallery is finally out of beta, and works a lot like Facebook’s Application Gallery works.  You have a list of Applications you can install, a brief description and then a button to put it onto your MySpace page.

Yahoo is letting a limited number of developers try out their new SearchMonkey platform, which allows websites to customize their Yahoo search results listing.

From Search Engine Journal we have an article on the top Back Link Checking tools that actually help.

Twistory is a cool Twitter mashup that takes in your archive and puts it into Google Calendar.

Flatworld Knowledge is an new web company with an aim to bring the Free Line to expensive college textbooks, by placing PDF files of its textbooks online, for free. They plan on opening their doors next January.

Esquire Magazine has a quick and informative interview with Vint Cerf, one of the masterminds of the internet from back in the early days.

SearchEngineLand has an informative article that gives a rundown for FireFox Plugins that can help with link development.

The new version of Ubuntu was just released a week or so ago, and it has finally gotten over those Linux hurdles that keep the non-geeks away. We’ve got links to a video showing you how easy it is to install, configure and run, as well as an article that explains just how important and polished this latest Linux download is.