Mozilla’s user experience guru, Mike Beltzner, took the time to demonstrate some of Firefox 3′s best features in this detailed screencast, embedded below.

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Note: This screencast won’t scale to size, so it may look misformatted on this blog. Try the link above if the overhang is just too hard on your design sensibilities.

[@Firefox Answers]

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Newsgator’s software was part of presentation by Lockheed-Martin on the results of its own 18-month project. “Project Unity” combined Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance (ESA), Newsgator’s Enterprise Server and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). Newsgator powers their feed management and reading experience. I’ll be writing about Unity in a future post.

You can hear more about Social Sites 2.0 from Brian in this Social Sites 2.0 podcast. (MP3)

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Learn how to add codecs automatically, play video embedded in a browser and how to install a Flash Player plugin or the Miro video platform.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2369893842637434537" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

This screencast is from Ubuntu.com and was created by Alan Pope.

Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

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UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

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For more information about Snort, see the following tips and articles:

• How can I learn more about Snort?
  Learn where to find the online resources to help you get the most out of the application.
• Network session data analysis with Snort and Argus
  Learn how flow/session data can complement the alert data supplied by the Snort intrusion detection system for network session data analysis.
  
  
• How to use shared object rules in Snort
  A Sourcefire security advisory has made using shared object rules in Snort easier for service providers.
• What does the future hold for Snort?
  Discover how the new features of Snort 3.0 promise to deliver greater functionality to Snort users and their clients than ever before.

Finally, make sure to view this expert screencast on Snort from SearchSecurity.com contributor Tom Bowers. In a step-by-step demonstration, Tom Bowers offers a brief introduction and history of Snort, and explains what it can do for information security pros and how to use it for the first time.

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The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

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There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

{angst}

Fortunately, a friendly colleague forwarded me a rather useful tool: Vector Magic. If you, like me, love to make your own gifts, including digital imagery, this tool will excite you as well.

Here’s a quick and clean summary. Vector Magic converts bit map images to vector graphics.

Why is this cool? Because a bit map uses a fixed or raster graphics method of specifying an image, the image cannot be immediately rescaled by a user without losing definition. A vector graphics graphic image, however, is designed to be quickly rescaled.

Instead of using commercial software, you can just upload your image to Vector Magic (essentially, a stanford.edu server) and they’ll vectorize it for you.

Here’s their example of the difference:

In other words, you can scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Savvy? Happy gift making!

Here’s a video that demonstrates how you how Vector Magic works:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/screencasts/vm_short.swf" width="450" height="380"/]

Check out this FAQ for more info. Vector Magic supports the JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF image formats as inputs and outputs them as EPS, SVG or PNGs.

The vision is quite straightforward: Everyone is an expert in something. Knowledge of that something can be visually explained in less than 5 minutes. Users can easily upload their shorts, using a visual storyboard to annotate videos and add outbound hyperlinks. While the Web site is still relatively new, there’s already some useful content in the tech section including Running ScanDisk in XP and How to do a Google Search.