With last weeks’ rollout of Firefox 3, Mozilla has once again delivered a smooth, and integrated browsing experience.
New interface design is more user-friendly, the browser is more stable, and also appear to hog less memory, a common complaint of users of Firefox 2, particularly on Macs.

Interestingly, many of Firefox’s famous add-ons are still compatible with the new release. And many of those plugins are Web 2.0 plugins, harnessing social networking and social media tools.

Available immediately as a free download, the browser comes in approximately 50 languages and culminates a three-year effort on the part of thousands of developers, security experts, and testers from around the world. Reports from Mozilla highlight how popular the browser has become - the network at its peak served 17,000 downloads per minute, or 283 per second, and had sustained download rates in excess of 4,000 a minute, he said.

“We’re really proud of Firefox 3 and it just shows what a committed, energized global community can do when they work together,” said Mozilla chief executive John Lilly. (Apple Insider)

Flock started the Web 2.0 browser craze with many social networking tools built directly into the core of the browser.

A new release of Firefox 3 on tuesday, has spurred another download frenzy across the Web, with downloads at nearly a million already.

Now, 3rd party developers are leading the way on Firefox, with a rise in handy Web 2.0 style-addons being up uploaded onto the Firefox site

Some of my favourites:

Shareaholic

offers an easy way to submit the sites you’re browsing straight to Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg, Friendfeed, Google Reader, pownce, Stumbleupon and Twitter, as well as using the cool Bzzster ‘Email to a friend’ Web 2.0 App.

Clipmarks

gives you the tools to create your own online scrapbook from the websites that you browse.

PicLens

is one of my new favourites. Not strictly Web 2.0 (although it uses Web 2.0 APIs), this tool is very handy none-the-less!

Scribefire

is a great way to manage your blog.

Blogging is an effective way to reach a wider audience with a more personal message than a website may present.

Companies that employ a well thought out blogging strategy encourage the strongest community goodwill, and that goodwill, in turn, promotes significant marketing and sales gains. It is said that success breeds success. This holds very true for successful blogs. There is chain reaction that begins with a real desire on the part of the blogger to provide value and connect with their audience. The blogger shares useful and engaging content —the latest information, help, discussion topics and ideas.

More than 5% of the Fortune 500 companies blog externally.

Market research done in the first half of 2006 indicated that 34% of large companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%

A business blog can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.

External corporate blogs, by their very nature, are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain public relations tools.

Greater word-of-mouth buzz on- and offline, higher search engine rankings, increased press coverage and superior lead generation are just some of the potential benefits of blogging in a corporate setting.

A new Web 2.0 style website design has been implemented on Sydney agency SHIFT Interactive’s CMS website.

Launched just before the Easter weekend, SHIFT Interactive is sporting a shiny new look-and-feel. Web 2.0 practices are search engine friendly, and have a visual aesthetic which encourages easy readability and access to content for the end-user.

To complement their new Web 2.0 website skin, SHIFT will be regularly updating their Blog with fresh web design and search engine optimisation tips, aimed specifically at web users from Sydney and Australia interested in Web 2.0 techniques.

An RSS feed is essentially a newsfeed of the latest articles on your site.

Many people now use RSS Readers to stay abreast of news on a large number of sites.  In this way, they can browse all the headlines of their favourite sites from one page, and simply click on an article headline to launch the article they’re interested in.