Now reporting live from Long Beach, California, where it’s smokey (due to the fires), and I’m up on the 6th floor of a particular hotel with my $10 internet charge paid for, I continue my Tiger-to-Leopard blog series. Yesterday, I started out covering some of the Web 2.0 news, in particular focusing on the various Web 2.0 sites that have emerged on the internet. But what about some of the other phenomena that have emerged since Tiger’s release? The series continues…

Podcasting is a major phenomenon which has risen on the internet since 2005. Although podcasts did exist prior to June 2005–the MacCast was born in late 2004 and this WEEK in TECH was first recorded in January 2005 and became a regular podcast in April, and who knows when Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code come out, podcasting really became popular once Apple made it a true part of iTunes with the June 2005 release of iTunes 4.9. Hit podcast Diggnation began in July 2005, and eventually expanded into a podcast network called Revision3. TWiT also expanded into a podcast network, TWiT.tv. Even I got into the podcasting fold with PreviewCast and later phpBB Weekly. Now with millions of podcasts in the iTunes Store, all of them free, the world of free, user-produced entertainment is steadily growing, and traditional radio companies should be getting worried.

Other tools have emerged to help grow the podcast revolution. One very significant program for podcasters has been PodPress, which was first released in February 2006. It’s a WordPress plugin that optimizes the WordPress interface for distributing podcasts, which I reviewed a few months back. TalkShoe, which I also reviewed, has become popular as a site where anyone can produce a live streaming podcast that can include audience participation, or even just as a place for free podcast hosting and feed generation. TalkShoe came around in mid-2006, and has been steadily growing and debugging itself over time.

You know about Firefox? Firefox currently enjoys a 15% browser market share, and that number has increased pretty nicely since Tiger’s release. Firefox 1.0 had been released in November 2004, and was still growing during Tiger’s release. In the last two and a half years, we have seen two major releases of Firefox: Firefox 1.5 in November 2005, and Firefox 2.0 in October 2006. On THE VERY DAY that Mac OS X Tiger was released, April 29th, 2005, Firefox announced 50 million downloads had taken place. 50 million downloads of Firefox from November 2004-May 2005 (six months). Well, in the last thirty months (five times the amount of time), there were another 350 million downloads (seven times the downloads), bringing the current total of Firefox downloads to over 400 million as of September 7th, 2007. Cool, eh? I’d like to see Apple’s Safari try to beat those numbers.

And of course, one cannot think of the Web 2.0 without thinking of Google. Where have they come in the last two and a half years? Well, for one thing, they’ve been acquiring other companies. Everyone’s aware of the late-2006 acquisition of YouTube, however, note as well that Google acquired a company called Upstartle, makers of Writely, which is now part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and in April 2007 they acquired advertising company DoubleClick.

Google Video was launched in January 2006, but following Google’s later acquisition of YouTube, Google Video has recently kind of closed down. Google Maps and Google Earth have also become very popular.

With all of that, is there anything that I missed? (The Web 2.0 is such a big place after all.) What other developments have happened in the last 2 and a half years? Hie thee hence to the comments section, and speak your mind! I’m off to my meetings.

Tags: article, browsers, Firefox, Google, Mac OS X Leopard, podcasting, PodPress, TalkShoe, Tiger-to-Leopard, Web 2.0