A Web measurement firm today blamed a massive online marketing campaign aimed only at Internet Explorer (IE) users for skewing its April data, which said Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari had lost significant amounts of market share.

The company, Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, Calif., has posted revised data on its Web site that shows Firefox and Safari still dropping in share, but by much smaller increments.....

Net Applications' revised April data indicates that Firefox's market share drop was only 0.07%. Safari slipped too, but by just 0.01%. On the other hand, Internet Explorer's growth was really just 0.03%.

If you have a MacBook Air and are going on a trip (or—wonder of wonders—using the laptop as you only Mac), an essential item (pun intended) is a My Passport Essential Portable USB Drives from Western Digital. The 5400 RMP drives are light (less than five ounces), reasonably priced and easy to stow and to use.

Since the "world's thinnest laptop"comes with, at best, a miserly 80GB hard drive, you'll probably only keep your essential files on the Air's hard drive or solid state drive. If you want to carry along non-essential items (videos, music, lots of photos, etc.) you'll need extra storage. That's where the My Passport Essential Drive is handy. It requires no power adapter, as it's powered directly through the USB cable.

We've been wondering where Samsung's 9.5mm 500GB SpinPoint M6 laptop drive has been hiding, and it turns out that it's just been vacationing in France.

Word on the street is that there is still a little more light to be shed on the saga of P.A. Semi and Apple.

Readers will remember that the news broke that Apple had acquired PA Semi for $278 million in cash on April 23.

Subsequently a source has said that Apple was an investor in P.A.Semi prior to the acquisition. I haven't been able to find anything in the public domain about this but strategic investors sometimes prefer to go unlisted. This does make some sense as a relationship was known to exist between the two companies and it had been reported elsewhere that Apple considered buying P.A.Semi in 2005.

The Information Super Highway could easily be called the Misinformation Super Parking Lot. Or, Junk Yard.

One thing is for sure, Matt Freestone doesn't know squat about Macs. He says Mac users have to buy new Macs to run OS X Leopard. How old is your Mac?

In reading one of the most poorly written, illogical and unreasonable articles about Macs vs. Windows PCs, or Leopard vs. Vista, I came away with two thoughts.

First, some people shouldn't be allowed to write about that which they do not know. Second, old Macs seems to run Leopard quite well (contrary to poor Matt's assertions to the contrary).

Steve Jobs' keynote presentation at this year's MacWorld conference was not as hyped as some of his talks in the past, but he remains one of the best corporate presenters. Consultant Garr Reynolds, on his Presentation Zen blog, culls these six lessons:

Develop rapport with the audience....

Give them an idea of where you're going.....

Show your enthusiasm....

It's not about the numbers, it's what the numbers mean....

Make it visual....

Save the best for last

There are an awful lot of Silicon Valley CEOs sporting beards these days. As Michael Copeland writes in the current issue of Fortune, "it takes more than leading-edge technology and a Stanford MBA to make it big in high tech. Apparently it takes whiskers."

So the magazine organized a contest: The Silicon Valley Beard-off. It pulled together a spread of eight unshaven execs and invited a panel of three distinguished judges to choose the best beard of the bunch....

The leader in early returns - with 53% of votes cast as of Wednesday morning - is Steve Jobs.

Lots of pundits are content with putting the words “Apple Inc.” and “proprietary” in the same sentence. A lot of that is, of course, due to the tight vertical integration of all of their products, from the iPod to Macs and Mac OS X.

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