Online Resource

No matter what sort of business you run or the size of your profile, chances are that at some point it will be mentioned on the web.

When it is, will it be good or bad? Wouldn't it be great if you knew what people were saying immediately so that you could respond either way?

Google Alerts lets you monitor specific keywords in the Google search engine, and it will send you an email every day (or however often you choose) with links to new pages that match your search phrases.

This can be useful for people doing research, following a breaking news story or who are simply interested in a particular topic. But another key reason to set up an alert is to monitor your brand.

The Australian Government today launched a new Small Business Support website to help people starting or running a small business understand their legal and tax obligations.

The site talks about starting a business and covers topics like tax, record keeping and becoming an employer. It also helps you understand your entitlements and has a list of places that can give you more help.

While the website layout is a little hard to understand and the visual design ugly, the content is simple and sound. If you are just starting out it will be the perfect resource to answer common questions.

There are also links from almost every topic to more information, so even if your questions are hairy you'll likely find a link to a page that will help.

Visit http://ato.gov.au/businesses/content.asp?doc=/content/00221703.htm to start using the website.

Google Maps results often appear above other listings for a location-based search in Google, so having your website shown on the map can give you a significant advantage over the other businesses that are only shown in the normal organic results.

So how do you get your business to appear in the Google Maps?

There are three basic actions you need to perform to get your listing to appear in Google Maps:

Are you having trouble understanding the new Fair Work Act? Have you even thought about it yet?

This act came into affect on 1st July 2009 and controls how your small business employs staff.

Luckily, the Federal Government this week released the Fair Work for Small Business website to help small business operators to understand their rights and responisibilities.

This free site provides online webinars, email newsletters, online guides and informative whitepapers and aims to highlight significant changes and make it easy for small business employers to conform.

If you live online you're probably using Firefox, arguably the best browser around and the world's second-most popular after Internet Explorer.

People love Firefox because it is free, open-source and very customisable.

Mike at SeeCure IT is a power user of Firefox as well as a friend of mine. He uses Firefox with all sorts of customisable addons, and he recently wrote an article about 12 of his favourites. Here they are.

Google released a new version of its search engine earlier this month which promises to make searching faster and more accurate.

Code named 'Caffeine' the new technology takes place behind-the-scenes, so there should be very few immediate changes but the increase in speed and flexibility means that future upgrades can happen more efficiently.

Google's Matt Cutts explains, "We're shooting to get results identical to previous version. We'll open up a few datacenters with it first and then roll it out."

"Caffeine will be more powerful, flexible and robust - allowing Google to index faster."

"(Caffeine) builds a powerful foundation for including any changes we want to do with indexing. Not so much for taking advantage of semantic, real-time indexing, but for getting good infrastructure in place for growth and unlock more power."

Email is a cheap way to reach large numbers of people. We suggest that every business should have an email list that they send to regularly as part of their online marketing strategy.

But when does sending email become spam?

Spam is essentially unwanted email. If you make sure your readers are recieving quality content, know who you are and have the opportunity to unsubscribe if they want to, then there will rarely be any problems.

The Spam Act 2003

In Australia the Spam Act 2003 makes it illegal to contact anyone by email without their prior consent - which means that any email you send to someone without asking them first could be considered a breach if interpreted strictly.

Bing is a new search engine created by Microsoft as the latest tool in its campaign to take control of the web. But can it outshine Google?

At first glance, Bing appears to be based so closely on Google that it's hard to spot any real differences.

The design itself looks like Google, despite the added background images. Yes, there's the search box. Yes, there's the go button. Yes, there's the links to other types of content searches, like image and video.

The returned results page is even displayed in a similar fashion to Google's results.

IE6ify, Elbert F's most recent home-grown creation, has gained popularity so much that it's now drawing over 5000 visits a day simply from social websites like Twitter and Facebook.

This site will appeal to all the web designers out there who still have to make sites work with Internet Explorer 6: the 'IE6ify' bookmarklet will break any website in any browser, no matter how standards-compliant!

As Elbert says on the site:

After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites.

Google Wave is an amazing new technology that has the ability to change the web far more than anything else I've seen.

Wave integrates lots of different ways that people currently communicate on the web, pulling together email, Instant Messaging and social sharing websites. But far more than just lumping them together, Google Wave promises to redefine the way we use these technologies so much that they won't be separate at all.

The smoothness of operation looks amazing - everything is realtime, so you can see the other person typing on your screen, and you can type into the same area at the same time. Then sharing a video is as simple as drag-and-drop the media file into the same window.

From the Google Wave website:

Internet Explorer 8 was officially released by Microsoft a few weeks ago, meaning that many users who allow Windows automatic updates will now have it running on their system.

If you did not recieve it as an automatic update, you can download it free from Microsoft.

Why upgrade?

The problems with Internet Explorer 6 have been widely documented, but unfortunately many users still seem to have that version installed on their Windows XP system. What this has meant in the past is that as web designers, we have to work around the problems with IE 6 to make sure that our designs still work with that browser.

Microsoft is giving away free copies of the new Windows 7 operating system in an attempt to respond to criticism of Vista.

Windows 7 is said to be faster to load, simpler to use and smarter in the way it learns from your common behaviour.

The Release Candidate is a 3GB download from Microsoft, and feedback received during its use will guide the final changes and bug fixes made before the official release. Using the software will be free over the next 12 months, after which you can decide to pay to keep it or revert to your current version.

Watch this video to see some of the cool new features of Windows 7:

I enjoyed university immensely when I was studying and I have often thought of going back - but the thought of years of night classes, endless homework and the cost have made it impossible.

The internet has always been a source of information and learning, and recently two sites caught my eye that purposefully take online education beyond tutorials or encyclopaedias and aim to provide structured, high-quality content that bears more resemblance to a traditional university experience - but without the hassles.

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a new website that shows lectures from universities all over the world on video, including Yale, Berkeley, Harvard and MIT. More courses are being added all the time so personally I'm hoping there'll be some PHP units among them.

DrupalModules.com is a classic 'mashup' website, combining module information and downloads from the main drupal.org website with the ability to review, bookmark and vote for your favourites.

What's a mashup? From wikipedia:

In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Looking for a business loan? The Victorian Government has recently launched an online business loan finder to help you find the loans suitable for you.

Enter your company type, the amount you want to borrow and on what terms, provide a little more information as required and the business loan finder will show you a list of loans available from a range of financial institutions. The list indicates fees and monthly repayments, so comparisons are easy.

At a time when finding affordable credit for Australian busineses is hard, a tool like this will make your life easier.

A 'Wordle' is a collage made out of the words that are most common on your website.

You enter your text by copying and pasting it from your website or supplying your RSS feed. The Wordle website application looks through it for words that commonly appear and creates a beautiful image arranging them in a pattern. You can choose the colours, font and layout to suit your tastes.

The words that appear more often are shown larger, so a Wordle is an easy, visual way to tell what your blog or website is about. Plus, they look pretty cool.

Here are two different designs produced from this "Fresh Articles" blog here at Choc Chip:

Have you ever wondered how copyright affects you or who owns the copyright to your graphic design?

Design Victoria has recently launched two guides to help you understand in simple language how copyright works in Australia. While aimed at graphic and industrial designers, these guides are a useful reference for anyone who has a brand, trademark, website or other graphic material they wish to protect.

Make Your Mark - A Guide to Intellectual Property for Australia’s Industrial Designers contains practical information and case studies to explain IP (Intellectual Property) protection, copyright and related issues. This guide is aimed at industrial designers and inventors who want to protect their business ideas.