In parts one and two of my online reputation management series, I wrote about a couple of great tools that marketers can utilize to monitor online brand reputation. The two tools I wrote about were Google Alerts and Technorati. Today, I want to discuss a third tool that can yield interesting results, Twitter.

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On Tuesday, Google revealed it's newest product...G1. Eerily similar in style to Apple's iPhone, T-Mobile showcased the G1, calling attention to it's large touch screen, trackball, slide-out keyboard, Wi-Fi connection ability and quick access to Google's email and mapping programs.

The phone is set to be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third generation wireless data network. On the planned device launch date, of October 22nd, that will include 21 cities. Included in those cities are New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami. The phone will be available in other areas for purchase, and does run on T-Mobile's slower data network, but it is optimized for the faster networks.

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In part one of my Simple Ways to Monitor your Online Reputation series, I wrote about how you can use Google Alerts to monitor your reputation. Today, I’m going to introduce you to another free tool that will also give you visibility into the blogosphere to see who is writing what about your company.

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Maps, remember what an Atlas was? Remember pulling out the 5’ x 5’ map in your car and trying to find where you were on one red thin line with hundreds of streets, highways, parks and shopping centers? I do and it wasn’t so long ago. Nowadays you can find your exact location at point A and a detailed description of where point B is, at your finger tips. It started with the internet, sites such as Map Quest and Google Maps started popping up in conversations of how to get somewhere. Now it’s a house hold tool for us to find the shortest route to the new restaurant that opened...

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Over the past 3 years I have made a transition from using photoshop to design websites to fireworks. Photoshop and fireworks are equally capable of creating anything you can imagine onscreen. However photoshop is more geared toward publishing, graphic design and high end photo retouching while fireworks has become adobes web specific design application. It now has features that allow you to share elements across frames (now called scenes). essentially this is a way to create a navigation structure then allow this navigation to be shared across all frames. If you decide to edit the navigation , your changes automatically reflect cross all frames. Previously in photoshop or fireworks you would have to do this manually or frame by frame. Fireworks has also created a library of common elements you can drop onto your page, items such as radio buttons , scroll bars, check boxes and buttons. Prior to the common library designers would either recreate things like scroll bars or literally take a picture of a scroll bar then place it on the page. Like the share across frames feature, you use these items throughout your design, and if you decide to edit a common item, the changes will reflect globally across the site similar to using a style sheet. All of these enhancements accelerate the process of dealing with client revisions and let you turn projects faster. In a fast paced agency environment - this is a good thing.

Recently I had the chance to demo Fireworks CS4 and enjoyed some of its new features like direct .pdf export and the new pages feature which allows you to create multi scene (formerly called frames) documents with various canvas sizes. I like the new release and it seems to run faster than the CS3 version. Is it worth purchasing the new version ? I guess it depends on how often you use it - but I don't see version CS4 making your designs any better. Is it Faster? A little bit.

Do you ever wonder why adobe doesn't create one monster application that accomplishes all design needs across print and web. A super application that could be used to create logos , edit photos, layout magazine articles, create all your web graphics and then wrap it all together by being a fully capable web development tool. This would be a huge task but definitely something adobe is capable of. At some point Im sure its been discussed or maybe its already in the works. Creative suite X? I guess until then, well be using all of adobes products however we see fit to get the job done.

As more and more news on Google's new Chrome browser comes online I find myself wondering what the future of the "Browser" is going to be and which ones will remain after the dust settles. Google's Chrome promises to give Internet Explorer a run for it's money but there are so many large companies with overbearing and controlling IT departments who have yet to upgrade to IE7 from the dreadful IE6, I wonder how many will actually take the leap to browsers like Chrome of my favorite FireFox 3.1.

There's no doubt IE6 should be put out of it's (and our) misery. My concern is not that browsers are getting better, but that we as designers and developers now have more to code for than ever and an even stronger suite for web standards (and browsers that support all of them!).

Here's my take on the whole situation:

IE7 will more than likely remain at the top of the heap, though not one of my favorites it does support all or most of the most recent CSS rendering techniques.

Google Chrome will give IE a good challenger but will probably never have the market penetration that IE has. Currently there's no native Mac support but I have a feeling it's a short wait for this to happen. I've also heard through the grapevine that Chrome very soon will have the ability to use plug-ins and addons the same way Firefox does.

FireFox will more than likely remain my favorite browser for it's addon's alone, as well as it's open source community and it's action to kill IE. The browser runs like it should and renders all CSS properly. It's easy to develop for, especially with addons like Firebug and Developers Toolbar.

Safari, in my opinion, probably will remain one of the top Mac browsers but it's penetration into the PC market will remain relatively small especially with the introduction of Chrome and Firefox's ever growing popularity.

In the end it's all speculation, only time will tell who will go the way of Netscape Navigator and who's here to stay.

The increasingly socially-responsive Web has made it more important to continually monitor your business or brand’s reputation online. As your customers, potential customers and the media increasing use the web to talk about and learn more about your business, you need to be proactive in monitoring what’s being said. Knowing how your brand is perceived is critical in improving your product/service and customer relations. On the Web, there are a number of great tools available that can help webmasters gain a view of who’s out there linking to and talking about their website and brand. Google Alerts is just one basic tool that you should be using.

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I recently went to one of my favorite blogs and saw that the author had posted up a neat little trick to help prevent spammers and bots from crawling your site to gain those oh so valuable emails and begin to send you and everyone else who has an email on your site - spam. It's a spammy spam world of emails and we as programmers need to try to prevent this.

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If you know me, then you know that I love me some PHP. Well in the course of all the years I have been coding, there were and are a bunch of websites that I often reference for a "how to" or to grab a class here and there. Grab a class? you may ask. Of course, why wouldn't I. That's like saying "Hey the transmission in my car broke, but I'm not going to go to find another one, I am going to build one from scratch." Sounds silly in those terms right? well that's probably because it is. So anyway, Here are a couple of websites that I often go to the see whats happening in my coding world.

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Since link building is such a critical process, it’s no surprise that there is so much hoopla over what the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ strategies are. I’ve put together some link building resources below that can help SEOs of all skill levels. Every time I get stuck for link building ideas I take a look trough some of these lists and always get something new. There’s always a fresh approach and I’m sure that at least one of these resources will give you some fresh ideas.

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