Then along came Microsoft – the new player in the market – they revolutionised the pc and made it accessible to everyone with their windows software. Everyone loved Microsoft!

On the back of the success of Windows, Microsoft grew large and powerful and profitable. Soon Microsoft took over as the ‘Bad Guy’. Everyone used Windows and hated Microsoft.

At the start of the 21st century Google took over the internet search market and everyone loved Google, who’s motto is “Don’t be evil”. Google became the search engine used to find information on the web. The English language gained a new verb – ‘to google’.

On the back of the success of it’s search engine Google is now growing large, rich and powerful. History seems to be repeating itself and slowly questions are starting to be asked about Google abusing its dominant position on the internet. The latest example of this apparent abuse is the release of Google’s SideWiki where anyone can post anything on any page on the web, and only Google and not the website owner has any control over what appears on his website.

For more about SideWiki please follow the links below:

Google’s own page about Sidewiki at www.google.com/sidewiki – Contribute and Publish helpful information to any web page.

Paul Myers of talkbiz.com well argued and well written article about the potential downside of Sidewiki from the point of view of website owners.

A reluctant defense of googles sidewiki from Simon Abramovitch

For further information please see:

Ofcom 0870 info page

At the end of the one day workshop each attendee will have built their own web shop and be ready to take orders online.

The workshop is aimed at anyone running a business who has some experience of using the internet and email and is ready to take the next step to trading on-line.

The workshop is to be held on
Monday 22 June 2009 10am to 4pm
£25.00 per person cheques payable to Calstock Development Trust
The price includes 30 days hosting.

Book at the Oasis Centre
or by phoning
Mike at Amcho Computer Services Ltd
on 01822 833 690

For anyone who wishes to start early or cannot attend the workshop we will be running an online version using email – sign up atBxB.biz

Example live webshops:

• Hand Crafted Decorative Porcelain Vessels
• Teddy Bear online Shop

Sometimes number 1 on google is not all it is cracked up to be!

Try it yourself in different browsers by putting UK style dates at www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_parse.asp

If you want to check it out yourself the PHP code is included below:

Function FindDate($sDate,$iDirection,$sTarget) {
// $sDate format YYYY-MM-DD from MySQL table
// $idirection to go forward or back in time
// $sTarget day of week we want to find
list($yyyy,$mm,$dd)=preg_split('/\W/',$sDate);
$i=0;
do {
	$timestamp=mktime(0, 0, 0, $mm, $dd+$i, $yyyy);
	$i=$i+$iDirection;
	$w=date('D',$timestamp);  // gives Mon - Sun
	echo ($i." ".$sDate." ".$w);
	echo (date('Y-m-d',$timestamp)."\n");
    } while ($w!=$sTarget && abs($i<7));

$r= date('Y-m-d',$timestamp);
echo ($r."\n");
return $r;

}

Similar in someways to the concept of sending the next tax demand back with a note along the lines of ‘Thank you for your offer but just at the moment , due to other financial commitments, we regret that we must decline your request“.

I was clearing out my spam folder and noticed a message with the above header, sometimes even spam can be interesting! The contents were less so; it was some sort of scheme to make lots of money returning phone calls….