Simple Live Chat on Your Website

Installed Plugoo last week on our client login area - it allows visitors to your website to contact you via Messenger, without them knowing what your actual messenger signin is.

Actually, they don't even know what IM software you're using!

It's all pretty seamless and appears to work quite well.

The only real gripe is that if you embed the object on the page, once the visitor navigates away from that page the conversation ends. Makes continuity a bit hard. I've overcome this by placing their object in a hard-coded popup window, and made a little 'live help' button instead.

Hat Tip

ACCC Sues Google

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has decided to sue Google over the sponsored links on its site.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

"The ACCC also alleges Google engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct by causing the Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota links to be published on the website. [In ads placed by used car rival, the Trading Post]

And then:

"Google also failed to adequately distinguish sponsored links from 'organic' search results, the ACCC alleges.

Geeze - don't worry about the price of fuel in regional areas compared to capital cities. Don't worry about Woolworths (supermarket giant here in Australia) squeezing out smaller operators. Don't worry about issues that affect everyday people. Tackle something for cheap publicity instead.

If the ACCC doesn't like ads placed on Google by the Trading Post, shouldn't they be chasing the Trading Post?

Oh, but there are no headlines in that, are there?

Web Directions South: I'm There!

Missed out last year, but the 04 and 05 conferences were both excellent. Inspirational.

So I managed to convince the 'boss' to let me loose again this year.

They have split it into 3 streams this year: Design, Development, and Management & Strategy. A designer I am not (kinda wish I had some 'skilz' there though) but I like some of the stuff in the Development stream and some in the Management & Strategy stream. Hope I can chop and change a bit.

I guess I'll find out in due course.

Internet Explorer Cannot Download / From Help

Funny bug in Windows Vista - apparently caused when Dreamweaver 8 is installed. If you try to get help from within Windows, this happens:



There is a pretty painless fix, found here.

Safari For Windows

Apple have released Safari (their web browser) for Windows.

Why would you want to use Safari instead of Firefox?

I don't know... but now you can.

Getting Nokia PC Suite to Work on a New Toshiba Notebook

Got a new Toshiba A200 notebook on Friday so just spent the weekend setting it all up. All went pretty well until I got to setting up my Nokia 6111 to sync with Outlook - a very handy feature you can do with Nokia's PC Suite.

Except it didn't work.

After much digging I found that Nokia's software won't work with Toshiba's bluetooth stack in Windows Vista. It found the phone, but no amount of persuasion would make it pair with the computer. You need Microsoft's bluetooth stack.

So here's the fix:

1. Go to your Control Panel in Windows and uninstall the existing Bluetooth by Toshiba.


2. Reboot


3. Go to C:\TOSAPINS\Bluetooth-Monitor\BtMon3Inst_v301.exe and install that.

This process has removed the Toshiba bluetooth stack and installed the Microsoft one.

Easy...!

Microhoo?

Microsoft to buy Yahoo? So reports the Sydney Morning Herald:

Yahoo would plug a "strategic hole" at Microsoft that was not filled by the purchase of AQuantive, announced last week, Mr Noto [a Goldman Sachs analyst] wrote in a note to clients.

AQuantive, which creates web ads and measures whether they reach the target audience, does not give Microsoft the roughly half a million advertisers required to compete against Google, Mr Noto said.

Windows Live Search obviously isn't being used for search as Microsoft had hoped. But one has to ask: would this be a good thing or a bad thing for Yahoo? And does Google care?