Work.com Small Business Community Blog:

What's Coming at Work.com: Channel-Specific Top Guides & Experts

In store for Work.com members in 2007 -- the Top Guides & Experts section will be expanded to display channel-specific results, so you'll be able to see the most popular guides and top experts in Money & Finance, Startups, or any other main channel from the channel's top page. It's great (and endlessly fascinating) to see what business how-to's are most popular in general among the Work.com audience, but if you want to go straight to the key info for a major topic, and go right to the guides that are must-reads for a particular channel, the new channel-specific rankings will help you.

As always, we love to hear your suggestions for anything else you'd like to see at Work.com.

P.S. By the way, speaking of Top Guides & Experts, we noticed that Kimberly Dawn Wells' Guide to Making Money in CafePress has leaped rather rapidly into the Top 20 Most Popular Guide list. We suspect this is because Ms. Wells, a CafePress expert among other things (such as volunteer firefighter) is an active member of many forums and offers links to her guide where relevant. Good luck in getting to #1, Kimberly!

Posted by Shara Karasic at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Year-End for Small Business: 5 Things to Keep in Mind

Now that the end of 2006 is fast approaching, make sure you and your business are in the know about:

And...well, we hope you don't do this, but, if you have to work while stuck at the airport, do it right.

Posted by Shara Karasic at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Open Source for Your Small Business

Akwasi Adjei, the Work.com community leader for the Technology channel who has an MS in management information systems and is a startup technology consultant, just wrote a new Work.com guide: Using Linux for Your Desktop.

Akwasi writes:

Software license costs can be prohibitive for small business owners. Linux is an alternative operating system to Microsoft Windows, and can be acquired at little to no cost to the small business owner...Linux comes with lots of free useful software for small business. For example, OpenOffice is an office suite complete with a word processing program, spreadsheet, database, media presentation and a graphics package. Mozilla.org offers Firefox for browsing the web, Thunderbird for email, and Sunbird, a calendar client.

Bhavin Patel, who describes himself as "yet another IT nerd", wrote a Work.com guide about open source web development: Web Development with Ruby on Rails.

Bhavin writes:

Everyone from startups to non-profits to enterprise organizations are using Rails. Rails is all about infrastructure so it's a great fit for practically any type of web application, be it software for collaboration, community, e-commerce, content management, statistics, management. Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming.Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days...

Eric Wolfram, Internet & Ecommerce community leader, comments on the Guide to Do-It-Yourself Web Design with a link to a list of free open source content management systems.

Have you saved your small business lots of money by using open source software? Do you prefer FreeBSB to Linux? What open source solutions have worked for you?

Tell us about your open source experience.

Posted by Shara Karasic at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

New Work.com Feature: Top Guides and Experts

I'm happy to announce that now you can see the top small business how-to guides and experts at Work.com, including the most popular guides, the top-rated guides, the newest guides (including most recently-updated guides), guides with most recent comments, and top experts. The top expert score is based on each expert's Work.com Guides: how useful members find them, how many written, and how often they're viewed and linked to from other sites. The best way to increase your expert score is to write highly useful Guides that people visit often, tell their friends and business contacts about, and link to.

Here are today's top 10 most popular guides:

1. Learning Search Engine Optimization
2. Creating a Great Business Plan
3. Low-Cost Businesses You Can Start
4. Business Logo Design
5. Getting the Most Out of Work.com
6. Foreign Exchange and Currency Converters
7. Finding Venture Capital
8. U.S. Postal Service Business Mailing
9. Racks, Shelving, and Display Cases
10. Small Business Blogs