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SBA Launches New Marketing Tool

According to the Office of Business and Community Initiatives of the U.S. Small Business Administration, "Signs are the most effective, affordable form of advertising for the small business." That's why it partnered with the Signage Foundation for Communications Excellence, Inc., to launch a signage page on SBA's Web site at http://www.sba.gov/starting/signage/index.htm.

The site is designed to help small businesses understand the marketing and advertising advantages of good signage. It also provides information on the types and legal considerations of signage, as well as a Sign Gallery. The legal considerations part of the site contains legal case studies involving signage, a bullet list of government regulations involving signage, and even a FAQ involving signage legal rights. Before you get too deeply into that, however, be sure to check out the glossary (unless you know what a "Pan Channel Letter" or a "Sign Band" are.) 

Businesses often overlook signage as an integral part of how they do business. This site is worth a look.

Authentica Announces Free Document Protection Service

Authentica, Inc., has launched a free Web service that offers a way to control information in a document even after being mailed out on the Internet, and while it is backed up someone else's server. After registering on Authentica's site, a user can encrypt a PDF or HTML document, assign it a protection policy, and specify who is to receive it from their personal address book.

Recipients are notified that they have a secure document, which they can download after receiving a free plug-in for a one-time download. Authentica
maintains the decryption key and document policy on its Recall Policy Server, but the user maintains the document and control over it by being able to change the protection policy even after the has been received.
Check out Authentica's press release at: http://authentica.com/newsandevents/pressreleases/freeservice.html.

California Legal Resources

The Legal Annex offers a list of California legal resources at sidebar.com
<http://www.sidebar.com/index.htm>. Options include lawyers and legal support services. You can search for lawyers by type of practice within an individual county or select from an alphabetical listing.

The legal support category includes attorney services, paralegals and miscellaneous services. The site also offers advice on selecting an attorney as well as the opportunity for legal resources to be added to the
listings.

Chris Sherman Unleashes New Newsletter Upon the World

Longtime followers of the online search engine world will know Chris Sherman as the Web search guy from About.com. Well, he's broken out and now he's working with Danny Sullivan (who long time search engine fans will recognize
as the man behind Search Engine Watch.)

The upshot of this is that there's a new newsletter available at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/. Called SearchDay, it's free and comes out every business day (natch) and covers a variety of topics, including some news, some resource reviews, and in-depth articles about events in the search world. The newsletter is very new (about a week old) so it may change over time.

If you were a fan of About's Web Search <http://websearch.about.com>, don't worry, it's still there. Now, however, it's run by Kevin Elliott. There's still a weekly newsletter available and the discussion lists are still around.

VersusLaw Announces AdvanceLinks

VersusLaw has announced its weekly e-mail service. AdvanceLinks is a alert service providing most recent court opinions on selected legal topics.

You can sign up for the service at http://www.versuslaw.com/products/AdvanceLinks.asp. Current topics covered are: Conflict of Interests, Death Penalty, DWI, Federal Sentencing, Immigration, Legal Malpractice, and Sanctions. Registration is minimal; enter your name and e-mail address for updates. (Note that there is a pre-checked box to provide you with updates on the rest of VersusLaw's products and services.) You'll receive updated links every Thursday.

AltaVista Adds NY Times to Its Search Service

AltaVista announced Monday that they've added content from the New York Times to its news search service at http://news.altavista.com. The press release describes the content as "headlines and abstracts," so I would guess searching this would be searching one step down from full-content.

AltaVista has also added translation services to its news service. Check out the results and you'll see that they now have a "translate" link that takes you to the BabelFish translation service.

BCL Computers Launches GoBCL.com

BCL Computers, Inc., has announced the launching of a PDF publishing site at http://www.GoBCL.com. After registering on GoBCL.com (registration isn't bad. Physical address is requested, but it's non-mandatory,) users can submit any Windows document smaller than 5 MB by following the site's instructions.

As a free service, the document is processed and e- mailed back to the user as a PDF file. BCL has future plans to offer users an online "e-publishing service bureau," with several targeted formats, on its site.