There's plenty of baby naming resources on the Internet, but the majority have a US-centric focus and thus discuss names like Liondrae that with any luck we won't see on Australian shores for a while. One useful exception is the Baby Names Explorer, which lets you see how popular a given name was in each decade over the past 100 years, using data from the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. My own name (Angus) has enjoyed a steady surge in popularity, and I'm pleased to see no Liondraes in sight. If you want to work out whether your future offspring will be the only child in their class with that name, this is a good place to start (though I implore you to resist the other trend of mindlessly mangling spelling to make a name "unique"). Thanks Sean!

Web site Quarkbase offers an organised and detailed overview of any web site, complete with summary, popularity, ownership, traffic information, and even recent blog posts and tweets about the site. In a nutshell, it's sort of like Whois.net on steroids. Quarkbase's accuracy and wealth of information varies based on the popularity of a site, but if you want to know more about a web site, it's a great place to start your search.

If you're planning on buying something expensive, a typical bout of online research starts with a Google search, a bunch of tabs and an eventual decision-making process. Aussie webapp My Perfect reverses the process, using a series of questions to guide you towards some possible candidates and then offering links where you can buy them. The approach wasn't foolproof when I tested it in the phone categories -- partly because it ran out of options before getting answers to all the questions I'd want answered -- but it definitely gave me some good ideas on the beer front. Currently the site offers searches for phones, cameras, beer and jobs; further categories are planned. [My Perfect via ZDNet Australia]

Webapp Zapproved helps you mediate group decisions, like where to have the company holiday party, or if everyone likes the new logo design. Users create proposals and then send requests to their coworkers, family, and friends. The requests appear as emails to the recipients who can approve or deny the proposal with or without commenting on it. Users don't have to sign up with Zapproved to participate in the voting process. Zapproved tracks who has approved, denied, or not responded to proposals to foster accountability among team members. Once invitees approve or deny proposals, Zapproved archive them in the original user's account for future reference. Zapproved is a free web based application.

Social networking and recommendation site Docoloco takes one-sentence user comments on shops, cafes and other points of interest, and melds them together to provide information on what's worth checking out in your local community. You can browse for all the recommended locations in a given area, search via tags for a particular category (like "pizza" or "haircuts"), and find where they are via integrated Google Maps. The site is currently focused on Australian recommendations (with a bias towards Melbourne, where it was created), but the developers plan to add other countries in the future. Docoloco has also recently rolled out an iPhone-specific version of the site.

Web security firm VeriSign has re-launched its Personal Identity Portal, an OpenID-backed portal that provides one-click sign-ins for many popular webapps and e-commerce sites. The biggest downside from using a software solution or another login handler is having to visit your personalised PIP page before moving ahead, but that can be a blessing if you can remember your password there but not at, say, Circuit City. The PIP page provides bookmarklets for quick access, but security-conscious users can also require that VeriSign authenticate another key or a browser certificate before granting access. The PIP service is free to use, and works wherever OpenID is supported. To learn more about OpenID, check out our review and walk-through.

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Free mashup service map a list grabs addresses directly from a Google Spreadsheet in your account and plots them out over a customised Google Map. While it certainly isn't the only web-based data-mapping tool, the combination of its easy grabbing from GDocs and its step-by-step creation wizard make plotting out the best pizza joints in town, the wedding party members who haven't RSVP'd, or any other data seriously simple. Your maps update automatically with the spreadsheet and can be shared publicly, and the maps can be exported to KML (for Google Earth fun) and texted or shared by email. A cool tool for those of us without the skills to directly patch into Google Maps.