Today is an exciting day. I’ve just finished up the first beta version of a brand new search engine called Fiazo. As a designer, I often spend countless hours on Google trying to find tutorials, blogs, articles, fonts, and more to inject into my daily design life only to become distracted and lose track of what I was looking for to begin with. After thinking about this problem for a little while, Fiazo: The Design Search Engine was born. The site essentially acts as a narrow proxy to Google that filters out unrelated websites and focuses only on top-notch resources from within the world of design.

It’s currently in its first beta, but there are lots of updates just around the corner as the holidays approach. Soon, it will incorporate some new collaboration tools that help the community improve the engine to include more and more websites that target the design sphere along with a suite of focus options to fine-tune your search even more. Feel free to add your site or another design site that you like to Fiazo by entering its URL here.

If you’d like to share your thoughts now or help add features to Fiazo, feel free to get in touch with me by sending me an e-mail. I’d love to know what you think so far and, as always, everything on Foozoo will remain a perpetual work in progress.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare project represents a progressive take on the future of education in regards to an increasingly global world. The program, which seeks to put the best of an MIT education within reach of anyone with a computer, has been around for quite some time now but has just recently become accessible from all corners of the planet thanks to the growing availability of broadband access.

The program already has an extensive collection of lectures and reading material on everything from Architecture and Engineering to Management and Physics - with new material arriving almost daily. To date, MIT’s pilot program has made some 1800 courses available to anyone with the web; in fact, it’s entirely possible that a relatively young child somewhere in Egypt is hard at work studying the words of some of MIT’s finest as you’re reading this.

To further the global reach of its OpenCourseWare program, MIT has begun making its materials available in an increasing number of languages including Traditional Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese with more to follow sometime in the near future.

Though the program represents the bulk of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate curriculum, the institution is careful to note that its program is not equivalent to a full education and that its online libraries do not come with degrees. Still, the possibilities created by the widespread availability of such a sheer amount of educational material are sure to open doors for children and adults alike both here at home and abroad as more of the world becomes connected each day.

Globally, MIT’s OpenCourseWare site is accessed by more than 1.5 million people each month - a testament to the impact already delivered by its unique take on the world of knowledge. In the wake of its success, a number of other prestigious universities including Stanford and UCLA have followed suit with similar (but smaller) programs that complement Apple’s iTunes U service - currently anchored by a substantial amount of content from MIT’s program.

While the service may not provide a degree, it does provide a wealth of knowledge at a price that can’t be argued with - free. In fact, by design, OpenCourseWare is perhaps the least restricted form of modern education available anywhere in the world. Anyone, at any time, can begin to teach his or herself some of the most complicated topics in the world thanks to the extensive library at their fingertips thanks to MIT. Of course, it goes without saying that without class times, grades, and other time constraints imposed by attendance at a university, the ease at which someone can pick up a subject in his or her spare time increases tenfold.

With MIT in front of you, you’re free to learn, well, whatever it is that you’d like to learn. How about a little physics on your lunch break?

Freelance Switch

This site is a must have for any freelancing web designer, graphic designer, or illustrator. With job postings from potential clients including everyone from PUMA to obscure European design firms, you’re sure to find something that fills your fancy. In addition to their job postings, which I should mention require a monthly subscription to access contact information on potential clients, the site offers a wealth of incredibly useful resources for the aspiring freelancer.

Browsershots

Coding for a single browser is tough enough without worrying about whether or not your site will function properly on the endless swarm of browsers available to users these days. Luckily, Browsershots can display a screenshot of what your site will actually look like in everything from Internet Explorer 4.0 to some of the most obscure Linux browsers on the planet. As of this writing, they can display your site in 64 different browsers on Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD. To make your job even easier, they’ll show you the resolutions that each browser was using to help you weed out those pesky cross-browser differences.

SEOmoz

First turned on to the site by a fellow web creator, SEOmoz has quickly risen to the top of my favorites list. Aside from consistently valuable articles, they offer a number of tools to improve your site in the eyes of the almighty search engines. While registration is required to utilize all that they have to offer, it’s well worth the ten seconds out of your day.

NETTUTS

Even the most seasoned web designer can stand to learn a new trick or two. NETTUTS provides an interesting array of unique tutorials on everything from custom AJAX scripts to design itself. The site’s owner runs a number of other sites which may also be of use, most notably PSDTUTS.

Faveup

The cure for the all-too-well known ‘design block’ has arrived. This design inspiration gallery is sure to give you a few ideas for your next project, whatever it may be.

These are by no means the only five sites you may find useful, but merely the start of a Foozoo series on the best design resources that the web has to offer.