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Your Free Internet Newsletter
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Issue 75 May 1st 2007
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PRIZE DRAW
Change to Direct Debit from credit card or standing order payment to take care
of your regular billing for Zen Internet services and enter our free draw to win
one of three terrific prizes. On offer: 1) Dell Inspiron 9400 Laptop (over
£1,000 value). 2) iPod Video 30g with Sensational BOSE SoundDock speakers
(£450). 3) Fujifilm S9600 Digital Camera (£300).
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=75e WINNING WITH IT
Plaques in the boardroom trophy cabinet are all well and good, but winning
awards that have government backing can pay big cash dividends too. Sunderland
City Council won the Digital Challenge Competition and pocketed £3.5million. The
pathway to big money prizes, says Spiked columnist Martyn Perks, is to design
schemes that make use of IT to promote political ends, which currently focus on
healthy eating, tackling truancy and improving "social inclusion".
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=75d WORTHY WINNERS
Projects highlighting the positive potential of ICT were rewarded at the
National eWell-Being Awards, announced last month. Five years ago when the
awards started, notions such as sustainability, environmental concern and
digital inclusion were hardly mentioned in the same room as 'information
technology'. Now, they are at the heart of many IT business strategies and
government policies. The National eWell-Being Awards aim to showcase projects
that use ICT to bring tangible, practical benefits in those areas to all
sections of society, in particular the most needy. This year’s award
classifications included: Building Social Networks, Climate Change and
Environmental Efficiency, Digital Inclusion and Environmental Product
Innovation.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=75f POOLING RESOURCES
British Waterways is responsible for maintaining the 2,200 miles of Britain's
inland waterway network, which is not only a major leisure resource but also the
setting for thousands of businesses that overlook its canals and pools. After
years of neglect, the agency has plans to improve and develop relations with its
business neighbours in the nine regions that it manages. BW will be approaching
companies to discuss co-operative ventures that could improve the landscape and
upgrade facilities for waterway users and tourists, and there will be funds
available for "strategic joint ventures".
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=760 http://www.britishwaterways.co.ukWORLD TWO
There is a new parallel universe on the Web in which your domain name is up for
sale and your home town can be taken over by a medieval-style land baron who
will collect taxes on every business transaction that goes on there. It may seem
to be nothing more than a game, or another piece of virtual world nonsense, but
links in the mirror world can go to real-world Web sites and real profits are
being made - and paid in real money, collected in real bank accounts. There has
been a rush of speculative domain name buying, with many names already up for
auction or re-sale at incredibly high prices, and a few businesses with
particularly well-guarded interests and markets to protect have taken to
pre-emptive purchasing by way of insurance.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=761 http://www.weblo.comhttp://short.zen.co.uk/?id=762 BLOGOSPHERE
Dave Winer, creator of break-through protocols like RSS, is taking a serious
look at Twitter, the new "global community of friends and strangers answering
one simple question: What are you doing?". Winer thinks the instant mini-blog
service could be the basis for a whole new channel of communication. Get a taste
by taking a look at the Twitter viewer example linked below, which displays
messages on a global background to give you a smattering of what people are
'twittering' about around the world. Just one of several viewers created since
Twitter first created a stir at recent conferences, it uses Microsoft’s Virtual
Earth to zoom about the planet, picking up the latest posts.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=763 http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=764 http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=765 http://twittervision.com/http://twitter.com/NET WORTH
British online ad budgets grew by 40 per cent last year, overtaking national
newspaper ads (11 per cent of the market) for the first time and getting close
to half the amount spent on TV ads. The latest figures from the Internet
Advertising Bureau show that advertisers are spending just over £2 billion per
year online in the UK. In the USA, online ad spending is half what it is here,
at least in percentage terms. Only 5 per cent of America's total advertising
expenditure reaches the online community. Whether European shoppers are the
chickens and advertising is the egg - or vice versa - is unclear, but our
consumers spend more online per capita than Americans do.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=766 IPTV
The world's television broadcasters must be wondering how the inevitable coming
of IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) will play out, particularly after market research
firm Infonetics Research's latest report shows IPTV equipment sales, service
revenue, subscribers, and some service providers, all posted phenomenal growth
in 2006 and are expected to continue surging ahead next year. The report shows
that worldwide IPTV equipment manufacturer revenue jumped 150 per cent in 2006,
easily passing the $1 billion mark. All categories but one tracked by Infonetics
are forecast to at least double or triple between 2006 and 2010.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=767 SHAPING THE FUTURE
BT has dismissed suggestions that it might indulge in 'traffic shaping' to
favour its own services as next-generation networks coverage - already available
in a few areas - is rolled out to reach most of the UK by the end of 2009.
Next-generation networks, or NGNs, are carrier networks that run IP end-to-end,
using a much simpler infrastructure that makes them more efficient and enables a
wider variety of new voice, data and video applications. Traffic shaping is a
means of prioritising some types of data over others and can be used by
operators to favour their own services over those of rivals. A Canadian telco,
Rogers, was discovered mis-using traffic shaping recently, degrading the
experience for anyone using a VPN over its service.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=768 http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=769 THE BUTLER DID IT
Shortly after the launch of an anti-Google advertising campaign in the UK by
competing search engine company Ask, people noticed that searching for "Google"
on Ask.com returned the comment: "Don't be a droid - use different sources of
information" next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to an
anti-Google Web site. Ask says the link was put up by over-zealous staff and was
quickly removed.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76a http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76b SORRY TO DISTURB
For those who hate the jump start of an alarm clock or the shock and awe of
bedside breakfast radio, there is now a much classier wake-up option. Voco has
developed a more gentile ticker that sounds off with the dulcet tones of Stephen
Fry, using his best butlering banter to get you out from between the sheets.
Fry, who once said his vocal cords were "made of tweed," recorded fifty tender,
deferential, deeply respectful wake-up messages to coax "sir" from his depths
and off to the office. The popularity of the £26 clock has ensured that an
equivalent version will soon be created "for madam".
http://www.voco.uk.com FILTER TEST
Being blocked by clumsy s p a m filters when the message you want to send is
legitimate and harmless is very frustrating. Some e-mails have to pass three or
four checks before being delivered to your final recipient, any one of which
might be using a 'large hammer to small walnut' approach. Finding the cause of a
blockage can be close to impossible. The people at Polite Mail have a free
service to help you. Pre-check, or send the same message that is getting
blocked, to spamscore@politemail.com, and you will receive a response tallying
your transgressions. Keep editing and retrying your message until your score is
classified as "Low Risk".
spamscore@politemail.comhttp://short.zen.co.uk/?id=756 AUDIO BOOKS ONLINE
Librivox.Org is an ambitious project that aims to convert every single book in
the United States public domain into free, downloadable audio files. This
non-profit, open source Web site takes podcasting to a new level, with its
ambition of "acoustical liberation". The virtual library is filled with
thousands of audio books that have been diligently recorded by volunteer
readers. Download an audio book of interest, browse the latest news on the
project, or volunteer your free time and become an official Librivox reader.
http://librivox.org WORDY WINNER
Maybe because it calls itself "The YouTube for documents" and gained some
instant notoriety as a source of copyright material, it didn't take long for
recent upstart Scribd to build a substantial audience, win a $10 million
valuation, and attract attention from Silicon Valley's circle of venture
capitalists. Within three weeks of its launch two months ago, Scribd was
counting 100,000 unique visitors a day and had 15,000 uploaded documents on
offer. The Web site makes it easy to upload docs - it's pretty much instant and
even easier than posting videos on YouTube - and whatever files you provide
(PDF, Powerpoint, .lit, .ps, .txt, Word, etc), Scribd converts them to HTML, or
a Flash player format that it says can be easily read by anyone.
http://www.scribd.com COOKIE CUTTER
Most Internet users know that cookies are browser files created by the Web sites
you visit. Some cookies can be useful, storing login information, recording
completed activities so that you don't have to repeat them, and so on. These can
be worth saving. Other cookies only benefit nosey Web advertisers and can be
deleted at will. But how do you tell which are which? Because cookies are plain
text files, they can be read very easily. Even so, the data stored may not be
easy to decipher. A tool like Karen Kenworthy's Cookie Viewer can help. Cookie
Viewer works with Internet Explorer and Firefox and makes the ingredients easier
to digest. You can see when the cookie was created, who cooked it, when it
expires, and more. The utility also helps you delete any that you don't want.
And it's free.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76c COOKING THE FIGURES
Net measurement firm comScore says that cookies used to track online behaviour
are mis-reporting Web site visits and inflating audience figures by 100 per cent
or more. People who routinely delete cookies are counted as first-time visitors
every time they go back to a Web site and skew the graph showing its supposed
popularity growth.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76d HEAT SEEKING STATS
The latest tools for tracking Web site visitors aim to measure usability, rather
than simply counting clicks or recording page visits. The next generation of
site trackers offer insights into how people use a site with 'heat maps' - that
show which areas of a page have collected the most clicks - and live tracking so
that you can watch what visitors get up to as it happens. Some traditional site
tracking tools do offer information such as Visitor Paths and Visit Length as
well as popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, and referring URLs, but none of
this tells you what users actually do on the pages they look at. There can be a
big difference between where you expect your users to click and where they are
actually clicking. One of the newer tools, CrazyEgg, provides a chunk of
JavaScript to drop into each page that allows you to see what's really going on.
After installation, it runs automatically and you can even watch user activity
while it is running - as well as checking later. Historically, the service
presents results using three different methods: Overlay, List and Heatmap. In
the overlay view, user clicks are clustered and combined into markers, coloured
according to click totals. Each marker can be expanded to see the number of
clicks in that position and where the users came from. CrazyEgg can show 'live
action' as well as snapshots of user clicks, but new startup, ClickTale, goes
further, by recording movies of how users interact with a site. CrazyEgg has a
free trial that covers 5,000 visitors per month. ClickTale is still in beta
testing.
http://www.crazyegg.comhttp://www.clicktale.com GOOGLE ABANDONS NEUTRALITY
Giving up on "Froogle" after five years, because "nobody understood" that it was
the name of a shopping engine, and calling it "Product Search" instead, Google
is re-launching the goods for sale service by incorporating its results into
ordinary search listings - and giving them priority. Items for sale will appear
above standard results. But they will not come from an impartial trawl of the
Web. Although usually perceived to be without bias, and despite a reputation
partly built on its supposed impartiality, Google will not be highlighting
products for sale unless they come from Googlebase, another of its largely
misunderstood branding efforts. To make matters worse - certainly for any
retailer who hasn't accepted the Froogle/Googlebase way of doing things - Google
will also favour merchants who've signed up for its latest enterprise, Google
Checkout, effectively penalising businesses using other payment systems.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76f http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=76e YOUR NEW PAL
Google has introduced its online payment service - Google Checkout - for UK
shoppers. The system, a rival to eBay's PayPal service, offers free processing
to online retailers who advertise their wares using Google's AdWords. For every
£1 retailers spend on Adwords, they can process £10 in sales through Google
Checkout at no charge. Google is running the free processing offer until the end
of the year, after which merchants will be charged 1.5% per transaction amount,
plus 15p on each purchase. Shoppers will see participating stores displaying a
Google Checkout icon on their AdWords advertisements as well as on their Web
pages. The UK branch of US shopping software provider Channel Advisor was first
to sign up for the service in this country. Google Checkout has been available
in the US since last June.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=770 BOXED OUT
Google was snubbed by another big American media firm recently when CBS agreed
to deliver TV content ("CSI," "Survivor", news and sport, including championship
boxing, and David Letterman's "Late Show") to online video sites for free
viewing - but not Google's YouTube. The list of favoured distribution partners
includes just about everybody else in online video: AOL, MSN, CNET and Comcast,
plus startups like Brightcove, Veoh, Sling Media, Joost, Netvibes and Bebo. The
deal also covers existing CBS partners, like Yahoo! Video, Apple's iTunes and
Amazon.com's Unbox. It all comes as the latest in a series of hits against
Google. First, Viacom ordered content off YouTube and sued for $1 billion in
copyright damages. Then News Corp and NBC Universal joined forces with six major
Web distributors to syndicate their video content, again excluding YouTube. Most
recently, Viacom picked Yahoo! over Google as its search engine of choice. But
no matter: Google chief Eric Schmidt says the company isn't first and foremost a
search engine or a media company anyway. Consumers should "think of it first as
an advertising system", he says.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=771 http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=772 DOUBLE TAKE
Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of Web advertising network DoubleClick
may be a bargain, compared to the YouTube buy, and it would give the search
engine a near monopoly in online ad serving. Google is already the leader in
text-based search and contextual advertising with AdWords and AdSense. The
addition of DoubleClick would give it dominant control of the market for
graphical advertising as well and, combined with AdSense, include some 80 per
cent of all ads delivered to Web site publishers. "To the extent that they will
be the broker of advertising for anything moving on the Internet, we would be
forced to deal with Google on Google's terms," said Jim Cicconi, head of
external and legislative affairs for Telecom giant AT&T. Microsoft is not well
pleased either, and has joined others levelling a charge of anti-competitive
behaviour against its arch-rival.
http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=773 SEARCH ENGINE OF THE MONTH
Yahoo! Australia is testing a new search engine named "Alpha", which brings
together results from different search engines and compartmentalises them in
widget-like sidebar boxes. In addition to Yahoo! Search results, there are
widgets containing results from Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo! News, Wikipedia, and
Yahoo Search Marketing. More remarkably, users can also add their own sources,
as long as they know the base URL for search results.
http://au.alpha.yahoo.com¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
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Rod Fielding
Editor
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David NelsonTeam Leader
Business Support Unit
Zen Internet