Zen Internet Newsletters

This year's "Walk to Work Week" takes place this month - beginning May 14th. Thousands took part last year and they clocked up some impressive mileage. But new records can be set this year. Sign up your workplace at the My Living Streets Web site and you and your colleagues will be able to log your miles, minutes and steps walked, see individual as well as collective totals of miles walked, calories expended and estimated carbon dioxide savings. You can download (second link below) a free employer's Walk to Work Week toolkit with everything you need to plan, promote and take part. It includes an employer's guide, posters, flyers, e-mail templates, Web site graphics and more.

Just how do you raise investment to launch your own digital business? Rose Lewis, head of venture capital firm Pembridge Partners, offered a checklist of sound advice for budding entrepreneurs at a recent seminar. In her day job, Rose assesses the feasibility of fundraising ambitions, develops target lists of investors, reviews offers, and helps to negotiate terms. She told the meeting: "Money is still available. The banks may not have it, but the bankers do. Rather than buying a Ferrari, the trend in the City is to use bonuses to invest. And they are only one group who still have cash to back new businesses".

Google Mobile (aka GoMo) has teamed up with DudaMobile to help small businesses set up mobile-friendly Web sites. The step-by-step system will automatically convert your current site to mobile. You can also add helpful touches like click-to-call, mobile maps and Adsense. Conversion works best for sites that are light on bells and whistles - Flash and e-commerce extras are unlikely to translate. But this might be an easy way for small business owners to get at least their basic information in front of the increasing audience of customers using smaller screens to find the places where they are willing to spend their money.

BuddyPress provides its users with everything they need to start their own self-hosted social network. Powered by WordPress, BuddyPress features include the ability to add activity streams, user groups, multi-site blogging, extended profiles, discussion forums and private messaging, as well as allowing the audience to make friend connections and update their own activity streams, just as they would with a status update or tweet. Because it's classed as a WordPress plugin, builders can build or use other plugins to extend or run alongside BuddyPress. And just like its parent project, BuddyPress is a completely open source endeavour. Everything from the core code, to the documentation, themes and plugin extensions is put together by the BuddyPress community.

A top selling tea has been named as the UK's best brand when it comes to engagement on Facebook. Brooke Bond's PG Tips steamed past such brands as Apple and Jaguar to get to the top of iProspect's Engagement Index, specifically when it comes to likes, follows, comments and shares on the social network site. Managementtoday.co.uk reported that one fifth of the fans bagged on Facebook by the company were active on the brand's page during the analysis period. Although some of this could be attributed to a Valentine's Day marketing campaign - fans could sign up to receive an e-card from the PG Tips character Monkey - the brand must be doing something right all year-round to create such levels of engagement.

Netizens can be a helpful crowd and outsourcing your problem, whether you need a simple how-to answer or a convoluted database fix, can be a remarkably easy solution. Most often, all you really need to discover what somebody else has already worked out, is a search engine, and the information you find will be free. But Facebook decided to be proactive about it, offering a minimum $500 "Bug Bounty" reward to anyone who could identify a security threat they didn't know about. Within three weeks, the social network had paid out more than $40,000.

Over 90 per cent of people say they check e-mail every day - that's more than any other means of communication. 63 per cent use e-mail to pass on tips and share content. Only one third say they'd put the same things on Facebook. And only 5 per cent would use Twitter. The one sector where social media does hold sway is the 15-17 age group. To reach the rest of the population, it seems it's time for businesses to revisit e-mail as part of their marketing strategy.

Zeen, the newest project from YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, aims to help people make and discover digital magazines. Now that design trends are being set by Windows 8 and new apps with user interfaces harking back to glossy print's glory days - all full-screen images and bold typography - Zeen could be a timely venture. An easy-to-DIY digital magazine with the grid-based look and feel of today's Mondrian-inspired interfaces (thegridsystem.org, flipboard.com, stylecaster.com) could have something for everyone. Exact details about how Zeen will work and what Zeen-spawned 'zines will look like are still sparse. But you can go to the site's landing page to reserve a username and connect the account to an e-mail address, Facebook identity, or Twitter account.

Google has patented a technology that analyses background noise during phone calls and serves ads based on perceived "environmental conditions". "That's creepy", says TheNextWeb. Although the technology doesn't allow Google to listen-in on consumers' calls in any usual sense - i.e. there isn't going to be someone monitoring your conversation for advertising opportunities - "the fact that the company could unleash technology that monitors our calls in real-time is weird". The patent, which also covers background monitoring of photos and videos, puts it like this: "Information about an environmental condition of a remote device is received, the environmental condition being determined based on a signal output from a sensor of the remote device or a sensor coupled to the remote device. An advertisement is identified based on the environmental condition, and the advertisement is provided to the remote device".

Following inexplicable neglect and eventual abandonment some five years ago, the all-British independent search engine Mirago might have been this country's last attempt at providing a serious crawler-based Web search alternative to Google and Bing. But another UK independent from the same period not only survived - it went on to get bigger and better. Re-launched last month, Mojeek is a general purpose, crawler based search engine founded in the United Kingdom with an emphasis on user privacy, providing unbiased results and staying free from advertising. In fact, it's the only genuine crawler search engine in the UK and it doesn't display advertising or track its users at all. It's better for mobiles too - a new responsive design adapts/responds to the user's device or screen size. You can check this on a PC if you have the latest Firefox, Chrome or IE9; you can resize the browser window to see Mojeek adapt all the way down to smartphone/iphone size.