Zen Internet Newsletters

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly February 2010 Podcast

If your business has installed a renewable technology that produces electricity, such as a Solar Electricity (PV) system, you may be able to make money from the power it produces. One way to do this is to sell that electricity back to an energy supplier. There are several 'buy back tariffs' on offer to suit your renewable energy system, the preferences of the energy supplier in question, and the amount of energy you produce. You can find out more about making money from renewable energy at the Energy Saving Trust's Web site.

You can earn extra cash using PeoplePerHour, a recruitment site that allows you to bid online for job projects that match your skills set and sell your work by the hour. Companies or individuals use the site to advertise projects that they want completed and freelancers bid for them by naming a price and explaining why they are the right person to complete the job. You don't have to pay to join the site or make a bid, but you do have to give the site a cut of any fees you make.

Every time you have to buy an ink cartridge for your printer, you're reminded of how enormously expensive they are. A two-pack of ink cartridges can cost more than the printer itself. There is a way to make some of the money back by selling your old, empty cartridges online. CashForCartridges will pay up to £4 per empty cartridge, which you send to them in a prepaid envelope. The site does not accept toner cartridges and you'll only receive your payout once the balance of your account reaches £25. Alternatively, you can earn somewhat less - 100 Advantage Card points for each ink cartridge you recycle - at Boots.

Stuff2Send is a company that organises the transport of goods for customers for an agreed charge. If you use a car regularly for more than commuting to the office, you could earn money as a courier without going out of your way. First, you register as a carrier with the company and wait until a parcel delivery coincides with a journey you're already planning. Then you bid to deliver the item and if your offer is accepted, you deliver the item and claim your fee.

160by2 is a Web service that lets you send free SMS to mobiles in Kuwait, India, UAE, Saudi, Singapore, Philippines and Malaysia. 160by2 is completely free, which means no cost for the sender or the recipient. Users can send up to 50 free messages per day with each message up to 80 characters long.

Calling friends and family overseas can be very expensive. Poke Talk is a Web service that allows you to call most parts of the world from your phone at no cost. To use the service, you simply visit the PokeTalk Web site and enter your number and the number you wish to call. Both phones will then ring to connect the call. Users of the service can make up to fifty 10-minute calls per month to over 55 locations worldwide.

Giveaway of the Day is a Web site that gives away a piece of licensed software every day, free of charge. Titles on Giveaway of the Day include screen-savers, system tools, video and photo editing tools, Office add-ons and others.

Linux lovers and Windows haters everywhere should love this. Chinese company YLMF (an abbreviation for Yulinmufeng, or Rainforest Wind) has released a Linux distribution that's skinned to look exactly like Windows XP. The company has even gone so far as to purchase the XP.com domain for a reported US$100,000, which currently redirects to its main Web site.

As far as transistor size is concerned, it doesn't get any smaller than this - a single-atom transistor that promises new quantum computing breakthroughs. An international group of researchers from the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne have built a fully working transistor that is just one atom in size, smashing previous records (like the one-by-ten atoms thick device made at the University of Manchester) and, more importantly, creating a unique opportunity to study phenomena to be exploited in the rapidly developing field of quantum computing.

Imagine a machine that accepts CAD drawings, then produces a three dimensional prototype within a few hours for just over £50. 3D printing technology is maturing to the point where rapid prototyping machines are becoming affordable to small business owners - and even for high-end home use. Dimension's uPrint 3D printer has just been released at a retail price of US$14,900, giving anyone with CAD skills the ability to prototype and even manufacture virtually any small shape they wish in hard ABSplus plastic - including pre-assembled objects with moving parts. What would you create if you could make any plastic object you wanted?

Here's the best Web destination for lovers of classical music performances to explore a comprehensive calendar of upcoming events at venues across the UK and throughout the world. Whether you want to go to the ballet, the opera, or an orchestral concert in your area, you can search this site based on where, when, what or even who you want to see or listen to. As well as music and dance performances in many cities around the world, the calendar includes lectures, talks and festivals.

A 26 year old Middlesbrough man making over £10,000 per month from a music sharing Web site has been cleared of fraud by a Teesside Crown Court jury after a police raid at his flat halted his business. Alan Ellis, the first British man to be charged for illegal filesharing, said his OiNK music site was "no different to Google" and only pointed people in the direction of illegal downloads.

You may want to think twice before you hit a Web site with a .cm extension. It belongs to Cameroon, the small nation on the west coast of Africa that has been pegged by McAfee as the world's riskiest domain. Because .cm is often a typo for .com, McAfee said, cyber-crooks like to use it to set up typo-squatted sites that hit you with malware or some other dangerous nuisance. McAfee's third annual "Mapping the Mal Web" report looks at the riskiest and safest domains across the globe.

Some of the personal information willingly surrendered by Facebook users is too sensitive to be trusted to strangers and would be closely guarded in the real world. A recent study by Sophos found that Facebookers reveal far too much to new friends, including people they don't know. Using fake profiles, Sophos sent out friend requests to 100 random Facebook users, and more than 40 per cent accepted, giving the company access to their birth dates, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and home addresses. The risk of ambush is shared across the landscape on Twitter. Malware attacks wait behind hundreds of the new URLs that appear each day and many of the phishing, hijacking and social engineering hazards now seen on Facebook are replicated on Twitter. CNET News has some common-sense help for both sites. Along with a report on the dark side of social networking, security columnist Elinor Mills offers a simple guide to countering the range of threats that face the unwary Facebook and Twitter visitor.

Computer Weekly has a timely briefing on the importance of safe and secure hosting for businesses and a Zen Internet White Paper download that provides advice on how you can mitigate the security risks associated with hosting business critical data or applications offsite and the selection criteria that should be considered when reviewing potential hosting providers.

The English language continues to evolve and thanks to the technology of the 21st century - including the Internet - new words and phrases are being created at an unprecedented rate. Increasingly, these new words result from our current preoccupation with online social networking sites and associated geek-speak. The American Dialect Society (ADS) voted "tweet" - a short message sent via Twitter - as the 2009 word of the year. The Global Language Monitor has nominated "Twitter" as the word of the year and the New Oxford American Dictionary claimed "unfriend" - meaning to "de-friend" someone on a social networking site such as Facebook - deserved their 2009 word of the year award.

Tag clouds are visual representations of key-word patterns that describe the content of a blog or Web site. Most blogs have their own tag clouds, but the free online tool at Tagul.com takes the idea further by letting you design these linked word bunches in easily customised and better looking patterns before they are added to your blog - or any Web page - to replace the standard tag cloud.

Leadtail, a US-based online advertising agency, has published its choices for the best article directories for online marketers. The list of 27 article sites was compiled by Leadtail's editorial team and represents some of the best free services (based in the US) to help marketers distribute traffic-generating articles about their industries, businesses, products, services, and other news. The directories were selected based on criteria that included editorial review, the number of monthly visitors and Google ranking.

The Center for Media Research has released a study by Vertical Response that shows where many of the USA's 'Main Street' (smaller business) players are going with their online marketing dollars this year. The big winners: e-mail and social media. With only 3.8 per cent of small business owners not planning to use e-mail marketing, and with social media still carrying the perception of being cost-free, this should make some in the pay-per-click advertising business and the rest of the online advertising industry sit up and take notice.

The Times newspaper reports that scam Web sites selling counterfeit products are dominating the sponsored search results for many branded goods on Google. The newspaper says that fraudsters, mostly based in China, are duping British shoppers into buying fake items from sites that appear in paid-for Google links. In many cases the goods never arrive and customers' credit card details are put at risk. Times investigative reporter, Lauren Thompson writes: "Even the most Internet-savvy shoppers can find it impossible to tell the difference between a fake and a legitimate site. Victims complain that they thought the sites were genuine because they had a commercial relationship with Google". Professor Ross Anderson, an online security expert at the University of Cambridge, commented: "If you click on an advert on Google, you are twice as likely to come to harm". Searches for Tiffany, the jewellers, revealed the sponsored link www.uk-tiffanyonline.com, which claims to offer discounts of up to 85 per cent. The site looks almost exactly the same as the genuine site tiffany.com and its owners pay Google up to £5 every time a user clicks on the link. Although Google says that it will not knowingly advertise sites selling counterfeit goods, the search engine performs few diligence checks, claiming that it "cannot regulate the Internet".

Google has decided to exclude listings for Web design and search marketing optimisation companies from its local search results in the UK and North America. Following a storm of bewildered complaints from the community of unilaterally disappeared businesses, the search engine offered a brief response on its Maps Help Forum: "We're intentionally showing less local results for Web design and SEO queries. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent".

Pulseni is a new search engine that explores the links that are tipped as further reading resources in millions of tweets. These URLs are often provided without any clear indication of what lies behind them. Pulseni attempts to display them in a traditional search engine result format with a title and description of the destination page.