Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly June 2009 Podcast

This is the 100th edition of Zen Internet's free monthly newsletter, first published in March, 2001, when our top story was "the latest news about ADSL - affordable high-speed Internet connectivity that's up to forty times faster than the fastest dial-up modem". This month, we look back over the newsletter's eight year history with a selection of stories from the Zen Monthly archive.

Spam - the meat that comes in a tin - has been around for 76 years. Surprisingly, the original Spam maker, Hormel, is not put out by the Internet's unflattering re-use of its best selling product's name. The company does object, however, when magazine and Web pages illustrate junk mail stories with pictures of its famous tins. If you'd like to learn more about Spam, the processed meat variety, check the address below.

Zen Internet's first headquarters building is located alongside a recently restored and re-opened branch of Britain's inland waterways where landscaping guidelines encourage the planting of indigenous species. To find out what plants are natural natives of your local area, you can search by postcode using the Natural History Museum's splendid online database, which will give you a bespoke listing of annuals, biennials, climbers, perennials, shrubs and trees that you can click on to display photographs and information including propagation tips and associated wildlife references. The site also maintains a list of suppliers offering seeds and plants of known British (and sometimes known local) native origin.

See the front pages from 270 of today's daily newspapers in 35 countries as PDFs that you can browse, read online, zoom-navigate, download or print. The site is 'Newseum' and it's completely free. Note that default thumbnails are displayed alphabetically by country and dominated by US titles with UK organs included at the end of the queue. Also try NewspaperDirect, which runs a similar service (40 countries, 160 papers) but goes beyond front page snapshots to reproduce full print editions, including complete copies of UK tabloids. It's a commercial service, but there's a free trial.

How many times have you downloaded a movie or audio file only to find you need a new player or different codec to view it on your machine? There are so many different media formats now that you need an arsenal of software just to keep up. Or you could try the one size fits all solution offered by VideoLAN, a non-profit organisation based in Paris. The group's VLC media player is a totally free, Open Source utility that works with any format, on any platform, including Mac and Linux. There are no additional codecs to install, even for DivX and Xvid.

Next time you find something on the Web that you simply must let someone know about right away, you can do better than sending the URL and hoping that the recipient will spot the relevant bit for themselves. Snip anything you like from a Web page and send a virtual cutting instead.

You can create an instant online journal or Web page with its own URL, without turning into a blogger or knowing anything about HTML. It's completely free and extremely easy to do - you simply type into an empty text box at ShortText.com and click once. If you have some text-based information that you want to share with the world, or just a few of your friends, you can copy it onto the page and click to create a dedicated Web address that you can send to whoever you like. You can include images or video too. In case you don't want to share the information you post with the whole world, you can lock it up and give the URL and a key to a closed circle of contacts. Locked content will not appear in search engine results.

Every search you make on Google is recorded and the data is stored for study by Google engineers. It is never made available outside the company, although a lot of people would like to get their hands on it. So marketers and many others were delighted - and privacy advocates infuriated - when AOL, which offers the Google engine to its users, released some 20 million search queries conducted over three months this year by publishing the information on the Web. In the furore that quickly followed, the site was taken down, but not before the full 439 MB dataset was saved by enthusiastic visitors, some of whom promptly put it back in the public domain, where it is still available.

The British Library ("13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, 3 million sound recordings and so much more") launched its re-designed Web site last month, with a new front-page search engine to retrieve answers from its 10,000 Web pages, 90,000 pictures and sound files, and 9 million articles in 20,000 journals.

Do you have 'issues' 'going forward' 'at the end of the day' 'seeing the big picture' when faced with e-mail messages and Word documents filled with business-speak, balderdash, babble and blather that says one thing but often means another, or means not much of anything at all? Discourage and begin to re-educate the authors of puzzling prose with an anonymous e-mail from Bullfighter. Copy and paste their message, or any document text, in the Mystery Matador online bull checker. Type their e-mail address, click the 'Preview' button, and Bullfighter will measure the jargon and verbosity and send them their score. The service is free, simple and anonymous - and, says Bullfighter, it could spare the rest of us from receiving any more of their nonsense.

Here's a Web site that caters to travellers looking for alternatives to big-footprint flying. It provides details about travelling by train and ship, with an emphasis on destinations in the UK and Europe, but covering the world. It includes sections on the Trans-Siberian railway and the Orient Express. Seat61 is a personal site run by a London "career railwayman" and ex-station manager who always chooses seat 61 - an individual window seat on Eurostar - as he leaves for Marrakech (via Paris, Madrid and Algeciras), Tunisia (via Lille and Marseille), Italy, Albania, Malta, Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Petra, Ukraine and the Crimea, and even Tokyo and Nagasaki via Moscow, Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway.

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.

The entire Internet has crashed. It's true. No, really. Watch this breaking news newscast.

Bizwiki is a new British business listing site that anyone can edit. If your company is in the UK and listed in another business directory, it's likely that some details will have been picked up by Bizwiki and used to create an entry without your knowledge. If you 'claim' your business listing, you can become the registered editor for your company's Bizwiki record, which means that you can monitor and, if necessary, remove any incorrect changes made by others.

ZoomInfo, a new site that compiles information about your personal profile - whether you like it or not - will be supplying that information to Web site operators and advertisers soon so that they can target you as you surf the Web. The inquisitive startup arrives at a time when Facebook is unleashing its own advertising platform that it says makes precise targeting possible. Based in Massachusetts, ZoomInfo already has personal information for almost 40 million business professionals, which it gets by scouring the Web, gathering things such as your name, past work affiliation, and even your e-mail address if it can find it. It attempts to track the industry you work in, your company, title, job description, education, sex and location. ZoomInfo calls its information "bizographic" - biographic data related to business - and says it is much more useful to advertisers than Facebooks targeting information, because it is more precise. Both companies think they have something better than Google. "Contextually placed ads dont cut it anymore", says ZoomInfo CEO Bryan Burdick, referring to the ads supplied by Google. "They simply look at the words on a Web page and serve up advertising related to the words without knowing anything about the reader". ZoomInfo says it updates over 3 million profiles per day and that about 100,000 people a week are finding their profiles on the site and clicking through to confirm or correct them.

The Wayback Machine has been providing an archive of the Web since 1996, showing Web sites at various stages of their development over the years. Its sister service, Archive-It, has over 255 million URLs on file. Unlike The Wayback Machine, pages stored by Archive-It can be keyword searched. The service uses Nutch open source search software and has recently added an Advanced Search Interface.

Zamzar is a free file conversion Web site that supports a wide range of file types including the majority of documents, images, music, video, and compression formats. You can make PDF documents editable by converting them to MS Word, for example, or convert Word's new format .docx files back to the more commonplace .doc. Zamzar also handles .xls and .xlsx files as well as .cvs; .odp; .ods; .odt; .ppt; .pptx; .ps; .pub; .rtf; .wpd; .wps; and most sound and video formats. You can easily convert your iTunes (aac) files to mp3. Zamzar has a Web browser button that you can add to your browser's bookmarks toolbar so that, if you are on a video sharing Web site such as YouTube or Google Video, you can click to convert and save the video you are watching. On other sites, Zamzar will auto-detect any of the files on the page that can be converted and highlight them for you.

People who love the various social sites and news aggregators, like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, Metafilter, Google News, Yahoo! News, Wired News, Slashdot, Fark, Netscape, StumbleUpon, Furl, Clipmarks and others can have a hard time checking them all on a regular basis. Popurls.com solves the problem by taking the top 15 stories from every one of these sites and listing the headlines. It also lets you see the top videos from YouTube, iFilm and other sources, the top photos from Flickr, the top podcasts from Odeo, and other things too numerous to mention, all on one page. When you're scanning the headlines and something catches your eye, if you position your mouse over it, Popurls provides a preview that shows the first 40 words or so.

There is a free alternative to cable or satellite television that lets you watch TV channels online via your PC browser, without the need for any special hardware, software or subscription service. You can begin viewing immediately: simply visit the Free Tube site at the link below, select a genre (business, news, sports, movies, etc) from the menu, and pick a channel. There are hundreds to choose from. With so many sources on tap, it's inevitable that content arrives in a number of different formats. To see everything on offer, you may need to have Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Real Player and Flash installed. If you are using a Mac, you can try adding Flip4Mac, which provides Windows Media Components for QuickTime.

Country Channel TV is a free to view Web broadcast service, streaming a wide variety of programmes over the Internet including an extensive back catalogue of films on smallholding and farming, livestock and wildlife, organic growing and foraging, crafts and cooking, country sports and local shows.

The Financial Times has launched a beta version of Newssift, a business-oriented search engine that provides some unique new features. Newssift aims to make its results - mostly gleaned from news sources - more relevant by letting users build detailed queries before a search executes. Type a keyword and the page automatically populates five categorised panels - Business Topic, Organisation, Place, Person and Theme - each suggesting additional keywords that can be chosen to better focus the search you're proposing. You can choose from among the suggestions, or add more keywords of your own. Then, once the search itself is completed and the results are in, you can refine again by filtering out different content sources. One click removes the results from magazines, newspapers and press releases, for example. Another unique feature is "sentiment analysis". A small pie chart on the left side of the screen provides a colour-coded snapshot of the general sentiment expressed about the subject, based on analysis of the articles in the search results. Red is negative, green is positive, grey is neutral. Business users test driving Newssift are mostly positive about the experience, and most agree that the opportunity to construct a detailed query before hitting 'enter' is a welcome development that traditional search engines are missing.

Zen Internet is keen to communicate regularly with customers and keep everyone up to date with the future plans for our products and services as well as the latest company news. We have decided to introduce a new Customer Newsletter, the first of which will announce forthcoming developments in our broadband product range. If you are not a Zen user, but would be interested in receiving our new Customer Newsletter, please provide your contact details here: http://www.zen.co.uk/customernewsletter.html and we will add you to our mailing list. Subscriptions to this free monthly plain-text newsletter will continue as usual and we would like to thank everyone who has supported this eclectic mix of Internet news and views since the first issue was delivered in March 2001.