Zen Monthly Newsletter

You may be voting one of them into power soon and WorkForYou.com is a volunteer-run Web site with the notion that it should be easy to keep tabs on Members of Parliament once they're elected. Enter your postcode and you can see most things that your representative has been up to, including votes and speeches in the house, and how much they spent on travel, paying staff, writing to constituents or buying computer kit. Full contact details are included, and there's a quick link if you want to send a message to your MP immediately.

Isn’t the whole point of issuing press releases that you include some basic contact details so that journalists can get in touch? The UK's main political parties don't seem to think so. Labour’s Web site section of press releases lacks any trace of contact details. Conservatives and Lib Dems are equally reluctant to hear from hacks.

ZoomInfo is a unique search engine that tracks down the latest online information about people and companies that have any kind of Web presence and presents a concise and useful summary. It can be a way to get in touch with someone if you don't know their e-mail address. Select a person or company from the list presented and one click allows you to send them a message via ZoomInfo.

The Freedom of Information Act applies to all information held by ‘public authorities’ in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The BBC has a page that tells you what you can dig up from central government departments, local authorities and councils, the police, the NHS, schools and universities, LEAs, and publicly owned companies.

Memorable domain names will help Multimap.com and Streetmap.co.uk retain market share following the launch of Google's street map and route planner service for the UK, but the newcomer's much easier to use drag-around interface must have search rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft wondering if their comparatively clunky offerings - map24.co.uk and MapPoint - will survive the competition.

An international team of researchers is about to begin the biggest-ever genetic study into human migration. You are invited to buy a kit and contribute DNA (no blood-letting involved, just a mouth swab) that will reveal your own genetic journey, a depiction of your ancient ancestors, and an interactive map tracing your genetic lineage around the world and through the ages. Discover your own deep ancestry, follow the progress of your DNA analysis online, and watch your worldwide family tree grow as your longest-lost distant relatives are added to its branches over the lifetime of the project.

Beware a company calling itself Central Domain Registry operating from addresses in York and currently sending unsolicited letters to new businesses suggesting they need to register a domain name with this official-sounding organisation. Businesses that reply get nothing much in exchange for the £75 to £90 fees proposed, except for registration with the UK's real 'central domain registry' - Nominet. To get any practical use out of the name acquired, anyone fooled by the notification will still need to find and pay for e-mail or domain hosting services so that they can communicate effectively or set up a Web site. If you receive misleading spam from this or any similar company, you can send copies to your local trading standards office - contact details available at www.tradingstandards.gov.uk

Nominet UK is not a regulatory or governing body and will not act against or comment on the business practices of any company from which it accepts domain registrations on your behalf. If you receive misleading spam about registering a domain name, or sales information that's designed to look like an official communication, or wish to complain about a business like Central Domain Registry, Nominet suggests writing to the sender directly and, if you are not satisfied with the response, contacting the following authorities, which do have regulatory or other powers;
Trading Standards Office: http://www.consumercomplaints.org.uk
Office of Fair Trading: http://www.oft.gov.uk
Advertising Standards Authority: http://www.asa.org.uk
Information Commissioner: http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk
Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA): http://www.ispa.org.uk

If your Web site gets plenty of visitors, but few buyers, you might be interested to know exactly what it is that is putting them off. A new Web tool from the Anglo-Dutch analytics company Nedstat claims to offer companies the ability to pinpoint the exact moment at which customers drop out of a particular process on any Web site that's designed to stimulate enquiries or promote online ordering.

According to Lancashire Business Link, which maintains a directory of such things, there are over 2,500 grants and support schemes for new and existing businesses, ranging from help for first-time broadband users (50% of costs paid) up to £300,000 per year in grant aid to encourage co-operative research and development projects with companies in Israel.

A new test checks the ability of students and others to handle typical PC software and make sense of the multiple streams of information that Internet connected computers invite us to look at every day.

CiteULike is a free UK service to help technical researchers and academics share, store, and organise papers they are reading. When you see an interesting academic paper on the Web, you click a button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your Web browser.

The University of Manchester is the first UK customer to sign up for Elsevier's Scopus, claimed to be the world’s largest abstract and indexing database with access to 14,000 peer-reviewed titles from more than 4,000 international publishers. Manchester is the largest university in the UK with 9,000 staff and 29,000 students.

A team at MIT in Boston have developed a desktop fabricator, designed to sit alongside your computer and make things, instead of just printing them. In the same way that Lego bricks allow children to build something more precise and complex than their natural skills allow, a personal fabricator makes whatever you want, from parts made with the same digital logic that the computer uses. In the still-early development phase of the 'Fablab', its manufacturing tools are off-the-shelf instruments. Cutters use laser beams or high-pressure water jets, which can slice through almost anything. There are milling devices, rather like power drills, that can cut sharp corners and smooth surfaces. There are also devices such as three-dimensional 'printers' that use laser beams to burn complex solid shapes into liquid polymers. The tools are precise enough to make components that snap together without glues or fasteners. The team predicts that the biggest demand for Fablab will come from developing countries. In London and Paris, the response has been: 'Why bother? We already have all we need.' But in Ghana, for example, Fablabs are already being used to devise cheap refrigeration units and solar-power collectors.

The next time someone shoots down one of your brilliant creative ideas at work, don't take it out on innocent bystanders - pick up a paintbrush and let go on canvas. Art.com provides the perfect venue for you to release frustration online. Those with a great deal of pent up anger can pick up an entire tin of paint and splash some colour à la Jackson Pollock.

Many Web sites have compelling multimedia files embedded within their pages, and some of them can be worth downloading to view at a later date. The trial version of MultiGrabber 3.34 is a tool that will let users do just that and can be used to save pictures, cascaded style sheets, Macromedia Flash movies, and RealPlayer movies.

Most Windows XP PCs have yet to be upgraded with Microsoft's Service Pack 2, according to surveys, but users of the software's Automatic Updates feature will no longer be able to skip the service pack. The Windows XP SP2 blocking tool expired on April 12th.

The latest Microsoft Download Notification newsletter should have something for everyone. It packs in a lot - from security downloads to trial versions of card games by Bicycle.

"Microsoft Caves on Gay Rights," published in the April 21 edition of the Seattle alt-weekly, The Stranger, accused the software giant of withdrawing its support for an anti-gay-discrimination bill in response to pressure from an evangelical Christian pastor who had asked company executives if it was true they would "put their power behind a guy who wants to dress up in a dress and come to work". The New York Times followed the next day with front-page coverage of the story. GLEAM, the gay and lesbian employees group at Microsoft, and other advocates of the legislation around the country, reacted with outrage and the Gay & Lesbian Center in Los Angeles demanded the return of an award it gave the company in 2001.

Zen Internet's marketing team would like to thank everyone who took part in the recent 'What makes an effective business Web site?' survey. The prize-winning participants were: iPod: Adrian Mark Austin (Alsager, Stoke-on-Trent); iPod Mini: Matt Pereira (Slough); Paul Richards (Bath); Zen coffee mugs: Simon Pitwood (Newcastle); Martin Muirhead (Marden, Kent); Peter Finch (Alderley Edge, Cheshire); Tim Brooks (Watford); Carl Trenam (Wakefield); Frank Leonhardt (Middlesex); Lin Holder (Cornwall); Aiden James Neaves (Leicester); Michael Z Barnes (Weymouth); Timothy John Young (Worcester).

WYSIWYG. In its search results listings, the Factbites search engine includes liberal amounts of relevant text from the Web pages it finds - and dares to suggest that WYS when you use Factbites might be better than WYG from Google. "We're never going to replace Google when you want to buy something over the Net, or find your best friend's home page and we're not trying to. But for 'Tell me about' questions - the sort you'd normally go to an encyclopedia for - we think we're the best there is".