Zen Monthly Newsletter

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Last month's newsletter story, European Power, reported the EU's plan "to make broadband available in every room in your house and make plugging-in to get online as easy as turning on the lights". The BBC's Click Online programme followed up a few days later, highlighting the arguments between experts who can't agree on the feasibility of using power lines and internal domestic wiring to deliver broadband. It's a question of preventing interference between two channels doing very different jobs in close proximity, not unlike the one raised by the once astonishing proposition that broadband could flow comfortably alongside voice communications transmitted over Britain's tired old telephone lines.

A father was fined £2,500 recently after a British Phonographic Industry 'watchdog' found file-sharing software on the family’s computer had been used by his children to download copyrighted songs and make them available to all-comers online. Dad has some advice for other parents.

Chinese citizen - Qui Chengwei - got a suspended death sentence after stabbing a fellow gamer - Zhu Caoyuan - to death. The men argued over a sword that Zhu borrowed from Qui in the game Legend of Mir 3. Zhu sold the virtual sword to another gamer for 7,200 Yuan or about £473. The Chinese government isn’t exactly sure how to handle stolen virtual property, such as Qui’s Dragon Sabre. Reporting the amazing story last month, the BBC said that buying and selling gaming artefacts such as imaginary weapons is a booming business on the Web. The Internet games section of eBay sees more than £5m change hands in a single year.

Google's easy to use 'drag to navigate' map of the UK now shows up in its Yellow Pages style local business directory, Google Local UK. The still developing beta service mixes search engine results with business listings to find and display the postal addresses and telephone numbers of shops, restaurants, hotels, services and suppliers in towns and cities across the UK and flags their positions on street maps that provide pop-up directions to the businesses from any starting point.

There is much more to come from Google's still-underway mapping of the UK if burgeoning exploitations seen across the pond are anything to go by. British estate agents, for example, will want a piece of HousingMaps.com when something like it arrives on these shores. It uses information from a database of available properties and overlays it onto a nationwide map. Chicago Crime uses the publicly available "Citizen ICAM" system to add recent crime scenes. Google Traffic uses information from traffic.com to show traffic jams and other problems facing drivers and, in the first example we've seen from the UK, there's a London traffic camera map with street-scene pop-up photos that are only minutes old. If you're up to the task, you can develop your own location-based service using Google Maps without charge and make the results available on your Web site.

Google's giant steps on the mapping front follow its takeover of Keyhole Corporation, a digital mapping business and near neighbour in Mountain View, California. Keyhole "streams the world" over wired and wireless networks enabling users to virtually go anywhere on the planet and see places in photographic detail. This is not like any mapping you have ever seen. This is a 3D model of the real world, based on real satellite images combined with normal maps and business guides. You can zoom from space to street level at colossal speed and then pan or jump from place to place, city to city - even country to country - including the UK. You need a (free trial) download from Keyhole before you can take off, but the ride is worth it. Late news: Google closed Keyhole's Web site this week and now re-directs visitors to a new 'Google Earth' page where the free download is offered without time restriction.

Pedalling hard to keep up in the Cycle Lane of the Google Superhighway, the Geograph British Isles project aims to collect a geographically representative photograph of nothing less than every square kilometre of the British Isles. Its growing pictorial map of the UK is already impressive, but there are plenty of gaps still to be filled. Be the first to submit a "geograph" for a grid square near you soon.

Maps offer not only a sense of place but, presented in historical sequence, an unparalleled understanding of the record of human activity absorbed by the landscape. Deliver this revealed history online, and it makes a powerful tool for academics across a range of subjects. A new resource, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and delivered by Edina, the Edinburgh-based national data centre, offers precisely this. It provides, for the first time, online access to historic maps covering Great Britain from the mid 1880s to the early 1990s. The Digimap Historic Map Service is available to all staff and students at subscribing higher or further education institutions. Further details: edina.ac.uk/digimap

The world's domain names are currently limited to the letters A-Z, 10 digits, and hyphens. Accented letters and other character sets are excluded. New proposals are being considered that would allow 'international' domain names, accommodating the writing systems of countries where English is not the first language. Names with accents - café.com - or with letters from other alphabets - êþô.com - or even totally different writing systems such as Chinese could be included. Nominet, the organisation that takes care of domains in the UK, has set up a working group on internationalised domain names and is looking for views and comments from Internet users.

At IamMoving.com, you can let companies and organisations know that you're moving, stop services at your old address, start them at your new home, and send a free 'e-card' to friends to let them know where you're going.

New technologies are constantly appearing on the market and wireless concepts are no exception. Just as many of us are starting to come to terms with what WiFi is all about, another acronym is added to the line-up. Next up for explanation is WIMAX - the latest wireless wizardry on the horizon.

A vicar is offering his flock a wireless hotspot in his city-centre church. The Reverend Keith Kimber, of St John's in Cardiff, believes the church should be a sanctuary for everyone, "including business people with laptops and mobiles who may want to find a quiet area, without lots of noise and loud music, to sit in peace and do some work or just send an e-mail". Originally unable to access his city's wireless services due to the building's four-foot-thick walls, Rev Kimber now boasts what may be the first wireless node to be installed within a House of God in the UK.

For the Microsoft faithful who haven’t made the switch to an alternate browser like Firefox or Netscape, here’s a download to consider. The MSN Toolbar is a plug-in for Internet Explorer (and only Internet Explorer) that integrates many useful features into a clean, easy-to-use interface, and adds tabbed browsing. It's a Microsoft freebie and you can click here to try it today.

Search company Yahoo! is offering a new engine that trolls through subscriber-only Web sites previously off-limits to indexing tools. The beta Search Subscriptions service allows users to rummage through content from sites that are mostly reserved for paying subscribers, including trade journals, The Financial Times, ConsumerReports.org, The Wall Street Journal Online and TheStreet.com. It's a portal to the 'deep Web' according to Yahoo! and will soon include millions of access-restricted pages that could not previously be searched, although users will still have to subscribe when they arrive at some of the sites if they want to view the content. The company said it will begin trawling Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and other services in coming weeks. Google is not far behind, currently testing a service that will allow publishers with restricted (fee-based or subscription) content to have their material crawled and indexed.

A new trend in the making is the claim made for the latest type of Blog, typified by the local news reporting of former newspaperman Dan Levine at his month-old Web site. One of only a handful of new 'hyperlocal' resource creators, Levine uses the familiar Blog format but is contemptuous of the term, preferring his site to be known as a Web newspaper, distinguished from the usual run of online diaries in which, he says, lonely people post boring thoughts and mostly pointless commentary.

A friend sends or forwards an e-mail to you about some child who's dying and wants to receive messages, or perhaps one about a national corporation that committed some grievous sin and should be boycotted. How do you find out whether or not the claims are true? There are several Web sites that make it possible to check stories making the rounds on the Net.

Heard about this one yet? Book Crossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others "to make the whole world a library".

Further evidence, if it were needed, to correct the wayward perception that all lottery money goes to fund 'good cause' charities, refugee groups, athletes, museums, and the like, is the People's Network Enquire Web site. It uses an ongoing cash grant to the nation's Public Libraries to run an 'answers online' service that operates in real-time, putting questions to real library staff. The live Q&A service runs 24/7 with helpers in the United States and Canada filling in when specially trained British library staffers are unavailable.

A new British search engine will give 50% of its gross revenue to charity every month and predicts that if just 10 supporters from each of the 188,000 UK registered charities use the site, £22m could be raised in a year. Everyclick.com otherwise operates in the same way as most other search engines, providing search results, images, news feeds and features such as Amazon product listings. Checks reveal that its main index, hopefully a charitable donation in itself, came from Mirago.co.uk, Britain's biggest independent search engine. Organisations involved in the scheme so far include Save the Children, The Meningitis Trust and Hope HIV. A marketing campaign promoting the initiative with press, online ads, postcards and stick-on mouse labels is running under the strapline "Give your mouse a heart".