Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet marked its place in the history of the Web with a celebration of its tenth anniversary last month. When did the Web begin? The first Web site was built by Tim Berners-Lee and appeared at http://info.cern.ch/ on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, or was to be, and how to acquire a browser that would let you see it. It was also the world's first Web directory, where Berners-Lee later maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own. Managing the directory didn't take much work at first. Two years later, there were only 600 Web sites to be found anywhere and a mere 100,000 by 1995. But by the end of that year, people were beginning to take a lot more notice of 'The World Wide Web' and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Compuserve, America Online and Zen Internet offered customers Internet access for the first time. Zen launched with a network capable of supporting up to six simultaneous dial-up users. Within two years, it was providing the fastest Internet access in the country, making regular appearances at the top of monthly 'speed league' tables and winning "ISP of the Year", the first of many national awards. Today, the company has a core network capacity over 20,000 times larger, it matches its first year sales every working day, and the world has accumulated an estimated 75 million Web sites.

One of the earliest print publications to offer readers a Web site edition, a few months after Zen's launch, was the Village Voice. The world's first 'alternative newspaper' drew breath fifty years ago last week when Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher put together the premier issue in New York. The Voice's now daily-updated Web site attracts almost a million unique users per week.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released the latest circulation figures for national newspapers in the UK. Broadly speaking, sales are down, but broadsheeet ABCs are brighter.

Ten years after the World Wide Web began to be recognised as something that UK business owners might want to take seriously, it's surprising that companies can still find original and worthwhile domain names to register. It's not as easy as it was, of course, and the dot com mother lode, ravaged by American prospectors, is now a fairly barren landscape for enterprising gem hunters. There are some surprising finds still available in the UK domain field, however, and the new .EU domain is rich with completely unworked veins. It's easy to check domain name availability at Zen's hosting site (just 'type and go' at www.zenwebhosting.com) where you will find a completely new range of domain registration and hosting products. £14.99 secures the name of your choice, and for less than £50 per year you can treat your new domain to hosting with 1GB Web space - and get a home page or photo gallery up and running in a few minutes with cPanel, the new online control console. cPanel also features in Zen's Linux and Windows hosting packages for business, from £3.99 per month and with up to 10GB Web space for multiple site hosting.

Apple sold over one million videos in three weeks at its iTunes Music Store last month. CEO Steve Jobs said it justified all the company's forecasts about the size of the market for legal video downloads. Top sellers included music videos from Michael Jackson and Fatboy Slim; Pixar's 'For the Birds' and episodes of 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives'.

The BBC has admitted that an Apple logo was edited out of an episode of its spy series 'Spooks', after newspaper allegations about product placement in its programmes. The Fiona Carter character, played by Olga Sosnovska, was seen using an Apple computer, with the bright logo clearly visible when the programme aired on BBC Three, but it was nowhere to be seen two weeks later when the episode reached BBC One.

Introduced by the famous crowing mascot, British Pathe's Web site presents 75 years of cinema newsreels dating from 1896 to 1970 and totalling 3,500 hours of free viewing. Visitors have viewed 750,000 free film clips in the last 12 months and tens of thousands have ordered paid-for downloads. There's a simple keyword search (the name of your home town may turn up a few surprises) and then - after a registration and shopping cart order process where you confirm the free preview option or choose to pay for higher resolution footage - the downloads are all yours for immediate viewing. An e-mailed confirmation with a Web link to the ordered file means that you can easily run the film clip again later. From grainy turn of the century monochrome to full colour snapshots of the swinging sixties, files are in Windows movie format, with clear sound and mostly excellent video, and although there is a watermark on the free films, it's easily ignored and doesn't detract from the overall value of this amazing archive.

Doom makes it to the big screen in the UK on 2nd December. It's not the first film to be based on a computer game. From Tomb Raider and Mortal Kombat, to Alone in the Dark and Dungeon Siege, Hollywood has been exploiting game titles for years, with mixed results. Alone in the Dark went straight to DVD and, as the full list at Cinemas Online reveals, very few of the rest met with any great success.

Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was drafted in last week to help get the Government's new 'Get Safe Online' campaign on the road. The TV host is promoting a 'SAFE' check, which stands for Spyware, Anti-virus, Firewall and 'Ensure your operating system is updated'. "We wouldn't leave our front door open or our cars unlocked, but we regularly use the Net without taking basic precautions," said Hammond, "It's not difficult to use the Internet safely; it comes down to some basic rules we should all remember". To publicise the campaign Web site, ten 'Get Safe Online Campaign Minis' will tour the UK with advisers to give advice to the public. The roadshow will visit Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Derby, Leicester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The campaign is a joint initiative between the Government, the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit and sponsors, including HSBC, eBay and Microsoft.

Picture a cybercafe full of 20-30 somethings, all earnestly and quietly working away at their computers, an every-day scene at any Seattle Starbucks or campus coffee shop. A Foreign Correspondent reporter visiting Nigeria found it was much the same when he called in at a Lagos cybercafe, except that every business-suited keyboarder around him was a scammer - busy sending '419' e-mails to fleece small fortunes from victims in the US and UK. The Lagos scammers told him about their theme song, "I Go Chop Your Dollars," hugely popular on local radio, and happily justified their trade as a form of rich-to-poor, white-to-black cash repatriation service.

Although 419 fraud is named after a section of Nigeria's penal code, no scammers have been prosecuted in its courts. Last month, Microsoft, which has been working to improve security after an onslaught of malicious software targeting Windows, signed an agreement with the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to track down those responsible for spam, phishing, spyware, viruses and counterfeiting in the country. Under the terms of the pact, "Microsoft and the EFCC will work together to combat the problem of Internet crime through information sharing and training on Microsoft's technical expertise in this area". Neil Holloway, president of Microsoft in Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the agreement is part of Microsoft's wider security strategy, which includes rewards for bringing prosecutions against virus writers.

Lookout is a free search add-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows you to quickly search through the content of your mail folders. Unlike the built-in search feature - which tends to be rather slow - Lookout produces almost instant results. It also offers advanced search options that enable you to limit the keyword search to recipients, dates, attachments and more.

Find your files faster by giving them keywords. Through Windows' File Properties, you can annotate files for easier searches later.

Lost your key? The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware utility that retrieves the Product Key (CD key) used to install Windows. It has options to copy the key to clipboard, save it to a text file, or print it for safekeeping. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Office 97, and Office XP.

In the struggle to hold on to users, AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are increasingly bundling their free toolbars, instant messenger apps, and utility software together and even including them with totally unrelated applications. If you're interested in trying AOL's newest Instant Messenger software, for example, you'll lose a much bigger chunk of your hard drive than you expect, says PC World reporter Erik Larkin. You'll also get AOL Explorer, an Internet Explorer shell that opens to AOL's AIM Today home page when you launch Instant Messenger, as well as PlaxoHelper, an application that ties in with the Plaxo social-networking service, and two programs that continue to run silently in the background after you quit everything else.

For most Internet users, finding the Web site most likely to provide a specific tidbit of information is like trying to find a word in the dictionary without knowing the letter it begins with. What they'd really like is a search engine that would cover a whole range of relevant terms and concepts and retrieve results for all of them. Most search engines won't do that, but two weeks ago, a new search tool arrived that uses semantics and linguistic analysis to suggest the best keywords or phrases to use - and then it goes off and completes the search for you. A free download, and currently designed mainly for shoppers, the Otopy Assistant converts initial keyword entries into multiple relevant terms and presents them in an easy-to-use interface. Otopy's designers say they will be adding databases for general Web searches, business, the law, medicine, and other applications over the next few weeks.

You can trust 99.99% of the word entries in your favourite online dictionary - http://dictionary.cambridge.org is a fast and easy to use example - but some editors are in the habit of adding words of their own invention. Compilers of reference works do this to set 'copyright traps' to reveal competitors whose admiration for their scholarship is demonstrated by copying. If you come across an entry for "esquivalience", you should ignore it. Supposedly the wilful avoidance of official responsibilities or the shirking of duties, it's pure invention.

This story is about nothing. Or to be more specific, the number zero - without which modern mathematics would not exist and the digital age might never have arrived. Before zero was invented in India about 800 AD, all calculations had to add up to something. Later Indian scholars invented the '0' symbol, although the word ‘zero’ derives from the Arabic ‘sifr’, meaning ‘empty’. The Indians, said Albert Einstein, taught us how to count. And their invention of zero led to the creation of binary coding - the representation of numbers that employs only the digits 0 and 1 - that is used by most computers today.

This story is about nothing but fun. Or to be more specific, it's about "sodaplay, the home of creative play", where you will find the sodaconstructor, a workshop to make springy, stringy machines that have a life of their own, and the sodarace, a place where your creatures can be tested against the best 'walking line drawings' that other visitors have put together.

London-based Previewseek is a new search engine that hides nothing under a bushel. It claims to be better than Google. First, say its founders, it's a lot smarter. Type in "Java", for example, and if you are interested in the island of Java, Google will make you click through 70 pages before showing you anything relevant. Previewseek, on the other hand, will acknowledge that the word has several meanings and provide definitions for each of them up front. Did you mean Java the island, Java the coffee, Java the programming language, or something else? Regardless of what you are looking for, Previewseek also organises results based on related concepts to help you further refine searches without the need to understand Boolean query syntax. That said, Previewseek is a metasearcher at heart. It may have its own patented set of exceedingly clever algorithms, but it applies them to results gathered from other search engines, rather than spidering the Web itself.