Zen Monthly Newsletter

A new Web site shows that, against expectations, most acorns dropping from the typical family tree in Britain take root close to home. Showing the geographical distribution of surnames in the UK, the site puts paid to the belief that population movement around the country has left a jumble of surnames with no discernible regional patterns. Visitors can look at maps that compare the distribution of more than 25,000 surnames in the 1881 Census with the pattern revealed by the 1998 electoral register. They show surprisingly similar profiles for many names and indicate that relatively few people move far from their birthplace. Additional search options, of special interest to social climbers, allow users to check the relative status of their surname. Patricia Routledge, who played the ultimate snob Hyacinth Bucket in a BBC comedy series, is at the bottom of the status league, but Vicky Pollard, the Little Britain star, is in the top third. The Web site is the result of studies led by professors from University College London, who spent a year checking 46 million surname records, and used postcodes to locate the ratio of particular names in affluent or impoverished areas, and to trace patterns of emigration to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Despite establishing a successful Web presence using the bbc.co.uk and beeb.com domains, the BBC reportedly spent £200,000 of licence-payers' money last year to retrieve the address: bbc.com from a US company called Boston Business Computing. At the same time, the corporation has stockpiled hundreds of Internet domain names apparently unrelated to its programmes or business. A Guardian reporter discovered a vast portfolio of names that includes the likes of pcforpeanuts.co.uk and plantx.co.uk. The BBC said that the names had been registered in case of possible future use, and to protect domains that relate to BBC projects. Fans of 'The Professionals', a popular TV series that ran from 1977 to 1982, are wondering if the BBC is planning a tribute revival after noticing collinsshaw.co.uk in the collection, apparently a reference to actors Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw, who starred in ITV original.

Few companies have pockets deep enough to match the resources of the BBC, and buying a vital domain name from someone who got to it first can be painfully expensive for smaller organisations. Many SMEs were relieved to see registrations for the new .EU domain being offered in stages, protecting businesses with the strongest claims on names that represent their brands or companies before the process is opened up to all-comers in April. Early registration fees are minimal when compared to the price it might cost to buy a domain from someone else later. For more information on registering ‘Euro’ domains, e-mail: eufeedback@zen.co.uk, call 0845 058 9000, or check the Web site.

Tesco is moving into the VoIP business. The company is selling a £20 handset enabling calls across the Internet that plugs into the USP port of any standard computer and comes with its own telephone number. Calls to UK landlines and international calls to countries such as Australia, the USA and Canada cost 2p per minute. Andy Dewhurst, the retailer's chief executive, made it clear that they are targeting BT customers. "Tesco Internet phone is the future for fixed line calls," he said. "It costs 24p a minute to make a peak time call to an Australian landline with BT, but with Tesco home phone it costs 2p a minute at any time." BT pointed out that its calls at weekends and evenings are much cheaper. The supermarket giant's shares fell 1.75 pence to 313.25 pence as the news was announced.

Small companies are benefiting from a boom in public service spending, but the very smallest firms that can’t offer online trading are in danger of missing out and Stephen Timms, the Department of Work and Pensions minister, is warning that chances of gaining public sector work will diminish for even more companies in future as part of a seemingly contradictory government drive to reduce the number of firms used by local authorities.

New Business magazine asked The Chartered Institute of Marketing's Christine Cryne, LateRooms' Chris Allen, and Mark Lang of Eclipse Internet how SMEs can get more business from the Net.

Research suggests that as many as 10,000 laptops are left in the backs of taxis each year and Lindsey Armstrong, senior VP EMEA at Symantec, reckons that any one of them could represent a loss of £500,000 to a business user - with some portable machines potentially storing as much as £5m-worth of commercially sensitive data and intellectual property.

Instead of waiting for a stolen Apple Powerbook to show up on eBay, a firm in Sydney, Australia chose to post it themselves and inform the world of the laptop's theft.

A 29 year old from Connecticut was sentenced to two years in federal prison last week after a 'Sting' operation in which Microsoft investigators bought parts of the source code for Windows 4.0 and Windows 2000 from the luckless criminal's Web site for $40.

At least 80 percent of all e-mail is spam, but nobody is in charge of solving the problem. The Internet, with the limited exceptions of such groups as ICANN and IANA, isn't really under any authority. Besides which, says Dave Crocker, one of the people who designed the Internet mail system, we don't know what would work to defeat spam in the first place. Arriving at a solution that would work is not simply a matter of technology; it's more about finding what would be acceptable to enough Internet users. Anything done to improve the system to cut out spam would create winners and losers, and most of the losers are entrenched interests who will not agree to change.

It’s good to see spammers facing any form of retribution, but some of the latest cases are seeing substantial jail time handed out. Of course, spammers wouldn't be bothering us at all if nobody fell for their bogus diet aids, phoney herbal remedies and an endless variety of get rich quick schemes in the first place. According to court reports in one case where four men faced ten year prison sentences, the miscreants earned over $100,000 from their activities over a few months, getting at least 100 orders a week for a weight loss patch and other worthless products.

On 27th February, Overture and its aged parent, Yahoo! (ten years old last year) will combine their search marketing products under a new name - Yahoo! Search Marketing. On this date, Overture Services Ltd will begin trading in Europe under the name of Yahoo! Search Marketing. It's a second name change for Overture, which just about invented PPC (pay-per-click) search engine advertising in 1999, when it was known as GoTo. Along with the name change, Overture is cutting down the space it offers advertisers for the paid-for listings that it lists above and alongside search results. The new format will match the smaller, classified-ads style favoured by Google for its AdWords PPC listings.

Responding to criticism from Amnesty International and others, CEO Eric Schmidt defended Google's acquiescence to censorship of its search engine results in China, saying "we weren't wild about the restrictions, but it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all. We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil". Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin has launched an effort to collect various Photoshopped Google logos and other images that protest Google's acceptance of the Chinese government's censorship. An early entry in the collection has an image of the Google logo sporting the old Soviet Union's hammer and sickle emblem, with a Google 'search page' showing the results of a query for "Tiananmen Square Massacre", in which the hapless search giant suggests an alternative query: "Did you mean: please arrest me and take me to re-education camp?"

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Book reviews of 'The Google Story' by David Vise and 'The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture' by John Battelle tell the full story. Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wanted to name the fledgling search engine after the term for a very large number, written as 1 followed by a hundred zeros, which is 'googol', but they guessed the spelling, got it wrong, and registered the domain name 'google' instead. Unknown to Page and Brin, the correct name - googol - had already been registered by a neighbour, Tim Beauchamp, a software engineer, who retains it to this day.

The next time you run across a Web site with something a little different going on and experience one of those 'How do they DO that?' moments, you might want to try a free download trial of the Paessler Site Inspector to find out. Site Inspector provides a browser that combines Internet Explorer and Firefox (Mozilla/Gecko) to let Web site designers check their work as seen by a variety of visitors and at different screen resolutions, but it can also reveal the component parts of any Web page to show forms, links, frames, metatags and scripts, as well as the HTML and CSS source code and HTTP headers. Paessler AG, based in Fürth, Bavaria, produces server monitoring software and is best known for its Webserver Stress Tool, an application that details what will happen if hundreds or thousands of visitors turn up at your Web site and want to do the same things at the same time.

Take part in 'Read it Swap it' and get a whole load of new books for free, by swapping your old ones. Simply sign up and register any books that you've read and would be willing to swap. Then, check out the ReadItSwapIt database of over 9,000 books and select one that takes your fancy. The ReadItSwapIt member will be informed and will browse your offers. If you have a title they want, a swap will be fixed and you both pop the books in the second class post. More than one person is usually willing to swap the book you're looking for, so you're bound to find someone to exchange with.

If you like the idea of grabbing some free tickets to join the audience at recordings of popular TV programmes, you can find out how to go about it at BBC and Granada Web sites, or register with TV Recordings, or the Applause Store.

MSN has introduced a new video streaming Web site in the UK, initially available as a beta test. Agreements are in place with a range of providers including MyMovies, Condé Nast, ITN, the Press Association and Reuters, as well as several record labels, to offer sports content, entertainment and business news, film trailers, music videos and interviews. Microsoft said its UK sales team is finalising discussions with potential advertisers and expects to be streaming ads in front of each video clip "very shortly". Earlier last month, rival Google launched its own online video store offering both free and paid-for programming.

Using burn-it-yourself CDs for long-term data storage is unsafe according to IBM "physicist and storage expert", Kurt Gerecke. After just two years the dyes needed for reading the discs can fade and data bits decay. Herr Gerecke recommends using magnetic tape or UDO (Ultra Density Optical) discs instead. IBM, of course, sells magnetic tape and supplies UDO media by UK-based Plasmon, who say the big capacity blue-laser discs have a 50-year lifespan.

New from Hull, Seekz is a parallel Web search engine, or metasearcher, that checks 15 search sites in one go. It is a university project and strictly non-commercial, so it excludes results from engines that accept payment for higher placements and ignores PPC results at the rest. Its own pages are free from banners, pop-ups and other forms of advertising. As well as visiting better known engines like MSN Search, Yahoo! and Alta Vista, Seekz also stitches together listings from second and third tier searchers, including Exalead, Gigablast and Wotbox.