Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you have read Robert Pirsig's bestseller "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", you may be interested to know that photographs he took on the trip across North West America when writing the book have been found and published for the first time on a true enthusiast's Web site. Run by Henry Gurr, Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, the site sets out to identify the complete route taken by Pirsig and includes hundreds of photos taken in 2002, when Professor Gurr attempted to find and photograph the actual places described in the book. Writing in 1968, Robert Pirsig explored the philosophy of Zen as he travelled with his young son and two friends on their bikes. Carrying the narrator (the book is in the first person) and his companions, the bikes are ridden and maintained with detailed affection and used throughout the book as an analogy for exploring life, the universe, and everything. A motor cycle, said Robert Pirsig, is a system of Zen concepts worked out in steel.

This newsletter has mentioned the intriguing activities inspired by the bookcrossing.com Web site at least once before (Issue 53), but makes no apologies for taking a second look this month, courtesy of La Vida, an arts section pullout at The Albuquerque Tribune, 'the best newspaper for miles' on Route 66. You can find all five years' worth of Zen Monthly's back issues at: http://www.zen.co.uk/about.aspx?page=42

"Looking for love in all the wrong places," wrote songwriter Waylon Jennings for "Urban Cowboy". But some people are looking for and finding love in all the right places - like book shops. According to a survey conducted by BizRate Research for comparison shopping site Shopzilla, bricks-and-mortar bookstores are good venues for meeting blind dates. After restaurants, they are the most popular locations to meet potential partners for both women and men (61 percent versus 52 percent). "You can find out a lot about a guy in a bookstore," Rebecca Opp, a production manager from Los Angeles told BizRate. "I especially look for single men in the cookbook, business, and pet sections". Yet when it comes to buying books, 78 percent of respondents say they are regular shoppers at online booksellers like Amazon.

There are almost 5,000 "interests" at Meetup.com and millions of Internet surfers are finding like-minded people online, then leaving their computers to get together in the real world. When it turned out that the biggest meeting so far wasn't a Moms Meetup or a Bible Study Meetup or a Gay Rights Meetup but a gathering of eBay sellers in Dallas, eBay called a meeting of its own and formed an Investors Meetup to buy a stake in the company. Meetup runs in nine countries and has 70,000 members in the UK.

When Chicago Tribune reporters decided to test CIA security using an online data service that's available to anyone, they found a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States. An undisclosed number on the list - the CIA would not say how many - are covert agents, known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets. Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Some are in northern Virginia, near the agency's headquarters; more are scattered across the country. Several are heavily guarded, but others are small offices and private residences with no indication of any affiliation with the CIA, bringing to mind the plot of 'Six Days of the Condor' in which a CIA researcher returns from lunch to his anonymous New York office to find the rest of the staff assassinated. A senior official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could".

Four online game-playing girls recruited from several countries have moved into the first-ever dedicated eSports home, funded by Taiwan-based Via Technologies, a global supplier of high-end computer hardware. The leader of the all-female international team "girlz 0f destruction", Jamie Pereyda, is the first female to be listed in the top 100 GGL World Rankings of gamers. The house is situated "in the heart of the European gaming community", near Stockholm and will cost Via about $250,000 in the first year, but the company says a dedicated training camp makes financial sense - there's plenty of money in worldwide gaming and tournament prizes are escalating. In one year, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) paid out $1 million in prizes.

"Here's a couple of fun sites that might be good for the newsletter". Alx Klive.

A Mac enthusiast has managed to prove that his favourite brand of computer is "a doddle" to hack and take over. According to ZDNet, the Swedish-based Mac fan launched an online competition inviting hackers to break through the computer's security and gain root control. Within an hour, his "rm-my-mac" competition resulted in a hacker calling himself "Gwerdna," claiming success. Gwerdna said it only took him half an hour because a Mac is "easy pickings". He said that despite the common assumption of Mac owners that their boxes are harder to hack than Windows, there are shedloads of unpublished exploits available.

Phishing scams - fraudulent e-mails that request personal information and appear to come from banks, building societies and other trusted sources - are becoming more sophisticated and widespread, says a new report. Symantec recently identified 7.92 million daily phishing attempts, an increase of over 5.5 million in the last six months. That's an amazing increase - and many believe the problem will only get worse. If ever there was a reason to rally behind the call to restrict bulk e-mail sending to paid-only distribution channels, this might be it.

It's not surprising that Internet security is becoming a major concern for UK businesses, with over 16,000 new viruses, worms and Trojans appearing in 2005 alone. According to the National Hi-Tech crime unit, 'e-crime' is costing Britain £2.4 billion every year and companies are now under pressure to ensure they have adequate security in place. Keeping pace with the growing number of Internet security threats can be time-consuming, costly and a drain on internal resources. Out-sourcing security to Zen Internet could help to make improvements, and reduce costs at the same time. To learn more about Zen Internet's managed security solutions, click here:

Criminals appear to be using a Chinese bank's server to host phishing sites to steal personal data from customers of eBay and a major US bank. That's according to Internet services company Netcraft, who claim that it's the first time that one bank's infrastructure has been used to exploit another. A free phishing toolbar user reported receiving a suspicious e-mail that led to phishing sites located in hidden directories on a server with IP addresses belonging to the Shanghai branch of China Construction, a state-owned bank with more than 14,000 branches.

Junk ads are migrating to instant messages, mobile phones and blogs - and legitimate blogs could soon be outnumbered by splogs, a mutant form with no inherent value, created purely as a vehicle for Google advertising or other random marketing purposes. Google pays 'sploggers' up to £20 per click-through for ads based on keyword phrases in some of the more competitive markets.

South Korea may be pointing the way of the future for mobile phones. Since January, some users have had the ability to watch television on their phones - free of charge - through a government-subsidised technology called Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or DMB. Seoul is the first city to make mobile phone TV available, and only those with the more expensive DMB-enabled phones can receive the free service. So far, consumers report that the images are relatively free of "jerky motion," but certain sports, like football, can be difficult to follow on the small screens. More than two million Koreans are expected to use the service this year, with a predicted 15 million, or 30 percent of the population, within five years. "Hey, if you lose this one," said Seo Young Bae, 32, referring to his phone, "the person who finds it will never return it because he can get free television."

Online advertisers are desperate to reach 18 to 34 year old males, because traditional media just doesn't resonate with most of this crowd anymore. If you are finding more sites on the Web that are honed specifically for young men, that's the reason. A prime example is Heavy.com, offering animation, music, video games, grainy home movies, super models in bikinis and parodies of pop culture in a series of 2-3 minute clips. Advertising is up front and ubiquitous, but presented in a manner of 'knowing commercialism', in which the site acknowledges that it has to support itself with ads. Wisecracks like, "this will be over faster than your last relationship" or ".001 percent of your daily ad intake" greet users as they view ads that appear in front of video content, which, like everything on the site, is free. Heavy makes all its money from advertising and big players from Unilever to Virgin are weighing in to foot the bills.

Analog needs digital and digital needs analog, says Alan Saracevic at the San Francisco Chronicle. He's written an insightful piece about the apparent collision between old media (mainstream media) and new media (MSN and more) and how the two really need to get along more amicably. He recalls that much of modern-day digital media can call San Francisco its birthplace, with seminal companies and phenomena from Apple Computer to Craigslist based in the area. But Saracevic believes the great divide between old and new is both overdrawn and not necessary. If the young Turks who dance in the digital fields don't learn the basics from the crusty old-media folks pounding the beat, he says, they're bound to produce second-rate content. Conventional print journalists in particular have much to teach. Their ethic, their daily habits, their skills - all should be copied by the scribes who work online. This is an interesting article, albeit filled with local Bay Area references, that should ring true with media types everywhere.

A new venture from the former president of the company that brought us MySpace aims to divert the revenue streams from pay per click ads that currently mostly flow to Google and Yahoo! (previously Overture) and channel them towards his own project, Adknowledge. Brett Brewer, the former head of Intermix Media, sold last year to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for for $673 million, has raised $48 million to back his latest start-up. Unlike Yahoo!/Google's format of text ads tied to keywords, Adknowledge will place what it calls behaviourally targeted graphic ads in Web pages and e-mails. The company claims a network of 500 content providers, from whom it buys e-mail and banner ad space directly, and charges advertisers from 20p to £5 per click.

From Radio 1 to BBC 7 and from Radio Cymru to the World Service, the BBC is offering free podcast feeds to its growing audience of online listeners and viewers. In a push to follow 6 to 14-year-olds around on every media device they own, Radio Disney has also expanded into podcasting, where it will offer "repurposed time-shifted content" for the downloadable format. Starting in June, the company will begin inserting ads in its service, the most popular for US children.

With so many podcasts becoming available, there's been a growing need for a good specialised search engine to index the jumble of content that the downloads provide. Few people expected that the engine might come from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), old hands at the Massachusetts company that developed ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet. But earlier this year, BBN launched Podzinger, a service that searches the Web for audio podcasts and uses proprietary speech-recognition technology to translate the audio into text and index the content. Now the company has introduced indexing for video podcasts, also known as 'vodcasts'.

In January's newsletter, we mentioned online diaries by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, by Samuel Pepys, who started his diary in 1660, and other page turners by literary luminaries including Franz Kafka and Henry David Thoreau. We should have known there'd be a Web site somewhere with a lot more. For the true diary enthusiast, we've unearthed Diary Junction, a loaded storehouse with daily jottings by everyone from Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler's infamous propogandist, Paul Josef Goebbels.

What did Kinderstart.com do to get itself virtually banished by Google? The search engine isn't saying, but we may find out soon, when the parental advice Internet directory site has its day in court. Its owners have filed a civil lawsuit in California, charging that Google "unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search result ranking without reason or warning". In fact, Google doesn't acknowledge Kinderstart's existence even under its own name, although the lawsuit notes that rival search systems at Microsoft and Yahoo! place Kinderstart.com at the top of their rankings when "Kinderstart" is typed in. Whilst it's true the site has a number of problems from a search engine perspective, including its untidy code and appearance, to the use of frames for a menu, to the lack of a sitemap page, and bad image tags all the way down to the copyright date in the footer (which at this writing is the year 2000), there is really nothing that merits near-complete removal from any search engine index. Even Kinderstart's boast that the site graphics were contributed by someone at www.ayzenberg.com, where the client list includes Disney and Microsoft, shouldn't be a hanging offence. Google isn't a truth machine. The most likely explanation is something that doesn't show up on the Web site, like participation in one too many link schemes, or the use of promotional software that Google specifically warns against, like WebPosition Gold.

If you don't follow sensible security guidelines, even something as empty minded and supposedly innocuous as Googlebot - the spidering mechanism that checks Web sites for content that ends up in Google's search engine results - might come along and delete pages from your site. It happended to Alex Papadimoulis, who wrote about it in 'The Spider of Doom'. He called in an investigator who found "one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted all of the content on the system. The IP didn’t belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google’s very own Web crawling spider". Could it happen to you? Find out here:

If you can't identify the spider visiting your pages, try this index, which includes most of Google's crawlers and some of the known nuisances.

The Reuters and Dow Jones partnership believes it shouldn't take an expert to find relevant business news and have introduced their own online application - Factiva Search 2.0 Beta - in an attempt to prove the point. Factiva delivers superior results, declares the company, and displays them with interactive charts and "powerful filtering and intuitive navigation". You can tell them how you got on after trying the free trial available now at a dedicated Web site that also has some nifty javascripting running the navigational switchgear behind the home page.

New, independent and "designed and programmed from scratch in the C programming language" to provide its own results, gathered and indexed by its own Web crawler, Mojeek is a welcome addition to the short list of UK based search engines, most of which serve warmed-over listings borrowed from Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing), or the godfather of all-British search, Mirago. Mojeek's search results contain no other engine's listings and nothing is added by way of paid-for inclusion or placement.