Zen Monthly Newsletter

Half a million small firms are missing out on rate rebates of up to £2,500 by failing to apply for money back, according to the Local Government Association. The LGA says that over 50% of the 870,000 eligible small companies in the UK are failing to claim Small Business Rate Relief, which in some cases would cut their rates bill in half. LGA Chairman, Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, said "Small businesses up and down the country are facing immense difficulties keeping their heads above water. Hundreds of millions of pounds is sitting around waiting to be claimed by hard pressed bosses of small firms". Estimates put the total amount of money still waiting to be claimed at over £400m.

Age Concern is looking for the UK's 'Silver Surfer of the Year' and 'Silver Surfer Entrepreneur of the Year' - Internet users over 50 who have acquired IT skills that have made a significant impact on their lives or the lives of others. Nominate your favourite mature user (friend, co-worker, someone you have trained, or even yourself) by July 21 for one of the cash prizes. Nomination forms are at the link below. The organisers are also keen to highlight "the important work of local councils in achieving digital inclusion" for older users, and want individuals and community organisations to support their local Council by nominating them for 'Silver Surfer Council of the Year'.

Overlooked in the recent furore about John Prescott's alleged grace and favour extravagances: the £250,000 given by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 to fund MySociety, the group responsible for FaxYourMP.com and WriteToThem.com. Apparently, £250,000 was more than the charity was able to spend and more suggestions are needed from the general public for cash-needy projects that are "founded on electronic networks", have a "real-world impact on democratic and community aspects of people's lives", and "low or zero cost scalability".

More people watched England's farewell World Cup performance this year. For the first time, the BBC showed matches simultaneously on the Web as well as on television. The broadband service mirrored terrestrial coverage, using the same commentary and camera work, and included on-demand four-minute highlight packages from every game. The BBC has provided plenty of football coverage on the Web before, but nothing with the audience potential of the World Cup. In 2005, it showed the final of the Club World Championship between Liverpool and Sao Paulo online. It showed all the interactive streams from the Athens 2004 Olympics. This year's Wimbledon Championships were signed up to go live on the corporation's Web site for the first time. Hospitality providers Sportworld managed services at the tournament with broadband supplied by Zen Internet's Events Team. And the BBC's live online sports coverage is set to continue. The broadband rights to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups have already been secured.

Brian Livingston, editor of 'Windows Secrets', says no security-minded company or sensible individual would want to run software that stealthily contacts a distant server and morphs its behaviour at will, but that's what happened a few weeks ago when Microsoft started quietly auto-installing "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) to Windows machines in several countries, including the UK. The software, which he says qualifies as spyware under any objective definition, included "Notifications", a feature programmed to contact Microsoft's servers every 24 hours. After hearing from outraged customers, the company back-pedalled on June 27, saying it would release a version that called home less frequently. But that doesn't deal with the basic problem, according to Livingston, who claims that any junior techie or software pirate can bypass the irritations of WGA Notifications and the rest of the paraphernalia that Microsoft puts in place to discourage copying, which means that only ordinary users are made to suffer. Under further pressure, Microsoft began offering guidelines on how to remove WGA Notifications altogether. Previously, it had said the software could not be uninstalled and one user who called MS Support was told "Having the latest WGA will become mandatory in September and if it's not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, it'll stop working, so you might as well install WGA now."

The number of visits recorded at some popular Web sites may be inflated by a little-known Google predilection to pre-load pages that it guesses the user will choose from the results listed. If Google's prediction is accurate, the page is presented in a fraction of the usual time. But a site visit is clocked up, even if the user chooses to look elsewhere. Site owners who want to avoid these ghost in the machine page views that inflate their Web stats - or cost them money if they pay-per-byte for bandwidth - can block prefetch visits from Google and others by having their Web server return a 404 or 405 (method not allowed) HTTP response code for all such page requests.

Google's secret HQ? The New York Times says a not-so-hidden complex sitting on the Columbia River in Oregon is the laboratory for Google's next secret weapon. From above, it looks like a big factory or a nuclear plant, and it isn't situated in a particularly desirable area, with barren desert land on either side of its Oregon-Washington border location. The Times calls it "the intersection of cheap electricity [from the Columbia] and readily accessible data networking" but it's also ground zero for Google's war with its rivals for dominance of Internet real estate. Microsoft and Yahoo! are building tech fortresses of their own nearby, and all three locations sit on top of massive fibre optics backbones laid during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Over the past few years, each firm has made a point of buying as much redundant fibre as possible, with Google rumoured to have gobbled up much of it. Commentators say Google is a clear frontrunner in the global data centre building race, noting the already impressive scale of its new desert complex. Three sports stadium size buildings will house tens of thousands of processors and disks, held together by Velcro tape, a Google practice that makes swapping parts easy. There are large cooling plants that look like skyscrapers, essential to absorb the heat produced by concentrated computing power. The site is referred to by Google only as "The Dalles" (the nearest town to its remote location) but locals know it as Project 02, although officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the place because they had signed confidentiality agreements. "No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter."

All Web sites are created equal. Or at least that's the principle the Web was founded on. So far, like everybody else, telecommunications companies have had to respect that notion. But if a new law makes it through the US Congress, telcos and cable monopolies will be able to charge for giving some Web sites priority access to the Internet. So called "Net neutralists" say it will strangle innovation online. The telcos say it's a fine example of the American way. Either way, someone will have to pay for upgrading the Internet to cope with the ever-growing amount of data we want to send through it. But will the net result be a case of one Net for them, another for the rest of us?

Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft to spend more time with his wife and money - in particular the 30 billion dollar nest egg at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which hands out grants to good causes. His role as chief software architect will be taken over by Ray Ozzie, a Gates contemporary and former rival best known as the creator of Lotus Notes, the collaborative e-mail package. Ozzie is expected to steer Microsoft further towards Web applications and advertising-based online services in direct competition with Google. Meanwhile, the company continues to depend on bundling Windows and Office with PCs for most of its revenue.

"The future of beverage innovation is limitless", say Coca Cola at their grandly-named beverageinstitute.org Web site. One of the most passed around viral videos of the summer is an amazing clip demonstrating beverage innovation in the form of a Coke-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, engineered by two prankster scientists in Maine who discovered that adding Mentos mints to Diet Coke provokes some extraordinary results. Now that the video - viewed a million times in one week - has made Diet Coke and Mentos a popular blog and search topic, what are the two companies doing to capitalise on the interest? According to the Wall Street Journal, which valued the publicity at $10 million dollars, Italian mint maker Mentos is relishing the attention, but Diet Coke isn't thrilled. Hundreds of copycat videos posted on the Net show that anyone can create a spectacular geyser by dropping a couple of mints into a bottle of the drink. The "crazyness with Mentos doesn't fit the brand personality of Diet Coke", company spokesperson Susan McDermott told the Journal. "We would hope people want to drink our soda more than try experiments with it." The marketing team at Mentos, noting that their annual ad budget is a long way short of $10 million, are not only delighted, they want to feature the video in advertising and hire its creators to tour on the company's behalf.

Paying customers are threatening to quit AOL after the company started putting banner ads in their incoming e-mail messages. In blogs, discussion forums and interviews, subscribers are complaining about the ads, calling them intrusive, unsolicited, distracting, and annoying. "These are animated ads. They blink on and off and carry on when you're trying to read a message. They're right there in your face," said one. The ads are being shown to AOL subscribers using version 9.0 of the company's proprietary access software. But there's no targeting based on monitored content of e-mail messages, according to AOL, who claim that subscribers surveyed beforehand said it wouldn't bother them to see banner ads along with their messages.

'Far From the Madding Gerund' is a collection of articles, written by two professional linguists and posted on their Web site, the Language Log. The theme of the site is grammar and correctness in English. They bewail the abandonment of grammar teaching in American schools (a view echoed in the UK), in particular being alarmed at errors of grammar in official examiners' answers to recent SAT practice questions. They debunk the popular notion that eskimos have 80, or 150, or more words for types of snow, and there's a wonderful deconstruction of the first few paragraphs of that dreadfully written book, The Da Vinci Code. In the section 'Learn your grammar', an article on misplaced modifiers includes this example quoted in the Penguin Dictionary of American English Usage: "Although widely used by the men, Bashilange women were rarely allowed to smoke cannabis". The book, which borrows its title from a blog reader's post, is an example of what looks like a trend: the conversion of blogs into books, or blooks. Every article is still available on the Language Log. Will people pay for something that's available online free of charge? The publisher’s sales figures suggest they will. The no-batteries-required, go-anywhere format of the printed book still has some life left in it.

Google hopes it might have found a way to dispel discontent and get some much-needed glorious publicity for its project to digitise books in public libraries. Sponsoring New York's 'Shakespeare in the Park' this summer, the search engineers say they have made all Shakespeare's plays available online and even more accessible to search or "browse through" on a new section of their site. It may be much ado about nothing. Visitors find the interface baffling and discover that the plays are truly "even more accessible" only if they look elsewhere. At Project Gutenberg, for example, anyone can download entire free copies in plain text format at less than 200Kb per title.

Since April, public libraries in England have had free access to several resources of the Oxford University Press, including the multi-volume OED - the Oxford English Dictionary - which takes up a yard of bookshelf space in its printed form. Recently, coverage was extended to Northern Ireland. Now users don't need to visit their local library to check the reference works, they can log on from any computer. To get access, visit Northern Ireland Libraries at www.ni-libraries.net, click on Online Library, and enter your library ticket number and PIN. Libraries provide access to the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Reference Online, the Dictionary of National Biography, Grove Art Online and Grove Music Online.

A gimmicky new rule introduced for this year's Webby awards meant that winners had to limit their acceptance speeches to just five words. Dell stuck to a short sales message: "Thanks. Go buy a Dell". Others entered into the half-sized Haiku spirit of the competition, leaving lines like "Even monkeys fall from trees" hanging in the air.

In the 6th or 7th century, Latin scribes saved time by shortening the frequently used word 'ad' (at, to, or toward) by stretching the upstroke of the 'd' and curving it over the 'a'. Today, their modest shorthand is part of everybody's e-mail address. In Britain, we call it the 'at symbol', but it goes by unusual pseudonyms elsewhere. South Africans call it the 'monkey’s tail'. In Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia it’s the 'crazy'. In the Czech Republic it’s 'pickled herring'. The French often refer to it as 'little snail'. In Greece it’s 'little duck'. There’s no official word for it in Thailand, but it is popularly referred to as 'ai tua yiukyiu', meaning 'wiggling worm-like character', which makes telling someone your e-mail address in Bangkok a tad tiresome.

This superb job title for a researcher turned up in the mid-June issue of New Scientist. A palaeotempestologist (in the US usually paleotempestologist) studies the frequency and intensity of ancient storms. Methods include taking core samples to find evidence of sand washed into lakes by storm surges, studying microfossils in coastal sediments, and investigating oxygen isotope ratios in tree rings. An important aspect of this work, in the midst of current climate change debate, is that it is becoming possible to predict how often and how violently such storms are set to occur in future and to check after the event to find out if global warming is producing more and more severe extraordinary weather.

The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner, according to the business-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute of America, an institution part-financed by Exxon Mobil, which published advertising last month to "counter global warming alarmism". "Why are they trying to scare us?", the ad wanted to know. This drew a protest from the University of Missouri professor whose study on the Antarctic ice sheet was selectively mis-quoted to back up the CEI's claim in a "deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate." Another CEI ad sought to reassure readers that carbon dioxide (CO2) is "essential to life," and said, "They call it pollution. We call it life." The truth about the misinformation campaign was revealed when it was examined by FactCheck - an online reporting project at the University of Pennsylvania - which "accepts no funding from business corporations, labour unions, political parties, lobbying organisations or individuals" in its pursuit of deception and confusion in political propaganda.

Imagine being able to record any smell - fragrant aroma or foul pong - and play it back later. Engineers in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of doing just that. The device uses electronic noses to analyse an odour, then reproduces it by combining an array of non-toxic chemicals. The system has already recorded and reproduced the smell of peeled oranges and sliced apples - and can even distinguish between Golden Delicious and Granny Smith.

After finding just what you were looking for on Google, MSN Search, or Yahoo! in a matter of seconds, do you ever think "Wouldn't it be nice if I could search the house just as easily?" Imagine entering a query for "Phillips screwdriver" or "spare keys" or "tartan socks" (we've seen you out on the town) and getting the same quick results. All it would take is an index and detailed pictures of every room in the house. Install some cameras and open your doors and drawers once a day, so that the closets and cupboards can be indexed, overlay some personal tags for faster searchability, and you're in business. After all, tagging pictures to make them search friendly is the crux of Flickr's modus operandi (which happens to be owned by Yahoo!) and Amazon's A9 includes street photos in its search index of US cities. So is home search at 75 Acacia Avenue really that far-fetched?

Google's idea of the most relevant Web site isn't always the right answer. It's always good to get another take on search results and a brand-new search engine is often a good a place to look. Zumber.com - a global-reach beta engine based in Australia - also has a customisable 'favourite photo' interface that it hopes will gain it some loyal users and a dictionary-style directory categorised by keywords.