Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen's free monthly plain-text newsletter goes out to more than 60,000 subscribers, including some who have been reading its eclectic mix of important and not so important Internet news and views since the first issue was delivered in March 2001. The full set of back issues can be seen online at: http://short.zen.co.uk/?id=472 - where there is an entry box for new subscriptions at the top of the page. Cancelling a subscription is easy too: just click on the link at the bottom of any delivered copy of the newsletter.

This year’s UK MacUser Awards will be decided by magazine and newsletter readers - Mac Users that is - and it's the first time that the organisers have handed over 'power to the people'. To encourage newly enfranchised Apple pickers to vote for their favourite Mac products, services and solutions, a £4,500 bundle that includes a 20IN iMac is on offer to a single prize draw winner.

No prizes here, but Spiked, the online newsletter, is conducting a survey of readers and selected writers, academics and artists, asking them what they think are the key questions facing the next generation - those born this year, who will reach the age of 18 in the year 2024. The survey will roll until autumn.

Following our "Disadvantaged Users" item in last month's newsletter, PC World picks up the continuing story of disquiet surrounding "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA), which includes anti-piracy checking software that by Microsoft's own definitions qualifies as spyware, says the magazine.

Should you use Windows Live Messenger? The successor to MSN Messenger arrived a few days ago. It has "everything you already love about Messenger plus new ways to connect and share documents with magical ease", according to Microsoft. But Woody Leonhard - online columnist, "For Dummies" author, and Benny Hill lookalike - thinks it's all a bit of a joke.

Tiring of watching its subscriber base shrink at the rate of 28,000 per month, it seems that AOL might be throwing in the towel on its ISP business. The company has $8 billion in annual revenue but spends $1 billion marketing its subscription services. It wants to save the marketing money and focus instead on the message that AOL offers free content. A report in The Wall Street Journal says the company is considering making its e-mail and other services available free and going from being a subscription-based ISP with an ad-supported Web business to a portal company with a subscriber business on the side. If that sounds familiar, it might be because it's reminiscent of a similar transformation that took place seven years ago at Yahoo! - where Web business grew 34 percent in the first quarter this year.

A start-up called Spiceworks is testing whether Google AdWords - the advertising commonly seen on blogs and informational Web sites - can finance a software company that will give away its wares to businesses instead of selling them.

The man who invented advertising, John Wanamaker, understood its limitations. "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted", he said. "The trouble is, I don't know which half". A hundred years later, the man who invented pay-per-click Internet advertising, Bill Gross, has designed a system that won't charge you for the wasted half. It comes a decade after the launch of pay-per-click at GoTo.com, and it's part of a shift to 'pay for results' advertising models. At ZiXXo.com, clients are charged only when consumers print out an online ad's discount coupon. At Ingenio, they pay only if they get a telephone call. Kontraband, a London-based viral marketing company, puts tracking sprites in video clips so that clients know exactly how many completed viewings they're paying for. And after selling GoTo/Overture to Yahoo! for $1.6 billion and watching his invention return a $6.1 billion income stream at Google last year, Bill Gross has a new start-up running at Snap.com, where advertisers will pay only if consumers' clicks turn into completed sales.

ABC Television has been in discussions with DVR manufacturers about introducing technology to disable the fast-forward button on home recorders and prevent consumers zipping ahead to avoid the commercials. In the USA, commercials take up 20 minutes in every hour of broadcast TV. For years, TV stations and networks subscribed to a voluntary code that limited prime-time advertising to less than 10 minutes per hour, but since 1992 the ratio has been running at between 17 and 21 minutes per hour.

MySpace is proof that getting lots of traffic to a Web site counts for nothing if most of it has no effect on revenue. Owner Rupert Murdoch is apparently beside himself because MySpace has hundreds of millions of users, and ridiculously high monthly traffic, but so far has only been able to sell banner ads to make money from it. "And that's the least profitable thing a Web site can do. You're not able to charge a whole lot," Steve Mansfield, CEO of startup PreFound.com, tells InternetNews.com.

YouTube now gets more than 100 million viewings per day of its snack-sized online videos, says Hitwise, the traffic-measurement firm that last month announced MySpace had the biggest overall share of Internet visits. YouTube's viral video site is the runaway leading provider of short movies lasting two to five minutes and accounts for 60 percent of all video watched online. Like MySpace, which is said to be losing money, YouTube is a social sensation with little or no cash return to show for its efforts. It has yet to create a viable advertising model, and continues to subsist on venture capital funding.

MySpace, the Internet's most popular Web site, wants a search engine, which means that Google, MSN and Yahoo! are battling to land the job. Last year, Google and Microsoft had to fight it out for the search engine vacancy at AOL. This year's battle could be fought a lot harder, following the news from Hitwise that MySpace is the most visited site on the Web, commanding nearly 5 percent of all Web site traffic. News Corp won't say how much money it expects to derive from the deal, but industry experts say it could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and boost MySpace's annual revenue several times over.

Satellite provider DirecTV is looking for partners and funding to create a national WiMax network in the US that would move News.Corp, which owns the majority stake in DirectTV, into the next generation of Internet service. WiMax - short for World Interoperability for Microwave Access - is wireless broadband technology that offers a range of 30 miles versus the current 20 feet offered by most Wi-Fi hotspots. According to The Hollywood Reporter, News.Corp and DirecTV have $2 billion ready to pump into developing the project. "I expect to have wireless broadband in at least two or three cities before the end of the year, and then take two or three years to build it out across the entire country," said News.Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

U.S. adults who download podcasts now outnumber those who publish blogs, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings. In June, more than 9.2 million Web users, or 6.6 percent of U.S. adult Web users, downloaded an audio podcast, compared to 6.7 million users (4.8 percent) who published blogs during the same time, according to the research company.

Search engine Google has taken over from Apple as top dog on Wired magazine's annual Top 40 companies list. Apple was praised for its iPod and iTunes dominance and "bundling the iLife suite of creative tools with new computers", but the judges advised Steve Jobs that Apple wouldn't regain the Number One spot until it adapted "the Mac OS to run Windows apps natively".

A law passed in France last month requires Apple to open its iTunes downloads to non-Apple devices. The company called it "state-sponsored piracy" but French legislators say it should be possible for songs purchased at any online store to be played on any digital music player.

Opera Software has posted the final release of its Opera 9.0 Web browser software, culminating a lengthy beta period. It's free to download and available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other users. The new release offers its own versions of Widgets, BitTorrent support, content blocking, tab preview, and source viewer. Other enhancements include a new search engine editor with a "Create search" option.

Close to finishing its home page redesign, Yahoo! is in prequel celebration mode at the new-launch Yahoo! Video site, where all-comer user-generated content can be uploaded. The site has sponsored video shorts, created by film school students, that describe how times they are a-changing at the Yahoo! interface. The venerable portal operator is also running movie-clip ads online at Atom Entertainment, iFilm, Maxim, MTV, Stupid Videos and Comedy Central.

If the new search engine made possible by a partnership between BT and Yahoo! proves popular, your entry in the BT phone book (already delivered to over 20 million addresses nationwide in its print edition) is going to be much more important than it used to be. Yahoo! has partnered with 'The Phone Book' from BT to provide a local business search service on Yahoo! Local. The deal will provide classified business listings on the Yahoo! Local UK search engine for the 120,000 businesses who advertise in The Phone Book. Yahoo! Local will also allow advertisers using the Yahoo! Search Marketing network to target customers interested in a specific local area with offers and business details. The service will feature two sponsored search results at the top and the bottom of the search results page. Stephen Taylor, regional vice-president and managing director of search and search marketing at Yahoo! Europe, said: "This joint initiative will deliver a number of important benefits for consumers looking for local products and services and businesses who advertise within The Phone Book's Classified Directory and online with Yahoo! Search Marketing. In essence, Yahoo! Local will provide people with a much more powerful way of finding local information quickly". Bruce Abercromby, general manager for online services at BT Directories, said: "We are constantly striving to find new ways to generate new business leads for our customers through emerging technologies and through interactive agreements such as this". Yahoo! Local has also announced plans to harness local community knowledge by including user-generated content and additional content and features from the Yahoo! network and third parties.