Zen Monthly Newsletter

Zen Internet collected a handsome brace of trophies at last month's Internet Service Provider's Association (ISPA) awards: one for the UK's best business e-mail service and another for best dial-up. Judges added a commendation for the dedicated support service that Zen provides to Apple Mac Users. There were also awards for the Heroes and Villains of the Internet in 2007. Vodafone's Annie Mullins took the Hero award, "for her work with the European Union's Safer Internet Programme and the Home Office Task Force on Protection of Children on the Internet." The Villain award went to the EU and its Commissioner Vivianne Reading, who beat the US government and the British Phonographic Industry to the booby prize "for foisting the most arcane set of rules yet seen for prior registration of .eu domains".

Born in the 1960s as part of Harold Wilson's 'White Heat of Technology' revolution, the Open University was founded on the belief that communications technology could bring the high quality of degree-level learning to anyone missing the opportunity to attend campus universities. By 1980, the 'University of the Air' had enrolled 70,000 students, and was producing 6,000 graduates annually. This year, the OU has a new LearningSpace Web site with dozens of courses freely available online, categorised into disciplines such as education, modern languages, and history. Visitors don’t have to register to use any of the study material available.

The British Library ("13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, 3 million sound recordings and so much more") launched its re-designed Web site last month, with a new front-page search engine to retrieve answers from its 10,000 Web pages, 90,000 pictures and sound files, and 9 million articles in 20,000 journals.

Avid readers can put their own used books to good use by swapping them with others in exchange for books they want to read. Book Mooch is a free, online community of readers from around the world that uses a simple points system to help people trade tomes, and find worthy homes for their old books. The Web site has plenty of features, including an option to use accumulated points to help charities, as well as a tool to create a personal "wish list" of books.

Bookalizer is an online script generator that will allow you to display customised Amazon book ads on your Web site according to page content, or your own criteria. You can specify the key words by which books are selected, or provide a set of Amazon product IDs. The service is organised by a German company, but most details are available in English.

When customers need to see design layouts before copy is written, print and Web designers use dummy text to fill the gaps. More often than not, the words poured into empty design holes are borrowed from a treatise in Latin on the theory of ethics, written by Cicero over 2,000 years ago. Beginning "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet", the extract provides a normal distribution of letters and words that mimics typical copy so successfully that printers and typesetters have been using it since the sixteenth century. At the Lorem Ipsum Web site, you can generate as much dummy text as you need in seconds, simply by requesting a number of words, paragraphs, bytes, or bullet point lists.

The most used brand name search terms in the UK last year were "ebay", "bebo" and "argos". The top generic (non-branded) term was "games", ranking at 28, followed by "weather" at 31. MySpace highlighted the biggest difference between US and UK searches. MySpace appeared in five of the top ten search terms across all categories in the US, but 13 was the highest spot for a MySpace term in the UK. British users looking for social networking sites preferred Bebo, which was the second most popular search term in the UK in 2006.

Football is a huge driver of traffic to YouTube, which has millions of sporting clips available. The Premier League has been in talks with YouTube about removing its content from the site, and media giant Viacom recently forced the removal of 100,000 clips. Now, Chelsea FC have contracted to have video footage and club news appear on YouTube, the first such deal to be done by a Premiership football club. The BBC is considering a similar deal that would see programme clips and content appearing in a branded area of the Web site.

From TV News to Time Magazine, traditional media is singing the praises of user-generated ‘people’s content’ published on the Web. But is it reliable? Spike's Theresa Clifford doesn't think so, and reminds us that tests of Wikipedia's accuracy - famously resulting in still repeated claims that it rivalled the expensive expertise offered by Encyclopaedia Britannica - were really just one more example of collective intelligence getting things wrong. In January, comScore elevated Wikipedia to a top ten ranking for the first time, with 43 million unique visitors per month, just below the Amazon group of Web sites, visited by 51 million browsers.

Hotspot-Locations.com is dedicated to Wireless Networking and offers a searchable global Hotspot Database of Wireless Access Points for anyone who travels with a wireless-enabled laptop or other device. The resource includes commercial networks as well as non commercial community networks and private Hotspots.

Do you have 'issues' 'going forward' 'at the end of the day' 'seeing the big picture' when faced with e-mail messages and Word documents filled with business-speak, balderdash, babble and blather that says one thing but often means another, or means not much of anything at all? Discourage and begin to re-educate the authors of puzzling prose with an anonymous e-mail from Bullfighter. Copy and paste their message, or any document text, in the Mystery Matador online bull checker. Type their e-mail address, click the 'Preview' button, and Bullfighter will measure the jargon and verbosity and send them their score. The service is free, simple and anonymous - and, says Bullfighter, it could spare the rest of us from receiving any more of their nonsense.

Here's a Web site that caters to travellers looking for alternatives to big-footprint flying. It provides details about travelling by train and ship, with an emphasis on destinations in the UK and Europe, but covering the world. It includes sections on the Trans-Siberian railway and the Orient Express. Seat61 is a personal site run by a London "career railwayman" and ex-station manager who always chooses seat 61 - an individual window seat on Eurostar - as he leaves for Marrakech (via Paris, Madrid and Algeciras), Tunisia (via Lille and Marseille), Italy, Albania, Malta, Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Petra, Ukraine and the Crimea, and even Tokyo and Nagasaki via Moscow, Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railway.

This Web page from the guardian (a newspaper that likes to use lower-case when it shouldn't) was about the size of one A4 sheet of paper when it was published and remained the size of one A4 sheet of paper for about five minutes. Then the invited comments began to roll in. Now the page is yards long. The cause of the elongation? Columnist Charlie Brooker's A4 piece was having a go at Macs - and Mac users - and he reaped the whirlwind.

After weeks in the apres-Christmas doldrums, PC retailers saw a boost in sales following the launch of Windows Vista, which is said to need 2GB of RAM - more than double the memory installed in most machines sold last year. In the USA, takings soared 173 per cent during the week ending February 3, compared with PC sales in the previous week and they were 67 per cent up compared with the same period a year ago.

Bill Gates coasted through a lightweight BBC News television interview without explaining the UK pricing of Vista, which is twice as expensive in Europe compared to the US. 'Windows Secrets' columnist Brian Livingston has his own answer: a legal money saver that allows British users to clean-install Vista's low-price upgrade version on any PC, with no prior XP or W2K installation required. "The evidence is mounting that this upgrade policy is an official decision by Microsoft. It's clearly not any kind of hacker trick. The steps to install without a product key, and to upgrade regardless of what version of Windows is running, is hard-coded into Vista in such a way that it can't be a mistake", says Livingston.

Could you type your way out of trouble if your keyboard died? Windows XP offers a rescue utility, The On Screen Keyboard, originally designed for users with disabilities. You can launch the On Screen Keyboard by clicking on the Start button, then on Run and typing OSK and hitting Enter. You need a working keyboard to do that, but if you create a desktop shortcut first, your mouse will be all you need to get you out of trouble. Right-click on any part of the Desktop, then on New, then on Shortcut. Type OSK and click the Next button twice. It can be a handy tool for teachers too.

No s_x please, we're Google users. According to data from Google Trends - gleefully pounced on by Yahoo! - the word "Yahoo" overtook "s_x" as the number one search term on Google last year. However, mail filters being what they are, (clumsy beasts), it's still practically impossible to mention the Internet's traditionally most popular word in any e-mail text without disguising it in some way.

Google is making Gmail available for almost anyone. When the service originally launched on April 1, 2004, it was 'by invitation only'. You could not get an account unless someone you knew was already signed up and invited you into the club. At one point, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for over £100. Now you don't need the nod from anyone to get your own Gmail account. If you want to, you can apply here:

Google Maps Australia has turned a 20-second walk to its own offices into an 18 minute drive. The Sydney Morning Herald reports how the just-launched Google Australia Maps service was outed after someone discovered it turned an environmentally-sound short stroll into a round-about car journey with a distinctly un-green footprint. A search for directions from a city centre hotel at 200 Sussex Street, to Google's Sydney office at 201 Sussex Street, which can be reached by crossing the road, takes users on a route that goes over a toll bridge and back, an 18 minutes car drive.

It's hard to get answers from Google. Aaron Stanton tried harder than most. Aaron wanted to meet someone at Google about a business proposal, but his attempts to contact Google via Web site form-filling, e-mail and phone did not work. So he decided to fly to Google, sit outside Google for several days, until someone at Google would agree to meet him. He reportedly got the meeting. His Web site has the details of his journey to Mountain View, California - and the videos to prove it.

Reports that a consortium of mobile phone operators is considering co-operative development of a mobile-only search engine are raising questions about another threat to the concept of Net neutrality. The worry is that the carriers would make their new search engine more easily accessible from the handsets they provide than services from established players such as Google. They could even throttle the performance of external search engines relative to their own. Carriers are certainly concerned about revenues falling as calls become cheaper and may be seizing an opportunity to reach for what they see as their share of search-related advertising revenues.

Jyve is a San Francisco company making plug-ins for the Skype peer-to-peer Internet telephony network. 10 days ago, it launched a new "ask engine" search site that links users directly with people offering to answer their questions. It offers live chat, an instant message, or a phone call from someone claiming expertise in the topic concerned. Users can get how-to advice and tips on virtually any topic, says Jyve. When a user types in a question, notices are sent to the desktops of logged-in members who have registered as experts in the questioner's field of enquiry. Members then can chat live on the site or have one-on-one phone conversations about their query.