Zen Monthly Newsletter

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Plaques in the boardroom trophy cabinet are all well and good, but winning awards that have government backing can pay big cash dividends too. Sunderland City Council won the Digital Challenge Competition and pocketed £3.5million. The pathway to big money prizes, says Spiked columnist Martyn Perks, is to design schemes that make use of IT to promote political ends, which currently focus on healthy eating, tackling truancy and improving "social inclusion".

Projects highlighting the positive potential of ICT were rewarded at the National eWell-Being Awards, announced last month. Five years ago when the awards started, notions such as sustainability, environmental concern and digital inclusion were hardly mentioned in the same room as 'information technology'. Now, they are at the heart of many IT business strategies and government policies. The National eWell-Being Awards aim to showcase projects that use ICT to bring tangible, practical benefits in those areas to all sections of society, in particular the most needy. This year’s award classifications included: Building Social Networks, Climate Change and Environmental Efficiency, Digital Inclusion and Environmental Product Innovation.

British Waterways is responsible for maintaining the 2,200 miles of Britain's inland waterway network, which is not only a major leisure resource but also the setting for thousands of businesses that overlook its canals and pools. After years of neglect, the agency has plans to improve and develop relations with its business neighbours in the nine regions that it manages. BW will be approaching companies to discuss co-operative ventures that could improve the landscape and upgrade facilities for waterway users and tourists, and there will be funds available for "strategic joint ventures".

There is a new parallel universe on the Web in which your domain name is up for sale and your home town can be taken over by a medieval-style land baron who will collect taxes on every business transaction that goes on there. It may seem to be nothing more than a game, or another piece of virtual world nonsense, but links in the mirror world can go to real-world Web sites and real profits are being made - and paid in real money, collected in real bank accounts. There has been a rush of speculative domain name buying, with many names already up for auction or re-sale at incredibly high prices, and a few businesses with particularly well-guarded interests and markets to protect have taken to pre-emptive purchasing by way of insurance.

Dave Winer, creator of break-through protocols like RSS, is taking a serious look at Twitter, the new "global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?". Winer thinks the instant mini-blog service could be the basis for a whole new channel of communication. Get a taste by taking a look at the Twitter viewer example linked below, which displays messages on a global background to give you a smattering of what people are 'twittering' about around the world. Just one of several viewers created since Twitter first created a stir at recent conferences, it uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth to zoom about the planet, picking up the latest posts.

British online ad budgets grew by 40 per cent last year, overtaking national newspaper ads (11 per cent of the market) for the first time and getting close to half the amount spent on TV ads. The latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau show that advertisers are spending just over £2 billion per year online in the UK. In the USA, online ad spending is half what it is here, at least in percentage terms. Only 5 per cent of America's total advertising expenditure reaches the online community. Whether European shoppers are the chickens and advertising is the egg - or vice versa - is unclear, but our consumers spend more online per capita than Americans do.

The world's television broadcasters must be wondering how the inevitable coming of IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) will play out, particularly after market research firm Infonetics Research's latest report shows IPTV equipment sales, service revenue, subscribers, and some service providers, all posted phenomenal growth in 2006 and are expected to continue surging ahead next year. The report shows that worldwide IPTV equipment manufacturer revenue jumped 150 per cent in 2006, easily passing the $1 billion mark. All categories but one tracked by Infonetics are forecast to at least double or triple between 2006 and 2010.

BT has dismissed suggestions that it might indulge in 'traffic shaping' to favour its own services as next-generation networks coverage - already available in a few areas - is rolled out to reach most of the UK by the end of 2009. Next-generation networks, or NGNs, are carrier networks that run IP end-to-end, using a much simpler infrastructure that makes them more efficient and enables a wider variety of new voice, data and video applications. Traffic shaping is a means of prioritising some types of data over others and can be used by operators to favour their own services over those of rivals. A Canadian telco, Rogers, was discovered mis-using traffic shaping recently, degrading the experience for anyone using a VPN over its service.

Shortly after the launch of an anti-Google advertising campaign in the UK by competing search engine company Ask, people noticed that searching for "Google" on Ask.com returned the comment: "Don’t be a droid - use different sources of information" next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to an anti-Google Web site. Ask says the link was put up by over-zealous staff and was quickly removed.

For those who hate the jump start of an alarm clock or the shock and awe of bedside breakfast radio, there is now a much classier wake-up option. Voco has developed a more genteel ticker that sounds off with the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry, using his best butlering banter to get you out from between the sheets. Fry, who once said his vocal cords were "made of tweed," recorded fifty tender, deferential, deeply respectful wake-up messages to coax "sir" from his depths and off to the office. The popularity of the £26 clock has ensured that an equivalent version will soon be created "for madam".

Being blocked by clumsy s p a m filters when the message you want to send is legitimate and harmless is very frustrating. Some e-mails have to pass three or four checks before being delivered to your final recipient, any one of which might be using a 'large hammer to small walnut' approach. Finding the cause of a blockage can be close to impossible. The people at Polite Mail have a free service to help you. Pre-check, or send the same message that is getting blocked, to spamscore@politemail.com, and you will receive a response tallying your transgressions. Keep editing and retrying your message until your score is classified as "Low Risk".

Librivox.Org is an ambitious project that aims to convert every single book in the United States public domain into free, downloadable audio files. This non-profit, open source Web site takes podcasting to a new level, with its ambition of "acoustical liberation". The virtual library is filled with thousands of audio books that have been diligently recorded by volunteer readers. Download an audio book of interest, browse the latest news on the project, or volunteer your free time and become an official Librivox reader.

Maybe because it calls itself "The YouTube for documents" and gained some instant notoriety as a source of copyright material, it didn't take long for recent upstart Scribd to build a substantial audience, win a $10 million valuation, and attract attention from Silicon Valley's circle of venture capitalists. Within three weeks of its launch two months ago, Scribd was counting 100,000 unique visitors a day and had 15,000 uploaded documents on offer. The Web site makes it easy to upload docs - it's pretty much instant and even easier than posting videos on YouTube - and whatever files you provide (PDF, Powerpoint, .lit, .ps, .txt, Word, etc), Scribd converts them to HTML, or a Flash player format that it says can be easily read by anyone.

Most Internet users know that cookies are browser files created by the Web sites you visit. Some cookies can be useful, storing login information, recording completed activities so that you don't have to repeat them, and so on. These can be worth saving. Other cookies only benefit nosey Web advertisers and can be deleted at will. But how do you tell which are which? Because cookies are plain text files, they can be read very easily. Even so, the data stored may not be easy to decipher. A tool like Karen Kenworthy's Cookie Viewer can help. Cookie Viewer works with Internet Explorer and Firefox and makes the ingredients easier to digest. You can see when the cookie was created, who cooked it, when it expires, and more. The utility also helps you delete any that you don't want. And it's free.

Net measurement firm comScore says that cookies used to track online behaviour are mis-reporting Web site visits and inflating audience figures by 100 per cent or more. People who routinely delete cookies are counted as first-time visitors every time they go back to a Web site and skew the graph showing its supposed popularity growth.

The latest tools for tracking Web site visitors aim to measure usability, rather than simply counting clicks or recording page visits. The next generation of site trackers offer insights into how people use a site with 'heat maps' - that show which areas of a page have collected the most clicks - and live tracking so that you can watch what visitors get up to as it happens. Some traditional site tracking tools do offer information such as Visitor Paths and Visit Length as well as popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, and referring URLs, but none of this tells you what users actually do on the pages they look at. There can be a big difference between where you expect your users to click and where they are actually clicking. One of the newer tools, CrazyEgg, provides a chunk of JavaScript to drop into each page that allows you to see what's really going on. After installation, it runs automatically and you can even watch user activity while it is running - as well as checking later. Historically, the service presents results using three different methods: Overlay, List and Heatmap. In the overlay view, user clicks are clustered and combined into markers, coloured according to click totals. Each marker can be expanded to see the number of clicks in that position and where the users came from. CrazyEgg can show 'live action' as well as snapshots of user clicks, but new startup, ClickTale, goes further, by recording movies of how users interact with a site. CrazyEgg has a free trial that covers 5,000 visitors per month. ClickTale is still in beta testing.

Giving up on "Froogle" after five years, because "nobody understood" that it was the name of a shopping engine, and calling it "Product Search" instead, Google is re-launching the goods for sale service by incorporating its results into ordinary search listings - and giving them priority. Items for sale will appear above standard results. But they will not come from an impartial trawl of the Web. Although usually perceived to be without bias, and despite a reputation partly built on its supposed impartiality, Google will not be highlighting products for sale unless they come from Googlebase, another of its largely misunderstood branding efforts. To make matters worse - certainly for any retailer who hasn't accepted the Froogle/Googlebase way of doing things - Google will also favour merchants who've signed up for its latest enterprise, Google Checkout, effectively penalising businesses using other payment systems.

Google has introduced its online payment service - Google Checkout - for UK shoppers. The system, a rival to eBay's PayPal service, offers free processing to online retailers who advertise their wares using Google's AdWords. For every £1 retailers spend on Adwords, they can process £10 in sales through Google Checkout at no charge. Google is running the free processing offer until the end of the year, after which merchants will be charged 1.5% per transaction amount, plus 15p on each purchase. Shoppers will see participating stores displaying a Google Checkout icon on their AdWords advertisements as well as on their Web pages. The UK branch of US shopping software provider Channel Advisor was first to sign up for the service in this country. Google Checkout has been available in the US since last June.

Google was snubbed by another big American media firm recently when CBS agreed to deliver TV content ("CSI," "Survivor", news and sport, including championship boxing, and David Letterman's "Late Show") to online video sites for free viewing - but not Google's YouTube. The list of favoured distribution partners includes just about everybody else in online video: AOL, MSN, CNET and Comcast, plus startups like Brightcove, Veoh, Sling Media, Joost, Netvibes and Bebo. The deal also covers existing CBS partners, like Yahoo! Video, Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com's Unbox. It all comes as the latest in a series of hits against Google. First, Viacom ordered content off YouTube and sued for $1 billion in copyright damages. Then News Corp and NBC Universal joined forces with six major Web distributors to syndicate their video content, again excluding YouTube. Most recently, Viacom picked Yahoo! over Google as its search engine of choice. But no matter: Google chief Eric Schmidt says the company isn't first and foremost a search engine or a media company anyway. Consumers should "think of it first as an advertising system", he says.

Google's proposed $3.1 billion purchase of Web advertising network DoubleClick may be a bargain, compared to the YouTube buy, and it would give the search engine a near monopoly in online ad serving. Google is already the leader in text-based search and contextual advertising with AdWords and AdSense. The addition of DoubleClick would give it dominant control of the market for graphical advertising as well and, combined with AdSense, include some 80 per cent of all ads delivered to Web site publishers. "To the extent that they will be the broker of advertising for anything moving on the Internet, we would be forced to deal with Google on Google's terms," said Jim Cicconi, head of external and legislative affairs for Telecom giant AT&T. Microsoft is not well pleased either, and has joined others levelling a charge of anti-competitive behaviour against its arch-rival.

Yahoo! Australia is testing a new search engine named "Alpha", which brings together results from different search engines and compartmentalises them in widget-like sidebar boxes. In addition to Yahoo! Search results, there are widgets containing results from Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo! News, Wikipedia, and Yahoo Search Marketing. More remarkably, users can also add their own sources, as long as they know the base URL for search results.