Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly January 2008 Podcast

Last month, the annual PC Pro Awards were held in London's Science Museum, where the winners of the IT industry's most prestigious gongs took a bow. In a three-month survey, 20,000 people gave their feedback on the products and services they purchased, giving an unrivalled insight into the products and customer service offered by the industry's leading names. For the fourth year in a row Zen Internet won the PC Pro Broadband ISP award. "Near-flawless customer service and reliability keep Zen at the top", said PC Pro.

In the run-up to December 25th, Microsoft encouraged children to connect directly to Father Christmas by adding northpolelive.com to their Windows Live Messenger contact lists. MSN's "Santa Program" asked what they wanted for Christmas and responded using artificial intelligence. All went well until a reader of the tabloid-style technology news site, The Register, reported that a chat between Santa and his young nieces about eating pizza led to some X-rated responses from the Christmas character. Microsoft were forced to close the chat facility after engineers failed to clean up the vocabulary being used. A company spokesman claimed later that the girls, aged 11 and 13, had provoked Father Christmas into using bad language.

Microsoft is giving up its attempts to cripple pirate copies of Vista after thousands of legitimate Windows owners were wrongly accused of running pirated software, leading to their systems being stripped of important features. The operating system currently enters "reduced functionality mode" if Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation determines that a copy is counterfeit, but Microsoft says this will end with the release of Vista Service Pack 1. In future, users will simply be given "clear and recurring notices about the status of their system". Microsoft corporate vice president, Mike Sievert, confirmed that "users won't lose access to functionality or features, but it will be very clear to them that their copy of Window Vista is not genuine".

Walt Disney has unveiled a new UK Web portal aimed at young adults that showcases the media giant's movie, music, social networking and game offerings. Similar rollouts are planned in France, Italy, Spain and Germany. The heart of the new site is a feature called Disney Extreme Digital, which allows youngsters to mash-up and share Disney multimedia content with their friends. They can also distribute film and TV clips, games and messages. The UK Web site will carry advertising and sponsorship links; other revenue will come from premium subscriptions and a shopping section. The site will not initially provide full-length movies, though Cindy Rose, who heads Disney's Internet arm in Europe, said that feature would be coming later.

Coca-Cola has had a few false starts in 'social media', not long ago ending "The Coke Show", a video-centric platform that was intended to engage consumers and support user-generated content. Most recently, the company opted out of Facebook's Beacon program amid controversy over tracking user behaviour without permission. Now the company's MyCoke site will direct users to a new social media experience called CCMetro inside the virtual world of There.com, a less popular destination than the better-known SecondLife. It takes over from Coke Studios, an avatar-based 3-D experience that is being reinvented inside There.com.

Adobe Systems is joining the advertising revenue game, after agreeing with Yahoo! to serve ads for publishers who want to generate revenue from PDFs - Adobe's Portable Document Format. The service will be similar to existing PPC - Pay Per Click - online advertising models in which Web site owners display ads from Google and others in return for a cut of the per-click charges paid by advertisers. To sign up, PDF publishers must send their files to Adobe for analysis and formatting. After that, every time an ad-enabled PDF is opened, Adobe sends keywords from the document to Yahoo!, which automatically returns ads from its fleet of ad partners. The ads are served up in a side panel of the PDF, much like ads are rendered on a Web site. Publishers already committed to participating in the "Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! beta program" for US-based advertisers, include IDG InfoWorld, Wired and Reed Elsevier.

Stolen bank and credit card details are given away on Web sites for anyone to download, according to an investigation by The Times. The newspaper claims that it was able to download information belonging to 32 people - including a High Court judge. The files, which included enough information to make purchases on the stolen accounts, were offered as a free taster on illegal hacking sites. Details included account and PIN numbers, and the three-digit security code from the back of cards, designed to prevent people from running up transactions without having the card in their possession. The investigation comes after the government dismissed a Lords' report into personal Internet security that compared it to the "Wild West".

In a Web 2.0 variation of MTV's Unplugged, MySpace is inviting musicians across the globe to return to the studio and re-record videos of their songs for distribution on MySpace. The News Corp site will sell the performances through a Web page devoted to the recording session, allowing musicians to set their own prices, and keep most of the revenue for themselves. MySpace Music is the third most popular online destination for music, attracting 18 million unique users per month, after ArtistDirect (19 million) and Yahoo Music (22.5 million).

It may wear the video-sharing crown in the US and Europe, but YouTube doesn't get a look-in in China, the world’s second largest and fastest-growing Internet market. The Google-owned company has no local presence and two home-grown leaders - Tudou.com and 56.com - are fighting for top spot. Tudou commands 22 per cent of searches for video on China’s most popular search engine Baidu, compared to 56.com, which gets 19 per cent. Tudou got ahead early because it was first to let people easily upload video they’d taken from TV or ripped from other places, but 56.com is catching up with 60,000 new videos uploaded per day and new financial backing from Adobe and Sequoia, one of YouTube's early investors.

Chinese video-sharing sites like Tudou, Youku, Ouou and 56.com have a growing following in the UK because they offer a host of free English-language content, including recent films and American TV shows. Until October last year, a UK-based site - tv-links.co.uk - was working as a linkfinder for the plethora of streaming movies, TV shows, anime, cartoons, and documentaries on the Internet, saving users the trouble of searching individual sites (mostly in China) and providing a comprehensive directory with easy access to hundreds of TV series and over 2,000 movies. In October, the Cheltenham-based site was closed after a police raid when its owner was arrested. The anti-piracy group Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) said the action was justified because the site violated Section 92 of the Trade Marks Act. But no charges followed the arrest and lawyers commented "On the facts that we know so far, it is difficult to see how the providing of links to infringing copies of TV shows gives rise to any civil or criminal liability under UK law".

The Web is bursting with original and legal video content including talk shows, comedies, dramas, and animated fare. All you need is a broadband connection, says PC Magazine's Molly McLaughlin, who offers "10 Web Shows To Watch During the Writers Strike". The Writers Guild of America asked its 12,000 members to stop working in early November and the strike lasted through December, leaving US networks without a store of new material - and nervous TV junkies facing a diet of repeats over Christmas and beyond.

One observer called Twitter "the Seinfeld of the Internet - a Web site about nothing", but The United Arab Emirates has apparently banned the social networking site because its content is "not consistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values" of the country. Although the oil industry has attracted foreign workers to the region and they, together with expatriates, make up more than three quarters of the population, the UAE has banned a number of popular international Web services at various times, such as Flickr, Myspace, Skype and YouTube. Sporadic access to US and European Web sites appears to be the norm in the country. Reports of a ban on Facebook also surfaced earlier this year. People have developed ways of working around the restrictions. If you want to access Flickr, for example, you can use the Firefox plugin from Iranian photographer Hamed Saber. He says it will let you circumvent the Internet filters of any country where the site is banned.

Do you think that user-generated content is better suited to connect with certain groups than traditional advertising? Should Britain's all-pervasive medium of advertising be dictated by advertising executives or by members of the group that the advertising is trying to target? Perhaps a social networking environment for creative types could shift the advertising world in a new direction by blurring the line between professional and amateur? BrandRepublic has a new Web site with a showcase that might provide some of the answers by inviting amateurs to produce "authentic content" for companies that it calls its "bold sponsors".

Just when you thought the world couldn’t handle any more social networking sites, along comes another, from a company called Red Room. This one is designed for authors looking to promote their work and has already managed to raise $1.25 million and attract the likes of Maya Angelou and Salman Rushdie. While Facebook, MySpace and others get most of the press, niche social networks are gaining ground. In May, Buzznet, which connects indie music fans with their favourite bands, raised $6 million and says it has more than eight million users. Last June, Daily Strength, a social network for people with health problems, took in $7 million from investors. Red Room is part of the same trend, and the San Francisco-based company has raised $1.25 million so far from investors that include Craigslist's Craig Newmark.

What is social media saying about you today?

Current TV coined the term "Viewer created content" - VCC - for their "Pods" which are essentially home made documentaries. Anyone with a state of the art mobile phone is now empowered to make short videos and upload them to services like www.current.tv. Current has over 50 million TV viewers in the US and UK where it's seen on Sky (channel 193) and Virgin Media Cable (channel 155).

Under a new scheme managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia will shell out modest fees to volunteer contributors for creating illustrations for the encyclopedia site. The money for the project has been provided by donor Phillip Greenspun who noticed that many key articles do not have high quality illustrations and contributed $20,000 "to improve standards".

A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia, alleging that the world's most famous UGC (User Generated Content) site promotes Nazism. Katina Schubert, deputy leader of Germany's Die Linke, told reporters that she had filed the charges on the grounds that Wikipedia displayed too much Nazi symbolism and had a particular fetish for the Hitler Youth movement.

As the much-trailed 'rival to Google' search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales nears completion, Google has announced a counter-strike aimed at removing the online encyclopedia from its top spot on the Web with a user-generated reference work of its own, to be known as "Knol". Meanwhile, back at Wikipedia, where there is an ongoing battle against users who deliberately post false and misleading information, Jimmy Wales found 'greatly exaggerated' reports of his death had been added to his own entry in the encyclopedia.

According to TechCrunch, classifieds site Edgeio is shutting down after running out of money. Although fundamentally local to cities in the US, the site targeted a global audience and covers 166 countries, including the UK. Edgeio competitor Oodle, meanwhile - which has a UK site at www.oodle.co.uk - recently redesigned and appears to be doing well. Online classifieds continue to gain traffic, led by gumtree.com in this country, where the latest free-ads start up is www.classifieds.co.uk.

Kosmix, the Silicon Valley search engine company that focuses on specific topics, came close to buying Google in 1999, but decided the asking price was too high. Until recently, only limited success followed the missed opportunity, but now the Kosmix health consumer site, www.righthealth.com, is drawing more than 3.9 million unique visitors a month, according to Hitwise. Kosmix has also released a consumer auto site, www.rightautos.com, which attracts more than two million unique visitors a month and it plans more topical search sites, including RightTrips.com, which is next.

Online communication for business means e-mail, teenagers favour MySpace, but hackers and others seeking anonymity rely on IRC - Internet Relay Chat - which allows them to protect their identities and cover their tracks. A new search engine startup called IRSeek is about to change all that, by indexing information that flows through the channel and making it searchable. Pre-launch, IRSeek is monitoring more than 6 million IRC conversations per day, "listening" to more than 2,000 channels across 10 networks.