Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Scarcely a day seems to go by without a new prediction of doom and gloom for the British housing market. The Council of Mortgage Lenders is predicting a sharp rise in repossessions this year. The International Monetary Fund said that property in Britain could be overvalued by as much as 50 per cent. There's even a Web site where you can see the prices falling. Property Snake describes itself as the "opposite of the property ladder" and carries details of more than 80,000 properties that have had their prices reduced, in some cases by over 40 per cent. Potential buyers can search by postcode, county, or region as well as by price and property type. Estate agents can add their contact details for any of the houses listed if they are handling the sale.

The winners of the Yahoo! Finds of the Year 2007 competition have been announced - revealing some of the "most interesting and innovative" Web sites made in Britain during the past 12 months. There are worthy ones - like the site that would have you "sign up to get nagged each month about one easy thing you can do to be greener, cleaner and, if you're not careful, a tiny bit smug" - and then there are raise-a-smile ones - like the site that reveals faces in pictures of buildings, wheelie bins, street furniture and quite a lot of food.

The Daily Telegraph has teamed up with leading entrepreneurs to help start-up businesses. Venture Navigator is an online 'driving test' that's free to try and over the next few weeks Doug Richard, the technology entrepreneur and former Dragons' Den panellist, Sir James Dyson, founder of eponymous home appliances group, and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson will be among entrepreneurs who will monitor the test and share their experiences of setting up and running a successful business.

Over the last nine years, the nation's nine Regional Development Agencies - RDAs - have been given £13billion to spend. Although local businesses say it's made little difference on the ground, RDAs are in favour in Whitehall and the Chancellor has just given them new powers to develop regional housing, infrastructure and environmental strategies. From next year they will also be put in charge of workplace training - currently the preserve of Europe's largest quango, the Learning and Skills Council. The Telegraph's Business Blogger, Richard Tyler, says there's no way of knowing if more money and more power for RDAs is a good or bad idea - it's anybody's guess.

Taxpayers spend billions each year on schemes designed to support small businesses and stimulate growth in failing local economies, but it doesn't work, reports Richard Tyler. Academics at the Centre for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises at Warwick University have been tracking the effect of government spending in Teesside for thirty years and say it has not led to an increase in new business creation. David Storey, director of the centre, says: "Policy makers thought that if they could stimulate entrepreneurship it would lead to and cause an improvement in economic welfare. But perhaps it works in reverse".

Brand Republic is reporting that Guardian Unlimited, the most visited UK newspaper online, is set to jump on the social networking bandwagon after striking a deal with Pluck, a provider of social networking platforms. The deal will see Guardian News and Media, which publishes The Guardian and The Observer, roll out tools on its Web properties, enabling users to interact with one another and add content to existing articles.

When I was a lad, we didn't have Digg. We didn't have Reddit. We had to walk eight miles in the snow to Yahoo! Picks. Launched in 1995, Yahoo! Picks highlighted the best of the Web in a weekly, and later a daily, update service throughout the decade before there was Furl and Del.icio.us - and when "social networks" consisted of people you saw at the weekend. Last month, after 12 years on the Net, http://picks.yahoo.com broke the news that it was closing down.

Netscape Navigator, the first commercial Web browser, will be pulled off life support today after a 13-year run. AOL has decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on developing the company's advertising business. Netscape use dwindled when Microsoft entered the browser business in the 1990s and all but faded away after the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox. AOL says that people will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser "indefinitely", but the company will stop releasing security and other updates from today. Netscape Director Tom Drapeau recommended that Netscape users try Firefox or the 'son of Netscape' browser, SeaMonkey, from Mozilla.org instead.

SpaceTime 1.0 is a new browser that allows users to navigate the Web in a 3D environment and literally grab, zoom and flip-through multiple Web site and search engine pages. Imagine playing around with a deck of cards in zero-gravity and you'll get the picture. "Using a three dimensional space is a more natural and faster way to search", said Eddie Bakhash, CEO of New York-based SpaceTime. "It allows people to shuffle through pages like they would through a book". Watch the video demo on the site or try the free download.

Twingly is a new-launch Eurocentric blog search engine with features that may help separate it from the general pack of blog hunters. Established to deliver high quality, non-spam blog content, the Swedish-based searcher started out by indexing a set of known, legitimate blogs and following trusted links. As a start-up, it raised 1 million Euros in financing last summer and took on content-sharing partnerships with European news publishers. Currently, the Web site offers an impressive screen saver download that displays the 'blogosphere' - global blog activity in real time with a 24/7 stream of worldwide blogging as it happens - rendered as a 3D visualisation.

If most of the e-mail flying around the world is spam (some say it's 90 per cent of the traffic) but nobody actually buys any of the enhancement pills, fake Rolexes and easy money schemes on offer in these pathetic little messages, why do the spammers keep on sending out the stuff? Is anybody making any money out of spam? E-Week's Larry Seltzer thinks he has the answers.

It's bad enough that visiting a rogue Web site can cause malicious software to be silently installed onto your computer, but now it appears they can start sending print jobs to your network connected printers and fax machines too. Here's the scoop on how the ploy works and what you can do to prevent it from happening on your network.

Australia's telecommunications minister has announced that the country will be requiring ISPs to provide filtering tools for blocking pornography and other "inappropriate" material. According to Australian news reports, anyone that wants uncensored Internet access will have to opt out of the scheme to get it. Legislators say they will be working with ISPs to ensure that mandatory filtering does not affect Internet speeds.

Web video is becoming the most popular thing online and it takes up a lot of space. 100 million video streams a day on YouTube consume as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in the year 2000. Capacity is filling up. As reported in December's Zen Monthly - ('Internet Running Out Of Road') - the infrastructure's ability to cope with burgeoning demand is degrading fast and there are tough decisions ahead about who is going to fund its expansion. Rationing and 'pay as you go' might be the only way to avoid meltdown in the meantime.

The Economist peers into its crystal ball and sees a significant slowdown for the Web in 2008. Not necessarily an economic slowdown - although the magazine does forecast that for the greater economy - but a slowdown in the actual speed of the Internet. The biggest problem, according to the report, is spam and Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing services, which are demanding more bandwidth by the day. Add to the mix the inevitability of television on the Internet reaching critical mass, and Internet access on cell phones and other mobile devices becoming commonplace, and it's not long before gridlock looms on the horizon. "That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders", says the report. ISPs are working on much-needed backbone upgrades, but it could take years for improvements to show in some cases.

If you missed the best of the bargains in the January sales, try HotUKDeals, a shopping community site where cut-price deal hunters share their latest finds throughout the year. Made up of "honest tips from people who don't stand to gain", HotUKDeals is an online shopping democracy - by the shopper, of the shopper, for the shopper - with free registration open to all.

Every year, some of the most eye-opening stories hardly get a media look-in. This review, courtesy of ForeignPolicy.Com, lists ten stories from 2007 on controversial topics that didn't quite get the news coverage they might have deserved.

In 2007, says PC World, the words "Internet security" joined the list of self-cancelling phrases, alongside "business intelligence", "political ethics" and "Microsoft Works." Downhearted columnist Dan Tynan begins 2008 by rolling out his survey of "The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007" - the much-ballyhooed products, sites, and services, that ultimately failed to please in the year that was.

Google, the most popular search platform, announced its "2007 End of Year Zeitgeist" in December - including the most popular terms that people searched for. Top ten were (1) iphone; (2) badoo; (3) facebook; (4) dailymotion; (5) webkinz; (6) youtube; (7) ebuddy; (8) second life; (9) hi5; (10) club penguin. Yahoo! adopted "Categories" as its basis for reporting popular searches, listing the "Top Ten Tech Terms" as: (1) YouTube; (2) Wikipedia; (3) Facebook; (4) iTunes; (5) iPod; (6) iPhone; (7) Nintendo Wii; (8) Xbox; (9) Sony PlayStation 3; and 10) Guitar Hero.

The open-source search engine trailed in last month's newsletter, Wikia Search, backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and $10 million from Amazon, has launched to mixed reviews. Business Week called it "little more than an ordinary algorithm-driven search engine mixed with a few Facebook-type frills such as user profiles that can be used to find others with common interests". According to Wales, allowing users to add information about themselves and their friends to search results is the engine's "primary innovation". In truth, success or failure for the supposed 'Google killer' will rest more on the quality and quantity of mainstay additions to the engine's Lucerne open-source-software-built index, expanded with search results supplied by volunteers using "Grub" - Web crawling desktop client software that users are invited to download from Search Wikia as part of a SETI@home-style project. Grub was bought-in from Wikia's advertising partner, LookSmart, who shelved the distributive crawler in 2005 after a two-year run.