Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

There are literally thousands of Web developers willing to create a Web site for you, but worries about being mislead or mis-sold causes anxiety for many companies when choosing a supplier. Effective Web site design requires experience and understanding of some diverse areas. It is vital to find a provider that understands your aims and knows how to communicate the uniqueness of your business. You also want to be sure that your Web site will be both user friendly and search engine friendly. Nobody wants to end up with a site that is poorly coded or invisible to most of the major search engines. Search engines want to give users what they're looking for. You want to sell users what they're looking for. Fortunately, there are ways to get the best of both worlds from one Web site. Zen Web Solutions has some of the answers - "Six Steps To Web Site Success" - and they're available free here:

Hexus, "the UK's largest, best trusted and most influential on-line PC technology resource" is recommending Zen Internet to its 1.7 million readers as the cream of the crop among the nation's ISPs. After checking comparison ratings with ThinkBroadband.com, Hexus declared Zen: "Essentially the UK's best broadband provider".

Most homes and virtually all businesses in Britain have an Internet connection and the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that 73 per cent of them are broadband. London's Metro newspaper has been looking at the options for those who want to switch providers, warning that with so much choice available, it is important to consider customer service as well as speed and price. Some suppliers charge £1 per minute for helpline calls, which can be very costly when something goes wrong, and especially annoying if you have to talk for a long time about moving to another ISP. Last year, telecoms regulator Ofcom found several providers making it difficult to switch providers, with 40,000 customers experiencing difficulties. On February 14th, the watchdog introduced new rules to ensure fewer problems with transfers. Broadband providers can no longer charge customers for switching, and those who make the process difficult will face heavy fines.

More than 2.2m people used the BBC's iPlayer to watch a TV programme in January, streaming or downloading an average of five shows each during the month, with 'Doctor Who' and spin-off 'Torchwood' leading the attractions. Demand for the iPlayer has grown strongly since it was re-launched over Christmas. Ashley Highfield, director of BBC future media and technology, said the iPlayer helps to attract up to 1.3m unique users to the BBC Web site each week. "While it's early days, indications are that BBC iPlayer is having a significant effect in attracting new users to bbc.co.uk and we now have BBC-branded channels on Yahoo! and partnerships with MSN and Blinkx going live soon". The BBC is also the first UK broadcaster to appear on iTunes.

The European Commission has fined Microsoft a record Euro899m (£680m) for failing to comply with sanctions imposed on the company in March 2004, when it was deemed to be abusing its dominant position in the software market. The fine, announced last week, which is the largest lobbied on any business by the Commission, follows a Euro497m penalty paid in 2004 and a Euro280.5m fine paid in 2006, bringing Microsoft's total bill to Euro1.68bn. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement that Microsoft was the only company that had ever ignored sanctions applied as a result of anti-competitive behaviour.

Privacy and civil rights advocates are expressing dismay over decisions made by a California District Court judge last month to shut down Wikileaks.org, a controversial Web site that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post corporate and government documents online. Judge Jeffrey White issued two separate rulings. One was a permanent injunction ordering the domain registrar, Dynadot LLC, to immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and to lock it to prevent its transfer to another registrar. Dynadot was also ordered to immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name, as well as preventing it from resolving to any Web site or server "other than a blank park page." In addition, Dynadot was asked to turn over all administrative and account records associated with the wikileaks.org site to the court.

Tiscali, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider, agreed last October to contact those of its subscribers that BPI - the British Phonographic Industry, the UK music industry trade association - claimed were illegally sharing music files over P2P networks. Warning letters were sent out and some customers had their accounts closed. The agreement with Tiscali is the sort of deal the BPI says it wants to strike with all ISPs in an effort to stamp out file sharing. But the BPI says it is not prepared to pay ISPs for their help, while Tiscali says it acted on the understanding that they would be meeting some of the costs involved in pursuing the file sharers.

Gloucester based Web site hosting company Fasthosts appears to have turned its back on efforts to combat spam. Its online contact page reply form works well enough if anyone wants to make a sales enquiry, but it blocks attempts to report spam or anything else that Fasthosts calls "misuse" of its resources.

Domain frontrunning is the practice of 'domain registration by stealth' employed by companies that provide online availability checkers and then register any domain name that businesses are interested in so that they can offer it to them later at an inflated price. Registrar NetSol - Network Solutions - came under fire recently for automatically registering domains that customers searched for, but claimed they were doing it to keep names safe until orders were placed.

The Wayback Machine has been providing an archive of the Web since 1996, showing Web sites at various stages of their development over the years. Its sister service, Archive-It, has over 255 million URLs on file. Unlike The Wayback Machine, pages stored by Archive-It can be keyword searched. The service uses Nutch open source search software and has recently added an Advanced Search Interface.

News from Google about Google Maps for mobile, now with My Location. GPS-enabled mobile phones continue to rise in popularity - but most of us don't have that capability. Now, with the latest version of Google Maps for mobiles, you can try new (beta) My Location technology that uses normal cell phone towers to provide approximate location information. It's not GPS, but it comes pretty close, says Google.

Cheap hydrogen-filled balloons carrying miniature versions of mobile phone network towers may soon provide service to sparsely populated countryside areas. Arizona-based Space Data Corp wants to bring wireless service to millions of rural inhabitants by beaming it down from balloons hovering at the edge of space.

ShoZu, a London-based company that connects mobile phones to social networking sites, lets users transfer photos from their mobile phones to Web sites such as Facebook and Flickr without complicated navigation. Users can also receive copies of their friends’ latest Flickr photos on their phones. ShoZu’s application is available on over 300 types of phone in more than 100 countries and following deals with Motorola and Samsung, the application will be pre-installed on 50 million phones this year. Meanwhile, the number of users downloading ShoZu’s software doubles every month, the company says.

Hearst Digital (Cosmopolitan, Prima, Good Housekeeping) which runs Web sites that "reach one third of women online in the UK" is following the Guardian into partnership with social media provider Pluck to add a range of social networking and audience participation features on its sites. Hearst managing director Alex Ballantyne said that Pluck's SiteLife was the social media platform best equipped to support the traffic volumes they encountered. SiteLife, which will begin working for Hearst this month, claims to power more than twelve billion "social media interactions" per year and is used by the online versions of publications such as The Washington Post and The Economist. The Hearst digital Network, based in London and Texas, a division of the National Magazine Company, publishes online at handbag.com, netdoctor.co.uk, getlippy.com, allaboutyou.com, cosmopolitan.co.uk, prima.co.uk, goodhousekeeping.co.uk and countryliving.co.uk.

Take care what you divulge on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, says Spiked columnist Rob Killick, they will own all the information you provide and you will have no say in how they might use it. Facebook is being investigated by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after users complained that it was impossible to delete their profile, even after terminating their account. But Facebook's terms and conditions state that the company owns outright all the data users provide: "By posting Member Content... you automatically grant... an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing".

Facebook has changed its deletion policy. Until a fortnight ago, there was only a deactivation option, which kept copies of former profiles on the company's servers unless users could negotiate "a cumbersome manual method". At one point, people were joining a "How to permanently delete your Facebook account" support group at the rate of 2,000 per day. Now Facebook allows users to completely delete their profile, although it's still unclear whether any information is retained offline. The company claims that it used to keep copies of user profiles because many of its users returned. "The number of users reactivating their accounts is roughly half the number deactivating their accounts," said Katie Geminder, Facebook's director for user experience and design.

Devious. Sneaky. Underhanded. Those are the words that increasingly come to mind when I consider the "new Web" says Stephen Manes of PC World magazine, after noticing that Google was keeping track of all the Web sites he was visiting - and not just those he found by using the search engine.

There are over 75 million blogs on the Web, but very few have many readers. Most blogs seem to be what Bryan Eisenberg at Grokdotcom.com calls "Splogs, Scrapers and Money Making Fakers", created because someone heard that search engines love blogs, or saw that they could get more traffic by grabbing content from others. Google pays them to do it - if they display Google's pay-per-click advertising. Using some form of automated site creation software, 'Black Hat' types can create millions of pages over hundreds of domains to carry Google advertising. Although one site with thousands of pages might receive only one unique visitor on less than 10 per cent of the pages per day, if only 2 per cent of those visitors click on a 10p Google Adsense word, the site could generate over £100 per month. Once they're set up with a hundred or more sites, spammers are able to look forward to 'better than wages' cheques from Google on a regular basis without lifting another finger.

Ethan Zuckerman used AdWords (Google pay-per-click advertising) to promote interest in some of the charities he supports. In the process, he found Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and others were also paying for Google advertising. "It was depressing to discover bidding wars over keywords associated with human suffering", says Ethan, but it taught him more than the average user knows about the intricacies of the AdWords algorithm.

Here's a unique Web site where you can search for individual ships at sea by name or vicinity (latitude/longitude) and see their position mapped. Click on the 'All ships worldwide' link and you'll see that it's busy out there on the water! If you don't want to see 'all ships,' you can restrict the display to such vessels as Tall Ships or cruising yachts or ocean liners. Check around the 'live tracker' map and it will bring up lists of ships in the vicinity, along with the time each one was last reported (UTC) and its latitude and longitude. Every ship name displayed is a live link that you can click-on to view where it's been and where it's going next.

Earthfrisk is a new meta-search engine based on the idea that blending human opinion with standard search algorithms can provide the best of both worlds. The site harnesses search results from engines that include Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask and Clusty, which users can comment on and vote for individually. "We believe we can offer a real alternative to the major search engines", said a spokesman. "With millions of comments and votes, we can beat any algorithm of any other search resource". Web site owners who find their site is not returned for a particular search can log in and make the addition so that it will turn up next time. EarthFrisk is located in Brooklyn, New York.