Zen Monthly Newsletter

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Microsoft has launched a video sharing service in the UK before introducing it in the US. The feature is called Messenger TV and you start it by clicking the activities button at the top of the MSN Messenger window. Once you have launched the application and your contacts have done the same, you can scroll through menus of film clips on offer and continue a conversation while watching a video together. MSN Video has partnered with Channel 4 in the UK and also adds content from MTV and Sony BMG, so there is a widening selection of videos to choose from.

Sometimes you see a video online that you want to save to watch later. There is no option to download movies from sites like MSN Video, YouTube, BlipTV or Google videos, but you can do it if you visit Splandoo.com. After finding a video that you want to save, use the drop down menu at Splandoo and paste the link into the space provided. You will be offered the usual Save dialogue when you click to download. Change the name of the file to whatever you want to call it and it will be saved as a Flash movie. If you need a viewer, try the free SWF & FLV Player from Eltima.com, or get VideoLAN (also free) from videolan.org, which handles just about any video or movie file.

Bluejacking - sending surprise mobile phone messages to complete strangers via bluetooth - is a phenomenon that's been around for as long as there have been bluetooth phones. BluejackQ.com, the biggest bluejacking community Web site, tells you how to do it. There's a code of ethics to persuade you that it's all just harmless fun and the site has instructions about turning off the bluetooth feature of your phone if you want to stay clear of the game.

According to The Guardian, it took just two complaints to The Advertising Standards Authority about an Apple iPhone TV commercial (you can watch it on the page linked below) for the watchdog to take action and ban the advertisement. The ad claimed that the iPhone offers easy access to Web sites and included the phrase "all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone". The two complainants said that the sales pitch was misleading because the iPhone did not support Flash or Java, both integral to many Web pages.

How often are users receiving true 3G data transmission speed with the iPhone 3G, promoted as being "twice as fast" as its predecessor? Not often enough, apparently. Most users don't seem to be experiencing the near Wi-Fi performance that the 3G spec promises. A wealth of complaints on blogs, forums, and message boards across the Web quote a range of low speeds, and few users report experiencing near-Wi-Fi performance. The speed you get depends on where you are and Wired Magazine is trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem worldwide with a global iPhone 3g speed test that it wants UK users to try.

1.5 billion text messages are sent every week in the UK, according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association. Although the MDA says that text messaging "dominates" data usage from UK mobile phones, and is still growing at 30 per cent per annum, peripheral services are lagging behind. Google, for example, continues to delay the launch of its query-by-text service for British users, four years after its launch in North America. When it does arrive, owners of mobile phones (with or without Internet access) will be able to text queries to Google (46645, or googl on most keypads) and get an immediate response. The focus of the SMS service is to provide local results and travel information, but typing "web" and a query - e.g. 46645 web cheap cashmere cardigans - will produce a crunched-down version of the same results as a search via your PC at google.co.uk. You will also be able to check the service from your PC at www.google.co.uk/sms. For now, you can see it at work in the US and Canada at the links below.

Microsoft is rolling out its new Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, and warns site designers to get ready for some of the changes it will bring. "To promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. This helps reduce the amount of custom code developers have to write on a browser-by-browser basis. However, content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer might display differently than intended". On a per-page basis, site owners can add the following new meta tag that will persuade the new browser to display the page as if Internet Explorer 7 was being used.

The new IE8 browser from Microsoft will pose new challenges of a different kind for Google, according to UK director John Curran, interviewed by The Financial Times. It comes with an "InPrivate" setting that lets users access Web pages without disclosing any of the information Google needs to be able to deliver targeted advertising. The FT says Google has already faced public outcry over the amount of information it collects. David Mitchell, an information technology analyst at Ovum, said: "If the hype around privacy gains more credibility, more people will hit the private button. There is a potential threat here to click-through [display] advertising". The next day, August 29th, Microsoft announced that it would be integrating Me.dium, "the first crowd-powered search engine", into IE8. The "crowd" in this case, influencing what IE8 users will see, will be the 2.5 million people who have downloaded the free Me.dium Social Toolbar. "Because Me.dium's Social Search results are ranked by what people are actually looking at in the moment, we're able to prioritise the things that are hot right now, rather than counting links from months or years ago. And as the zeitgeist of the online community changes, so do the search results", said Kimball Musk, CEO of Me.dium.

Microsoft is also looking to boost its online shopping search market share with the purchase last week of popular consumer search site Ciao! - Ciao.com/Ciao.co.uk. The Munich-based shopping engine has more than 26.5 million unique visitors per month and operates in seven EC countries and languages. Microsoft said the sites would be integrated into its Live Search portal across Europe and that work was ongoing "to ensure that Live Search delivers across all categories, building on recent progress including the acquisition of Multimap and the decision to open a European Search Technology Centre this financial year".

Mozilla Labs has announced a new participation project in which anybody can put up ideas, mockups and demos of what a next-generation Web browser might look like. Mozilla, the group that oversees scores of volunteer programmers collaborating on the free Firefox Web browser, hopes to attract multiple helpers to change the way people view the Internet and is calling for developers, designers and artists across the globe to ponder the future of the browser and submit their creative ideas using anything from sample code to sketches on a single sheet of paper. As part of the project, Mozilla Labs has teamed up with San Francisco-based Adaptive Path, which created a series of concept videos that showcase the potential browser of the future. One of the videos shows how users can push, grab and lift all the objects in the browser, making surfing the Web more like moving through a 3-D space, with Web pages semantically organised in clusters. "We are trying to make people's interaction with the technology more natural and more physical," said Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path and the man who coined the term "Ajax". Aurora isn't yet available as a product, but Adaptive Path is releasing the design and interface as a springboard for discussion and development.

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like instant tabs for Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft Live Search results) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). All features are optional and easily configured from the options menu. You can also stream search results so that you can see hundreds of listings on one page, instead of the usual top ten, or the 100 that Google allows as an optional maximum.

A Google user complains that the search engine's boast to have millions of Web page listings available for most searches is false. It won't let him see more than ten pages of results. He recommends looking elsewhere, but he might find that Google isn't alone in guarding its resources. Although other search engines tend to be less miserly, they also impose restrictions. Microsoft comes out best, typically allowing sight of 2,000 results, but Yahoo! and others usually stop working after providing a maximum of 1,000 results.

Google Insights for Search is a new information product designed with business advertisers in mind. It crunches numbers and produces graphs to show search trends across categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions and time ranges. If you take the simple example of the search term apple, where the majority of queries will be associated with the brand Apple, Insights for Search allows you to filter results via the Food & Drink category, resulting in a view of search volume trends and related searches about apple the fruit. Ever protective of its fundamental data, Google won't put a number on any of the ups and downs portrayed in the graphs, but Insights will show businesses accurate reflections of interest in their products as affected by seasonal, regional, economic and other influences over months or years.

The Internet is awash with information and resources about global warming, becoming carbon neutral and caring for the environment, but there is an awful lot of other stuff to wade through before you can reach it. Specialised sites are busy filtering out the Web's planet-unfriendly debris to deliver the real green. Vertical search engines like LiveGreenOrDie, GreenLinkCentral, EcoEarth and EcoSeeker return more relevant results than general search. Green Maven is one such "totally organic" search engine dedicated to rambling through the green Webscape. But this site is more than a search engine. Its creators also scout the Web for the best green articles, news and blogs and combine them in an easy to read compendium on the opening page. Click the video tab in the panel across the top, for example, where the best of the green from YouTube has been filtered for viewing.

What part of turn off updates does Windows not understand? You'll get a new Windows Update soon, like it or not, says Scott Dunn at Windows Secrets. Microsoft will install a new version of Windows Update on your computer, even if you've set your PC not to download and install any updates.

Microsoft raised headlines again last month, announcing that it'd be releasing details about Windows 7 - the follow up to Vista - in October. The company also launched a Windows 7 blog, and resolved to adopt "an open and honest approach" during the operating systems final development stage.

PC Magazine's Steve Bass reports on some good humoured trickery by Microsoft marketers who convinced a bunch of Vista-hating volunteers to try out the next version of Windows, named Mojave. The testers loved it - but were then told that what they'd been using was nothing more than a well disguised version of Vista with a different name. Still more surprising is the revelation that as well as finding unorthodox ways of working around Vista's current unpopularity, Microsoft is working on a replacement for Windows itself. In five years, they will introduce Midori, an Internet-centric operating system, based on the idea of connected systems, that largely eliminates the dependencies between local applications and the hardware they run on that has existed with just about every OS - and certainly every version of Windows - over the past 20 years.

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system, Microsoft is preparing for the day when people realise we don't need Windows anymore and is thinking about what the company will do when the operating system becomes obsolete. An incubation project, code-named Midori, is in progress, to create a non-Windows operating system that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows was conceived. Although Microsoft won't comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. Leaked reports portray Midori as an Internet-centric OS - one focusing on 'cloud computing' and on-demand services - that will eliminate the need for much of the installed hardware and software that is required by a typical OS today.

The Guardian has tried a bit of old fashioned keyword stuffing, attempting to trick its way into search engine results by peppering one of their football news Web pages with references to "Paris Hilton" and "How to make vast sums of money without working for a living", plus a few other allegedly popular search terms that we're too polite to mention here. The technique, which all the search engines have penalties for, and warn you not to use, has worked for The Guardian. Although it failed to fool Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search, the page is listed in top ten search results by Google and Ask for some of the gratuitously added terms.

"Our search engine is the Google of music", says Israeli entrepreneur Deddy Schwartz, who launched Jogli.com in July. The new search site allows users to listen to full songs and albums and claims to have more than 500 million songs and 12 million full albums in its database. The start-up is currently in its trial period (beta phase), mainly offering users search results from YouTube. Jogli enables surfers to listen to music on the site, while search results are accompanied by the songs' lyrics, links to additional albums by the same artist and by similar artists. Schartz says the main difference between Jogli and competing sites is its sheer size. "Other sites offer tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of songs", he says, "but we've got more than 500 million".