Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Businesses want reliability and top-class support from their ISP and 72 per cent say they would change provider if their Internet connection became unreliable. The figure emerged in research carried out by Shape the Future Limited on behalf of Zen Internet. Over 1,000 Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) were surveyed for the report.

If you're new to the Net, or still finding your way around its quirks and foibles, Aberdeen University's impressively named Directorate of Information Systems and Services has one of the most comprehensive information packs online and easily available to anybody. It has answers to very basic questions: "How do I create my first Web page?" and even "What is the World Wide Web?" as well as detailed guides to understanding and using CSS and XML.

Many small business owners create Twitter accounts solely for marketing their businesses. However, once they're signed up at the popular social media site, they wonder, "What do I Twitter about? How do I market my business with this tool?" Online business coach Donna Gunter shares her top ten strategies for first-time users wanting to market their goods and services with the help of Twitter.

Are you blogging but not yet Twittering? Down-under blogger, Darren Rowse in Melbourne, has suggestions about getting attention from beyond the blogosphere with minimum effort. He outlines his enhancing social media marketing structure at Problogger.net in a short illustrated guide: "How I use Social Media in My Blogging".

Should employees be using social media in the workplace? There are obvious reasons why they shouldn't, but there are easily overlooked benefits too. IT managers and employees surveyed about their Internet and social media habits at work revealed that almost 80 per cent used Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube at work for business reasons. Many cited professional networking, research, and learning about industry colleagues as their prime motivations, although most admitted they also visited social media sites during working hours for personal reasons.

Whether you want to use social media to launch a business, promote a cause, or elect a President, this year the answer seems to be: Yes you can. BusinessWeek says the 2008 contest for the White House should go down in history as "the first social media election" because sites like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace played an "unprecedented role" in determining the outcome, especially compared to 2004, when most social networks were just getting off the ground. YouTube, for example, wasn't even founded until the following year, while MySpace and Facebook had only a fraction of the traffic they have now. Many voters used social networks to celebrate the voting process, taking pictures of themselves voting and using their camera phones to upload the snaps to their profiles. They sent each other Obama and McCain buttons, wrote extensively about their favourite candidates on their own pages and left comments on the pages of others. Enthusiasts could post comments everywhere from third party blogs to candidates' pages, they could 'tweet' on Twitter, and find common interests with like-minded voters on micro-social networks like MyBarackObama.com. Facebook's Chris Kelly said peer-to-peer contact actually drove voter turnout and by 10:30 on election night the number of confirmed Facebook voters reached 4.9 million.

Give it up for Barack Obama mixing it with Jackie Wilson. Sing along higher and higher with the President Elect.

A huge global grid for computers is being used by two technology companies in the UK in a new search engine project. The grid was designed to analyse the data that the Large Hadron Collider generated when the world's biggest scientific experiment was launched earlier this year. But it is now providing an opportunity for technologists in the UK, with Cambridgeshire companies Imense Ltd and iLexIR utilising its data in a joint venture named Camtology. The firms say they hope to become a new force in the search engine market, with the particular aim of rivalling Google and other major search engines in image searching.

Project Kangaroo, which will offer TV catch-up from the BBC (after the seven-day iPlayer window), Channel 4 and ITV, is set to launch in the new year. The online TV joint venture is planning to start testing the on-demand media player this month. A spokesman for the project confirmed that alpha testing will begin in December and a closed beta trial will follow in January.

Talks are in progress that could mean Google-owned YouTube will begin offering full-length Hollywood feature films for online viewing by Christmas. It depends if arguments about advertising formats can be resolved and Google can get enough ads into streaming movies to make them profitable.

The UK government is considering plans to use mobile and Internet communication to combat Taleban propaganda in Afghanistan. Films criticising the West have been watched on around six million mobile phones and half a million PCs in the country. The UK Foreign Office wants to counteract Taleban propaganda with films of its own and is hoping to have up to 100 short films ready in time for the Afghan film festival next summer.

Library House, a Massachusetts based research firm, has just published The Mediatech 100, its list of "the 100 hottest private media technology companies in Europe". The companies were selected by a panel of investors and technology experts. The top ten includes several UK enterprises - Flirtomatic.com, a messaging platform; MOO Print (moo.com), a printing company producing a variety of products based on users photographs; Where Are You Now (WAYN.com) a social networking community for contacts between travellers; King.com a gaming site where players compete against opponents from around the world; Playfish.com, which develops and publishes games for integration into social networks and Plastic Logic (plasticlogic.com), developers of a low-power flexible display unit.

Amazon has launched Windowshop.com, a 'window shopping' interface that you can zoom around using the spacebar and arrow keys. It's faster to negotiate than most sites that present image galleries of one kind and another and Amazon's wall display fairly whips across the screen when dragged around using the mouse. Clicking on an image (or using the spacebar zoom) results in a preview of the pictured album, film or book, and launches a voice-over review or music sample.

Even the most educated readers and writers can fail to get a complete grasp of English grammar. The book: 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' has evidence that a surprising number of people struggle to define parts of speech and few have any idea about, say, passive and active verbs. Why the book's peculiar title? It's from a joke: A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter in the foot. "Why?" groaned the injured man. The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. When the waiter consulted the book, he found an entry that read: "The Panda is a large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves". We see signs in shops every day for "Banana's" and even "Gateaux's". Competition rules remind us: "The judges decision is final". There are many punctuation guides explaining the principles of the apostrophe; the comma; the semi-colon. These books do their job, but somehow punctuation abuse does not diminish. Why? Because people who can't punctuate don't read those books! 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' adopts a more militant approach and attempts to recruit an army of punctuation vigilantes, telling them: Send letters back with the punctuation corrected. Do not accept sloppy e-mails. Climb ladders at dead of night with a pot of paint to remove the redundant apostrophe in "Video's sold here". The BBC Skillswise site has an alternative guide for non-activists.

Shrink2One is a free Web service that allows you to convert multiple URLS into one. It's a convenient way of sending a list of links by e-mail or via IMS - especially if the URLs are very long or complicated. To use the service, visit the Shrink2One site, add the different links of the Web pages you want to share, give your collection a title and then just click to shrink. The instant service will provide you with a link to a new Web page that includes all the site addresses you've listed, along with a thumbnail preview image from each destination.

In perhaps the most intriguing rumour of the month, some of the Net's chattering classes have been murmuring that Apple might be working on a Google bypass. Currently, a Google search field is integrated into Apple's Safari browser. Might the company be looking into its own search alternative? TechCrunch confirms that it has received reports that Apple is working on a search engine of some sort. But "Here's what we think is really going on", they say. "Apple doesn't like the search experience on its mobile devices, and may be building a radically different user experience that is much more visual. It will likely still be powered by Google results, but Apple may present it in a very different way that suits mobile users much better".

Google is hosting a series of town hall meetings at the company's Washington D.C. office, starting with one about economic growth and the technology infrastructure needed to "foster innovation". The first meeting is aimed at helping set the technology policy agenda for the incoming US Administration. Google says: "For the first time, we're encouraging folks to use Google Moderator, a new application that allows audiences to submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered". If you have any queries for Google, here's your chance to ask them.

Is Google guilty of gluttony, greed, envy, hubris, or any of the seven deadly sins, as well as failing to live up to its "don't be evil" motto? The jury is still out. When the argument was tabled at a recent Oxford Union style debate in New York, the vote was an even 47 per cent split for and against the proposition. The final decision on the issue has been turned over to online readers of the New York Times. You can click below to have your say.

Semanti has joined Gogimon and TigerLogic as the latest in a raft of software providers offering to augment search results from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft with a browser add-on that adds intelligence. Semanti's free SemantiFind plug-in has a key difference, it employs semantic search to help users refine their search results and lets them boost the ranking of the most relevant Web sites they find. The add-on, which installs a new toolbar on users' browsers, was originally designed for Google and expanded to cover Yahoo! and Microsoft search last month. Semanti's Web site provides a video demonstration of the tool using Google. Search results from SemantiFind appear at the top of the page, with Google results underneath, illustrating the problem with traditional search engines that have difficulty with multiple possible meanings of search queries. Semantifind shows how it does a better job of understanding users' intentions, partly by learning from 'Crowdsourcing' - the wisdom of the crowd. "In short", says CEO Bruce Johnson, "the searches you make with SemantiFind today will influence the searches someone else does tomorrow".

Taptu is a new UK search engine designed specifically for mobile devices and mobile users. Content from searches, such as music videos, blog entries or news stories, can be shared "simply and quickly" between users via text message. "We believe mobile devices are super-social devices and social is at the core of everything we do. Enabling consumers to not only find great entertainment super-fast, but to be able to share it with their friends, is proving very popular", said Lynsey Tucker, a director at Taptu, which is based in Cambridge.