Zen Monthly Newsletter

If you would like to listen to the podcast for this newsletter please follow this link: Zen Monthly January 2009 Podcast

The financial crisis is turning out to be a good thing for sites like LinkedIn and Xing, Reuters says, as laid off and worried workers turn to their professional networks for their next job opportunity. LinkedIn, in particular, has seen staggering growth in the last 12 months, from 18 million to 31 million members since last January, and is now adding members at the rate of one per second. Not surprisingly, new registrations are heaviest in sectors like finance, technology, and media. Strategy Analytics, a research firm, says LinkedIn should rack up $100 million in revenue this year. Xing, the most popular professional social network in Europe, has seen membership growth of nearly 25 per cent recently. Like LinkedIn, Xing earns its revenue from advertising and premium memberships, for which it charges 5.00 per month.

"Tough times be damned! We're going technology shopping" says Lance Ulanoff of the USA's PC Magazine. Check his fourth annual guidance report on what to buy, consider, or avoid at all costs!

Logitech shipped its billionth mouse recently. The milestone came within days of the fortieth anniversary of the first public demonstration of the computer mouse. On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart gave a live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, which included the first mouse. He never received any royalties for the invention because his patent ran out in 1987, before the PC revolution made it indispensible. Is there a mid-life crisis or early retirement in store for the faithful tool? Laptops and, allegedly, Windows 7 work without rodent assistance and Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii game may have introduced some different expectations for the future.

Measured in human terms, the Internet - like the mouse - is approaching middle age. The Web is barely a teenager but, depending on exactly where you start counting from, the Net is nearer forty already. And it's a big machine now, consuming 5 per cent of the world's electricity so that we can send 2 million e-mails per second and click 100 billion times per day on some of its 55 trillion links.

The Internet is growing by one zettabyte a year, fuelled by images, videos, gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing. Pieter Poll, CTO of Qwest, considers whether the growth is manageable.

A new Internet domain that hopes to become the online equivalent of the phone directory has gone on sale for the first time. The latest top level domain extension - .tel - opened for business last month. Rather than merely acting as a memorable address for a Web site, a .tel domain is designed to serve as a repository for contact information. By listing site, street and e-mail addresses, as well as telephone numbers, in their .tel entry, the registry's operators say, companies and individuals will make themselves much easier to find. Unlike normal URLs, which point to Web sites stored on local servers around the world, .tel addresses return only information stored on the Internet's core Domain Name Servers (DNS). "It is the most significant innovation in the domain name system since the advent of .com", said Khashayar Mahdavi, the CEO of London-based Telnic, which is operating the .tel registry. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees the assignment of names on the Internet, has outlined wider plans to liberalise the allocation of domains. The rules will be relaxed later this year, potentially allowing any useful word such as .city or .news - to be registered as a domain suffix by anybody.

Google is denying that it has reversed its stance on Net neutrality after a Wall Street Journal story claimed that the search giant had been talking to telecom and cable companies about giving Google traffic preferential treatment. Richard Whitt, Google's telecom and media counsel, said that the Journal's report was based on a misunderstanding of the company's offer to place so-called edge servers within the networks of Internet service providers. He said the servers would store only Google content that might be frequently requested by consumers, such as YouTube videos, in order to provide faster access. "Google remains strongly committed to the principle of Net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open", Whitt insisted.

There is a free alternative to cable or satellite television that lets you watch TV channels online via your PC browser, without the need for any special hardware, software or subscription service. You can begin viewing immediately: simply visit the Free Tube site at the link below, select a genre (business, news, sports, movies, etc) from the menu, and pick a channel. There are hundreds to choose from. With so many sources on tap, it's inevitable that content arrives in a number of different formats. To see everything on offer, you will need to have Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Real Player and Flash installed. If you are using a Mac, you can try adding Flip4Mac, which provides Windows Media Components for QuickTime.

The Web offers any number of sites providing access to online radio. A tentative new arrival named Radio Beta stands out from the bunch by making everything easy, including by-country and by-genre search - and especially the one-click listening access that's provided for anything you find. From Asia to Oceania, most of the world's nations are well represented. There are 285 British broadcasters online, over 2,000 in the rest of Europe, and 7,500 stations to choose from in Canada and the USA.

Visit WebValuer.org and it will attempt to find out how many visitors your Web site has, how many pages are viewed, and how much potential the site has to make money from carrying Google AdWords or similar advertising. After the checks, and taking account of a few additional factors, WebValuer will estimate the overall value of the site and suggest a fair selling price. Some of the data that WebValuer relies on can be a little sketchy, and there are no eager buyers waiting behind the scenes to make you an offer, so don't take it too seriously.

As digital communication between people evolves from simple interactions - sending e-mail and instant messages - to more complex ones - commenting on Flickr photos, replying to Tweets - so too do our demands of e-mail providers. Yahoo! says it recognises this, and is experimenting with a new kind of e-mail "that will accommodate the way we live our lives online today". Currently in beta testing, the new version of Yahoo! Mail allows for third-party interactions and incorporates social tools. The home page for the service focuses less on news and ads and more on social activity and the user's "connections" - the group of people they communicate with most frequently. Ars Technica has a short demonstration video that explains the differences, and speculates that the new service will be "far more useful and appealing".

What's better than e-mail? How about Video e-mail? Send a click-to-reply talking head sales message, a live-action birthday greeting to Grandma, show off the latest widget fresh from your production line, extend your long-distance love affair even longer. Whatever message you want to convey, Eyejot makes it very easy. There's no charge, nothing to install, and your free account allows you to send an unlimited number of messages of up to 60 seconds each. All you need is a webcam and a microphone.

Yovisto is a new Web 2.0 platform to upload, share, search, tag, and discuss video talks and lectures on technical, educational and academic subjects. At the Web site, Yovisto provides an automated mechanism to generate a full-text index of online videos in its library. It is possible to describe video content collaboratively, place keywords or labels (tags) at any position within a video, or start a discussion. Users can also write or edit wiki-pages to enrich the video content with further information, such as images, hyperlinks, and text.

Maintaining its position as the Web's favourite reference work, community-owned Wikipedia attracts 683 million visitors a year, offers 9.25 million articles in over 250 languages and its still completely free. Could its future be even brighter if the site accepted advertising, or would that compromise everything it stands for? Wikipedians cant agree on what should be in the online encyclopaedia let alone what shouldnt be. You only have to visit www.wikirage.com to see that, as Ian Harris reports for .net magazine.

The world's largest flower delivery firm has sued Marks and Spencer at the High Court in London for sponsoring the word Interflora as a search engine keyword. The case could be an important test of how UK trade mark laws apply to keyword advertising.

If you weren't inspired by anything in the traditional bumper crop of holiday advertising over the festive season, try this unique new search engine - dedicated to finding "unusual" hotels, from igloos and ice caves to railway carriages and tree houses. Coverage is sparse in some countries - only one in China and two in South Africa - but 10 in the UK and over 60 in Europe, as well as numerous gems in North America.

Human-powered search engine Mahalo launched a new Q&A feature last month, aiming to compete with similar 'wisdom of the crowd' services offered by Yahoo! Answers and Wiki.Answers. The difference is that some contributors will get paid for their answers at Mahalo. Once upon a time, Google had a Q&A site that allowed people to ask questions and it paid selected volunteers for the answers. The Mahalo system is more open, and adds an element of competition: questioners who offer cash incentives - known as tips - will select the most satisfactory answer supplied and only that contributor will collect the reward. Answer writers won't see all the money - Mahalo says it will deduct 25 per cent commission before passing on accumulated fees via PayPal.

Launched last summer from its home base in New Zealand, Searchii, the latest in a small band of genuinely independent search engines providing UK-specific results with its own Web crawler and index, has been unavailable at www.mysearchii.co.uk in recent weeks. It continues to operate at www.searchii.com for its worldwide audience and for Australian and New Zealand users from its co.nz and com.au domains. Searchii Limited's co-founder and CEO Alex Greig tells us that the UK site is "upgrading to new, better and faster technology and will be launching with a brand new interface and many cool new features soon".

This is a custom search engine that sifts the Web for how-to articles. It's an especially good resource for curious creative types, with a big index of tutorials on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Web design and HTML, for example. But there's also everything from gardening and cooking to DIY house building. All the sites are hand-picked and you can submit a tutorial of your own for review if you have one.