Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

New guidelines from Ofcom, the phone and Internet watchdog, will protect consumers from unfair charges that are often hidden in the small print of mobile phone, home phone, subscription TV and broadband contracts. Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards says: "When consumers shop around for the best deal, they should be able to easily assess the true cost of whats on offer. We want to make sure that telecoms and pay-TV companies are up front about all their charges and, where there are small print charges, they must be fair". Additional fees on phone, digital TV and Internet services that are under scrutiny include surcharges for payments not made by direct debit and penalties applied when switching providers.

The government is looking into having Web sites rated in the same way that the British Board of Film Classification certifies films, which are labelled "U", "PG", "R18" etc to safeguard children. Minister For Culture Andy Burnham told The Daily Telegraph that the government was planning to negotiate age ratings for English language sites with the administration of President Barack Obama. "The more we seek international solutions to this stuff - with the U.K. and the U.S. working together - the more that an international norm will set an industry norm", Burnham said. One possibility, he added, would be to force ISPs to offer services where the only Web sites accessible are those deemed suitable for children. Burnham claimed this would not be censorship: "This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply that there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it".

Privacy advocates are applauding the decision by Yahoo! to slash the amount of search data it keeps on individuals and are urging Google to follow suit. The European Commission will consider new search engine privacy rules this month, but Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's privacy guru, warns that forcing search engines to shed all individual data would make them ineffective and irrelevant.

Amid concern about privacy, Google plans to bring its Street View service to Britain in the spring, according to media reports. Street View is an enhancement to Google Maps that enables users to zoom in to see 3D views of a location from ground level. The service has faced protest from privacy groups who have complained about people who might be caught on Google's cameras. "We know that privacy concerns are a big thing in the UK, but we feel that we've been open and honest", said Laura Scott of Google UK. "The service has been approved by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office", she added.

Geographical data (geo data) is not free in many parts of the world, including the UK, where copyright maps often include 'Easter Egg' traps, such as streets that don't exist, to catch out anyone publishing copies. But because officially sanctioned mapmakers are funded partly by taxation, 'free our data' activist groups have sprung up to oppose the restrictions that are applied to the data used to compile copyright maps. OpenStreetMap is a project aimed at creating and providing free geographic data and maps that anyone can use. Contributors to OpenStreetMap take handheld GPS devices with them on journeys, or go out in groups to record GPS tracks. In 2006, the Isle of Wight was mapped in a single day. Helpers collect street names, village names and other features using notebooks, digital cameras, and voice-recorders. Back at the computer, they upload logs and trace-out the roads on OpenStreetMap's collaborative database, which is open for volunteers to add more information.

There have been promises for years about your living-room TV serving up search results via the Internet, but have you thought about your car being enabled as a search engine? Ford has. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Ford's Director of Connected Services, Doug VanDagens, said that it would be a free service and it was on its way. "It will be available in the spring and it's going to be available on every new vehicle we make in 2009, from the Focus to our high-end cars. What we're announcing here is an ability to connect to the Internet through a normal voice plan. All you need is your phone, and we can connect you out to Tellme, which is a best-in-class voice portal. From there, we can direct you to a number of Internet data sources. We can send the GPS information from the vehicle, we can send diagnostic information and then we have traffic, directions, business search, and other information, all Internet-based. If you want news you can go in and say, 'I want technology news', 'I want business news' and it'll be read to you. You can get sports and weather. It will do business search. You can get navigation information, so you can say, 'Find me the closest Starbucks', and it will go out, based on your location, and find the closest Starbucks to you, analyse the traffic conditions, tell you how to get there the fastest way, and download the directions to your car. You'll get turn-by-turn directions. It will take you anywhere you want to go".

Insurance companies, including Allianz Insurance, Equity Red Star, Groupama Insurances and The Co-Operative, have started offering car insurance through Coverbox.co.uk, a specialist pay-as-you-drive online broker. To get a quote, you enter your details online and provide an estimate of how many miles you drive per week during peak and off-peak times. If you sign up for the service, your actual mileage will be checked via a small Global Positioning System (GPS) that the insurer will fit to your car and you will be surcharged or refunded accordingly. If your car spends most of its time going nowhere, you could save money.

Formed by bringing together English Nature, elements of the Countryside Agency and the environmental land management functions of the Rural Development Service, Natural England is nothing if not comprehensive. Its Web site provides a slew of scientific data, maps and free downloadable publications produced from its research and work around the UK. The amount of information available can be overwhelming, but the site offers the option of viewing based on the category of visitor, such as farmer, teacher, volunteer, and so on. Visitors can also click on links for information that is relevant to "Local Authorities and Policy Makers", "Countryside Visitors", and "Volunteers". The home page has links to the nine environmental regions of England. Clicking on any of the region's links will take the visitor to a menu that includes links to a "Map of the Region", "Nature on the Map", an interactive feature that allows one to see the nature in any area in England, "State of the Natural Environment", and "National Nature Reserves In Your Area". Clicking on the "Publications, Data & Forms" link will take the visitor to the "Publications Catalogue" section that can be browsed or searched, and offers free downloadable publications about a dozen environmental topics including "Wildlife Species", "Farming", "Habitats", and "Coasts & Seas". Natural England also has an Education Pack page and a Nature for Schools section with lesson plans, activities and information based on the National Curriculum.

Country Channel TV is a free to view Web broadcast service, streaming a wide variety of programmes over the Internet including an extensive back catalogue of films on smallholding and farming, livestock and wildlife, organic growing and foraging, crafts and cooking, country sports and local shows.

Presented as the first "home social media centre", Boxee plays media from your computer and other devices in your home network, as well as connecting you to various Internet sources that allow you to stream or download movies, TV programmes, music and photos. Access to the BBC's iPlayer was added recently, which means - if you include it in the loop - that you can now retrieve missed programmes to watch on your TV set, as well as on your PC.

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro says that this year's Macworld and Consumer Electronics Shows were yet more evidence that TV has a long way to go before consumers are tuning into programmes over the Web on an everyday basis. The Web currently abounds with sources of video: iTunes Store purchases and rentals, Amazon's on-demand video service, network TV Web sites, third-party video providers like Hulu and YouTube. "Depending on your tastes, these options could let you drop cable or satellite service entirely," Pegoraro says. "But the only way to bring all this content to your TV at the moment is to plug in your computer". Manufacturers have been trying to build solutions to this problem for years, but they are still years away from reaching their goal. At Macworld, Apple failed to announce an update to Apple TV, which still only really works well for Apple's iTunes Store and Google's YouTube, Pegoraro says. At CES, LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio all announced that they would ship sets with Yahoo! software that plays video from a handful of sites. However, unlike a Web browser, these Web-connected TVs can't play video from any site, even though most of them use the same Adobe Flash software to show clips.

The problem with video hosting sites is that they're not compatible. If you have uploaded videos to YouTube, Google Video and Blip.tv, you don't get a uniform user experience when you embed them on your Web site. Embedr.com lets you put them all into one player, with up to 100 videos at a time. It's a useful tool for anyone wanting to share video collections.

Qik provides a platform where you can easily stream and share live video from your mobile phone camera. At the Web site, you'll see live video streams being shot by Qik members from around the world. You can keep things private or share your video globally. Once delivered to Qik, your footage is archived at the site and can be sent automatically to YouTube, Twitter, your blog, or your page on Facebook.

One social network site is never enough. 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. Over 50 million people per month visit both MySpace and Facebook. A lot of users maintain different friend lists on LinkedIn and MySpace and other sites. Until recently, there was no effective way of aggregating and merging all the data and activity on these sites into a single user interface. But late last year, a new Brazilian-based startup called Power.com arrived, aiming to do just that. Its founders call what they do "social inter-networking" because it allows users to view and interact with all their social networks at once. Data is aggregated, and the sites themselves, if accessed via the Power.com site, are marked up with extra features. Now Facebook is suing Power.com for copyright infringement, violations of terms of service, and the scraping of what they consider "proprietary data," which appears to mean user information and the storage of user credentials on Power.com servers.

High street shopkeepers could be banning the use of mobile phones on their premises if upcoming phone app CompareEverywhere lives up to its promise to "change the way you shop forever". CompareEverywhere is an application that allows users to use their mobile phone to take a picture of a product's barcode and use it to comparison shop instantly for the same thing at other shops nearby and dozens of online sites. One of the problems when shopping online is that postage stamp product shots and a few lines of descriptive text often aren't enough to go on. You need a little hands-on experience too. If you're shopping for something electrical, you might want to see it working. If it's wearable, you might want to try it on. CompareEverywhere allows you to use a convenient retailer to gain access to the goods, 'borrow' the barcode, and find the best price for the same thing somewhere else.

UK-based shopping search engine Twenga has launched the first price-comparison service for the iPhone. The Twenga iPhone Application lets iPhone owners use their mobile phones to browse through prices, offers, technical specifications and consumer reviews with an interface specifically designed for the iPhone. It is available for use in six countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

Google doesnt find everything on the Web, not by a long chalk. It might seem that with sufficient crawling, everything could be found, eventually. But only a small percentage of the Webs content is accessible to mainstream search engines. Most of it is buried in "the deep Web", beyond the reach of the typical "surface Web" crawlers. Search engines like Google cant easily fathom the deep Web because most of its content has no links to it. It is behind search form interfaces and Google isnt designed to fill out search forms - or click "submit" as humans do. There is a solution, however. It is known as Federated Search and there is a growing family of federated search engines able to behave more like human site visitors. They use specialised software that knows not only how to complete forms and simulate the pressing of the "search" button, but also how to read the results that the source provides. In addition to filling out forms and combining documents from multiple sources, they search content in real time. You do have to wait as each search is conducted, but you get real time data - and that can be crucial for some researchers. With federated search, as soon as the content owner updates a source, the information is available for the next query. By contrast, standard search engine results are only as current as the last time that the site was crawled. Google results can be days or weeks old. See the difference for yourself. Federated search applications include:

2008 was a bumper year for new search engine launches. In January, contextual search specialist Silobreaker launched its new engine for relations-mapping and trend analysis on topics and people. A few weeks later, startup Surf Canyon released its Discovery Engine, a browser plug-in that disambiguates (reorders based on relevance) search results from the major engines in real time. In March, SearchMe launched its "visual search" capability and category suggestions for non-text searches. The three-year-old company landed $31 million in venture capital. In May, Ask.com, one of the original "plain English" search engines, announced its acquisition of Lexico, the owner of Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. in June, Search aggregator Viewzi, which presents results from top search engines in "innovative and user-friendly interfaces", relaunched with new tools. In July, search startup Cuil appeared, created by a pair of Google veterans and claiming to index billions more Web pages than Google. Semantic Web search engine Hakia, founded in 2004 by a group of European scientists, debuted a "social search" feature designed to connect users with people of similar interests and found investors willing to back its ideas to the tune of $21 million. Google continued to break new ground, devoting some of its annual $16.5 billion revenue to its operating system for mobile devices, Android; putting out a new browser - Chrome - to compete with Internet Explorer; pushing into cloud computing; dedicating resources to enterprise search and setting up a unit designed to: "develop electricity from renewable energy sources that is cheaper than electricity produced from coal, with a goal of producing one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity - enough to power a city the size of San Francisco - within years, not decades".

MelZoo.com is a new search engine that provides its results in traditional format on the left side of a two-pane window and displays the Web sites at full size on the right. The site in first position is shown immediately, other sites appear quickly if the appropriate result is hovered over. No mouse clicks are required and there is little or no waiting time before listed Web sites can be previewed.