Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

In Google's Lat Long Blog, Laura Melahn reminds business owners that - courtesy of Google Maps and some details grabbed from a Yellow Pages listing - information about their company that they're unaware of may be appearing in Google search results. It makes sense to 'claim' the information to make sure it's correct and take the opportunity to expand or improve it. Any unlisted business can use the same process to add a brand new listing to Google's local database.

Since its launch last month, there has been a flood of negative reporting from critics who regard the new location-aware Latitude service on Google Maps (which allows users to track other people via smartphones) as a threat to privacy. The words "stalking and "Big Brother have turned up in a range of mainstream news articles and even Google's own pitch for Latitude has been "see where your friends are in real time". Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said "As it stands right now, Latitude could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners and obsessive friends". Google says the system has easy-to-use privacy controls and points out that it's an entirely opt-in service. People who use Google Maps on their smartphones can choose to restrict their level of exposure, or simply not be involved with Latitude at all. More recently, the Gmail Blog announced that you can also activate a new Labs feature that will append your current location to your e-mail signature, when you use Gmail.

The MOBVIS (Mobile Attentive Interfaces in Urban Scenarios) project, currently mapping city streets in Austria and Germany, plans to introduce 'information without search' for mobile phone users across Europe. MOBVIS technology will work from pictures of surroundings taken by camera-equipped mobile devices, it will recognise the location and add hyperlinks to anything pictured that it has information about. So, if you snap a bus stop, MOBVIS will tell you what buses stop there and what the schedule is. If the buses are equipped with GPS and telemetric units, it could also tell you how long you have to wait for the next one to come along. Other information will include dining reviews, items on sale in local stores, entertainment schedules and reviews. MOBVIS is a Specifically Targeted Research Project (STReP) funded by the European Commission.

A claim that the world could run out of IP addresses before the end of the year has prompted European Commission moves to push for more IP addresses to be made available and support the freeing up of domain name formats to expand the diminishing supply of top-level domains.

DomainTyper is an easy domain name finder that checks availability instantly as you begin typing and then uses international domain extensions to suggest alternatives when the-name-you-want.com is taken. Because names like search.com, carhire.com and dentist.com, for example, were snapped up long ago, DomainTyper lets you know that http://sear.ch, http://carhi.re and http://denti.st are available. If the idea of a domain based in Switzerland (.ch), Saint Helena (.sh), Reunion Island (.re) or So Tom e Prncipe (.st) does not appeal, and you're still stuck for ideas, try clicking the "Generate" button (lower left on the DomainTyper home page) a few times to see if the utility's random list of diminishing still-available .com names has anything for you. At time of writing, suggested 'fit almost anything' names included the likes of podfoundry.com, edgeposts.com, boodlemill.com, kaycable.com, yocore.com, tencircuit.com and tinyside.com.

Duplicate content has long been an issue for search engines and Web site promoters. Search engines want to avoid cluttering results with copies of the same text, while marketers and site owners often produce several copies of the same content with different URLs for usability or other purposes. Even a home page can have three or more URLs that deliver exactly the same thing, such as: http://example.com, http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/default.aspx. Now, the 'big four' search engine operators - Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask - have agreed a solution that offers Web site owners the opportunity of designating which URL should represent particular content and which URLs with duplicate content should be ignored. Last month, they announced a new tag to specify the URL of any page on a site. It allows Webmasters to choose which URL search engines should use for particular content, regardless of what session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order or other variable has been appended to the end of the URL in a link. The new tag goes in the section of a page and looks like this: Google says "we strongly recommend pointing to a single page to ensure optimal results".

Favicon.ico is a special type of icon that browsers display alongside a Web site's address (URL) when visitors arrive at a Web page. It's a little extra branding for Web sites (graphics don't get much smaller) that also carries over when a page is added to "Favorites". The Favicon can help to make your pages stand out in the lists that social book marking sites let you populate and Google has experimented with adding site favicons next to search results. If you would you like to see your own icon in the browser address bar when visitors view one of your Web pages, you might find a suitable ready-made file to download at VeryIcon.com and you can learn more at Favicon.com.

It may have a silly name, but businesses are taking Twitter seriously. Examples of 'big brand' companies using Twitter's circuitous route to promote their wares include:

Twisten.fm is a new service to listen to music on Twitter. Pronounced "twissen", the service crawls Twitter for tweets about music, then adds a play button so that you can listen to the song being talked about. Visit the site, sign in, and search for an artist or favourite song. You will see all the tweets from people who recently heard the same music.

Sing or hum a tune, or just talk about it; use your voice to find the album track or music video you're looking for with this almost hands-free search engine.

Find out how you could earn serious cash in just one weekend, mostly without leaving home, including a visit to the online car boot sale.

Aided by Google, Dummies.com is promoting its new Web site by looking for budding writers with inside knowledge or expertise to share for some new online guides and offering a 650 prize to encourage first-time authors. The competition site provides some ideas. "You can browse other submissions" (subjects ranging from pancake making to backpacking), "or take a look at any of the excellent content on Dummies.com. And there's a "How-to" template to get you started.

Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild to pay for the copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, many of them out of print. Last month, the Google Book Settlement site went online, which allows authors and other copyright holders of out-of-print books to submit claims to participate in the settlement. Copyright holders have until January 5, 2010 to make a claim for a one-time payment of $60.

As well as a collection of online dictionaries and translation resources in English and other languages, Dicts.info is a new comprehensive reference site with a home page quick translation tool that provides the foreign language equivalent of English words in over 50 alphabetically listed native tongues from Afrikaans to Welsh.

If you like pub quizzes, or need definitive answers to settle the occasional factual argument between friends, Wapedia.com could be just what you're looking for. Once stored in your phone, this site from the people at Wikipedia is one of those Web addresses that could become indespensible.

Most Web sites are not optimised for mobile phone viewing. Mobile Leap is a bridging filter that strips sites down to basics and reformats them so that you are sure to be able to view their pages on your handheld device. Click on Settings at the bare-bones interface when you first launch Mobile Leap to set the dimensions of your screen and include as much or as little detail as you think your mobile can handle. You can choose to run text-only, or with graphics re-sized to mobile-friendly dimensions. Options to strip out advertising and excess page code provide extra help to cut down loading times for slow connections.

This site allows you to see from your desktop PC how any Web site will look on a selection of mobile handsets. Just enter the URL and wait for the image to load. The available interfaces are limited, but it will give you a working impression of the end result. There is also an 'Instant Mobilizer' tool to build a .mobi site for mobile viewing from DotMobi, the registry for the .mobi domain for mobile Web sites.

Yahoo! has announced new features for their Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) platform - including usage fees. When BOSS launched in July 2008, the stated goal was to spur innovation and disrupt the search market. Will the addition of fees hinder that goal and become a barrier to entry for the startups Yahoo! was originally trying to help? The company says no; they "believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers".

Yahoo! is hoping to make up ground on Google with the launch of its Search Pad service, which helps organise items found on the Web. The launch comes after Google announced it was dropping its similar Notebook tool in a bid to cut expenditure on "non essential" projects. Search Pad lets you copy and edit clippings from Web sites, organise them so that they're relevant to a particular topic, and then print them out or e-mail them to friends or colleagues. You can also save notes and access them later. Yahoo! says its research shows that people often use text files, word-processing documents, sticky notes, e-mails, bookmarks, or a combination of things, to store and organise information they find on the Web. "These methods can be quite cumbersome and require extra steps which are time-consuming and distracting," said Tom Chi, senior director of product management, on the Yahoo! Search blog. "Search Pad tackles this problem by intelligently detecting users' research intent, automatically collecting visited sites, and providing simple tools for users to organise and add notes - all in one place". Search Pad is still being tested, but a limited number of users will be able to try it now. For everyone else, the company has released a short video demo to show how it works.

Worio is a new meta search engine that uses recommender technologies to improve search results. It transfers the 'people who bought this also bought that' idea from online shopping to Web search. To gain the knowledge it needs, Worio doubles as a social bookmarking site to learn more about sites and their users. Also, by identifying common keywords in results, Worio turns them into tags and stores them as groups. When you use its search, the bulk of the page shows results delivered by your choice of major search engine, but on the right hand side it displays themed sub-searches that Worio has performed using its tag themes.