Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Zen Internet has been awarded its 7th Which? Best Buy Award after climbing to the No1 spot in the UK consumer watchdog's satisfaction tables for 4 years running. In its annual Best Buy Provider search this year, Which? reviewed services provided by 30 broadband ISPs. Zen also achieved the highest reliability rating of all ISPs in the largest ever UK broadband survey (of 500,000 users) completed last month by thinkbroadband.com

Happy birthday to Apple Computers, formed April 1st, 1975 and Google's Gmail, April 1st, 2004.

Not online very much of the time, apparently. You certainly weren't using Google or visiting YouTube, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia.

Happy Birthday Web. It's 20 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working in Switzerland at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, published a proposal that has revolutionised the way we live. Berners-Lee's intention was to develop a system that would enable scientists around the globe to share information online, using hypertext. The address of the world's first Web site was www.info.cern.ch. The total number of sites on the Web at the end of last year was approaching 200 million, with over 30 million joining the throng annually.

The next generation of Super Broadband DSL is just around the corner, even for the UK's existing copper-wire network, according to Swedish Telecommunications giant Ericsson. The company is achieving 500Mbps transmission rates over copper cabling by using new "crosstalk cancellation" VDSL2 (Very High Bit Rate DSL 2) based modems to reduce noise interference. The data rate is many times faster than the fastest ADSL2 services currently on offer in most countries. With products using the technology likely to be available within months, you may be able to add new broadband services such as video-on-demand over IPTV networks to your Christmas wish list.

The governing body for Internet addresses, ICANN, is preparing to introduce radical changes in the provision of TLDs (top-level domains), including gTLDs (generic top-level domains) that will offer brand-name Internet addresses like www.ford and www.tesco. A goldrush style scramble for other generic TLDS such as .flights .movies, .wine, .books, .shoes and thousands more also seems likely. Other new domain names will be "internationalised", allowing the use of languages with non-Roman character sets, such as Arabic and Russian.

The Financial Times has launched a beta version of Newssift, a business-oriented search engine that provides some unique new features. Newssift aims to make its results - mostly gleaned from news sources - more relevant by letting users build detailed queries before a search executes. Type a keyword and the page automatically populates five categorised panels - Business Topic, Organisation, Place, Person and Theme - each suggesting additional keywords that can be chosen to better focus the search you're proposing. You can choose from among the suggestions, or add more keywords of your own. Then, once the search itself is completed and the results are in, you can refine again by filtering out different content sources. One click removes the results from magazines, newspapers and press releases, for example. Another unique feature is "sentiment analysis". A small pie chart on the left side of the screen provides a colour-coded snapshot of the general sentiment expressed about the subject, based on analysis of the articles in the search results. Red is negative, green is positive, grey is neutral. Business users test driving Newssift are mostly positive about the experience, and most agree that the opportunity to construct a detailed query before hitting 'enter' is a welcome development that traditional search engines are missing.

If you'd like to ask Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling if it was really necessary to shore up a lot of bad banks with your hard earned money, advise Rafa Benitez on tactics for Saturday's game, find out why Terry Waite is supporting hacker Gary McKinnon, or query Liam Gallagher's claim that he's not launching a line of men's fashion "for the money" - try Yoosk. It's a new British online "interview magazine" that enables you to pose questions directly to public figures, politicians and celebrities. Yoosk persuades those in the public eye to participate by encouraging them to "get closer to constituents, fans and customers". The London-based company is run by "a team of citizen media entrepreneurs and professional journalists".

123people, "the next generation of people search", has expanded its coverage to include France, Spain and Switzerland after launching in the UK, US and Germany. The search facility claims to find information by scouring the Deep Web - also known as the invisible Web - in addition to standard sites and social media pages and it does seem to do a better than average job of turning up e-mail addresses and other contact information.

Employers are being warned to look out for criminals using cloned career histories culled from social networking Web sites to get jobs with the aim of committing fraud. Avis Easteal, general manager of Experian Background Checking, said: "Today no one can accept a CV on face value".

Over at the e-Justice Blog, they're running a list of "25 Surprising Things That Google Knows About You". They're all true, up to a point, although they're not all very surprising and very few of them apply to all Google users, but the question remains: does it really matter? To answer that, you'd have to know what, if anything, Google is doing with what it knows about you. And Google isn't saying.

Google is moving Dennis Woodside, formerly head of operations in the United Kingdom and Ireland, to oversee the search engine's advertising sales in North America and South America. He replaces Tim Armstrong, who left to run AOL. Woodside, 40, will report to Omid Kordestani, who runs all the company's advertising divisions. The almost appropriately named Matt Brittin, Google's head of direct sales, will replace Woodside as director of British operations, which have been estimated at around 15% of Google's overall business. The Times reported that Wall Street welcomed the Brit's move with a 5 per cent jump in Google's share price.

Software engineer, Aaron Greenspan, founder of the Think Computer Corporation, tried every way he could think of to communicate with Google and resolve his problems before resorting to court action and a civil small claims lawsuit.

Google discontents are looking forward to the makings of a glorious summer when British physicist Stephen Wolfram launches a new search engine in May. Known as Wolfram Alpha, the London scientist's project is an attempt to address some of the deficiencies of current Web search by understanding people's questions and answering them directly. Natural language processing has long been a holy grail for computer scientists, who believe in the possibility of interacting with machines in an instinctive way. That, says Wolfram, is part of the code that Alpha has cracked. Other search engines, such as Google, compare search terms against billions of documents stored on their servers, before pointing - more in hope than certain knowledge - to the pages on which the correct answer might be found.

Scheduled for launch in June, Oparla - "the UKs newest search engine" - is offering British businesses a free trial of its sponsored search advertising. A spokeswoman for the Wimbledon-based search engine said, Oparlas beta test of its advertising platform will enable us to gather valuable feedback from advertisers and allow us to develop a solution that meets the many demands of todays online businesses. Although in its early stages, Oparla is already handling a large number of search queries. This is a great opportunity for any business to enjoy extra exposure to their target demographic at absolutely no cost". Businesses wishing to participate should e-mail advertising@oparla.com for details.

Pay-per-click advertising, pioneered by Overture, dominated by Google and increasingly expensive and difficult to focus, contains the seeds of its own destruction and should be replaced by pay-per-lead marketing, according to Zephrin Lasker at Pontiflex, who says the theories of Karl Marx predict the downfall of PPC.

Online marketing budgets will be getting more money this year as spending on print media advertising declines. But less than half the marketing professionals in Britain and the US know how effective their online expenditure will be. A survey by Bristol marketing software company Alterian reports that only 47 per cent use analytics to measure online campaign results. Worse still, 20 per cent of respondents admitted that their Web sites were "just basic" and lacked anything that was tailored to the likely expectations of the customers and prospects that they were spending money to attract as site visitors. "Web sites must offer landing pages that demonstrate some immediate relevance to the marketing message that persuaded visitors to turn up in the first place", says Adam Pritchard, consultant at Zen Web Solutions. "Do you know the bounce rate of your Web site as a whole? How about the bounce rate of the landing page you drive searchers to? If people are leaving almost as soon as they arrive, something is wrong, and you need to know about it", he notes, adding that "a high bounce rate doesn't just indicate content problems related to user relevancy. It could also be persuading search engines like Google that the site isn't relevant for some of your target search phrases and that means it won't be ranked highly".

Do you create content for a Web site that has something to sell? How persuasive is your copywriting once it's uploaded and out there, waiting invitingly on the page? New York marketing software company FutureNow has a neat little online quiz to test your knowledge of what works best on the Web when it comes to converting visitors into customers.

Dabbleboard is a Web-based collaboration application based on the familiar whiteboard model, with the added advantage of desk top publishing tools that you don't get in a real-world setting. It's easy to use - visit the Web site and you can start immediately - and it's free. Your Dabbleboard can be private or public; you get a URL that you can share with others. You can also go a step further, and click voice and video chat. Dabbleboard will detect your camera and microphone. You can then add friends, pupils or co-workers so that they can see what youre drawing and writing - and contribute themselves - as well as being able to see and hear you. Dabbleboard whiteboarding is a perfect way to 'show and tell' when youre a long way from home, or need to work with a range of people in different locations, and it's just as easy to use in front of a logged-in audience in a school or office setting.

BBC plans to bring the Internet into living rooms moved forward last month with the opening of a public consultation period on 'Project Canvas', which replaces 'Project Kangaroo', reported in our December newsletter. The consultation will run until the 17th of this month. You can submit your views by completing an online questionnaire or by e-mail. In a joint venture with commercial broadcasters, the BBC plans to bring the iPlayer, as well as content from ITV.com and others to TVs and set-top boxes, along with Web site content including elements of bbc.co.uk, government information sites and "services like Flickr. BBC technicians estimate that a connection of 1.6Mbps should be enough to watch Canvas, but admits users may have to upgrade their existing broadband package. Is this Kangaroo re-born? The BBC proposal says Canvas will provide all our existing on-demand services and planned services. The monetising Kangaroo project was rejected by the Competition Commission, but the BBC believes Canvas will see the light of day and will "completely revolutionise" its services.

Ofcom, the UKs broadcasting, telecommunications and wireless communications regulator, recently added a friendly overview page on its Web site that details the free online catch-up services offered by the main TV channels. Most people will have tried the BBC's iPlayer by now, but the options for watching TV on your computer offered by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and others are less well known.

Biznar is a new business-centric search engine that delivers results from resources like Business Week, The Financial Times, Blogscope and Consumer Reports as well as Wikis and general Web locations. It is a "federated search" engine, which means that instead of crawling and indexing static content like Google or most other search engines, Biznar chooses relevant databases to search dynamically - as and when queries are made. While this may take a few seconds longer than usual, it does ensure up to date results - and a complete absence of spam. Biznar also offers a free alerts service, similar to Google Alerts but reportedly much more productive.