Zen Monthly Newsletter

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

Zen Monthly has featured many Web sites offering free services over the years. This month is no exception and our top selection for this issue is one of the best. It's a fast solution for anyone who finds international phone calls too expensive. PokeTalk.com, a new Web-based service, offers free 10-minute phone calls to almost anywhere in the world. At first glance, it all seems too good to be true, but the calls really are completely free and you don't even need a microphone or headset to get started. You simply have to sign up, log in, and enter the landline number you are calling from and the one you want to connect to. Within a few seconds your phone will ring. Answer, and you will hear the number you've chosen being connected, just as if you'd dialled it yourself. PokeTalk is based in Israel and allows calls to over 50 countries from the UK and a dozen other locations.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is giving away a SEAT Ibiza Ecomotive diesel car every month in a free online draw. It takes less than a minute to enter - a valid e-mail and UK postal address is the only information required. The cars are provided by SEAT to promote the Ibiza Ecomotive as a vehicle that "sets a new benchmark for ecologically friendly cars by reducing CO2 emissions to a minimum thanks to new on board software and diesel particulate filtration system" - so there's no cost to the taxpayer.

Alison Hunt, columnist at lovemoney.com, invites you to check her tips to find out how to get ice cream, books, tickets, gardening tips and seeds, comics, photos, degree level course materials and much more, all for absolutely nothing.

What's crowdsourcing? It's the growing Internet phenomenon of business leveraging the masses - gleaning 'the wisdom of the crowd' - and mostly getting the answers free with a survey, quiz or game. Google does it with Image Labeler, an open-to-all 'name this picture' game that's played against anonymous opponents, which helps the search engine to label images for its index. Recaptcha.net recruits multiple helpers to decipher unrecognised words in scanned book pages. Zeros2heroes.com invites ideas that it can develop as comic strips. Then there are the companies willing to pay for help. Amazon's mturk.com offers micro payments to multiple volunteers to complete online tasks such as checking how easy it is to find named products on shopping sites. Namethis.com helps manufacturers find names for new products by setting competitions and paying the winners. And Innocentive.com offers cash awards from $5,000 to $1,000,000 to any crowd member capable of providing solutions to the difficult and complex problems that it collects from hundreds of businesses.

The review Web site Yelp, which has angered businesses denied the right to reply to unfair criticism, is to allow them to respond publicly to customers' critiques. The San Francisco-based company, which has expanded its coverage to the UK, says it will let businesses post replies to negative user reviews in future. Businesses must first register for a free business owner's account. Previously, some businesses wanting to correct errors have claimed that Yelp offered to obscure negative reviews or highlight positive ratings in exchange for paid advertising. Yelp denies the allegations.

Just how powerful can a photo be? Recently, two tourists in London were forced to delete pictures of London buses from their cameras by police who claimed to be preventing terrorism. Along with the double decker bus, Big Ben and red phone boxes, London Bobbies have also long been a popular target for tourist snaps in the capital. But now it seems that under Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, photographing a policeman within the city can land you a fine or a 10-year prison sentence. Nathalie Rothschild from Spiked, the online newsletter, protested by taking her camera onto the streets to capture a selection of policemen on film and publish the results online.

Police were called when angry residents in Broughton, Milton Keynes, surrounded a Google Street View car to prevent their homes being photographed. Protestors accused Google of invading their privacy and "facilitating crime". A local councillor said the camera, mounted 12 feet high, was intrusive and that people should have been consulted. Thames Valley Police said: "A squad car was sent to Broughton at 1020 BST after reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor".

Two University of Texas computer science researchers have been stress-testing the levels of anonymity and privacy provided by Twitter, Facebook and other sites, combining anonymised data from multiple social networks to determine whether sensitive information about individuals could be extracted. "It is important to understand what a malicious third party application can learn about members of a social network even if it obtains the data in an anonymous form", they say. According to Jules Polonetsky of the Future of Privacy Forum, "Any time there are a number of pieces of data about one user, there is an increasing potential they can be identified. For most users it's rather unlikely that anyone will go through the trouble, but it is important to understand that as you build an electronic trail, identification becomes possible."

Scammers are harvesting rich pickings in the fertile fields of Facebook. People on social networking sites wander about like innocents abroad, shedding their normal caution, says Mary Landesman, senior security researcher for ScanSafe. Confronted by so much navet, rip-off artists and worm-writers are rubbing their hands with glee.

If a seasoned IT professsional of 20 years experience with a degree in computer engineering can fall prey to a Facebook scam that cost him hundreds of dollars, is anybody safe? PC World has some cautionary tales for the unwary.

The Conficker worm, which has been infecting PCs at a growing pace since October 2008, is still worrying anti-virus experts because its ultimate purpose remains unknown. The Ministry of Defence reported that some of its major systems have been infected. The worm has spread across desktops aboard various Royal Navy warships and Royal Navy submarines, and has been found on 800 hospital computers in Sheffield. Worldwide, at least 3 million PCs have been compromised. When executed, Conficker disables a number of system services such as Windows Automatic Update, Windows Security Center, Windows Defender and Windows Error Reporting. It receives further instructions by connecting to a server or peer and receiving an update. The worm has achieved its primary motive, which is simply to create an enormous network of infected PCs, but its final objective may not be known until its creators are ready to put it to work. You can see at a glance whether or not your PC has been infected by the Conficker worm by visiting the test page at the link below.

This is a simple browser add-on tool for Explorer and Firefox that instantly removes clutter surrounding Web page content to make it easier to read. The transformation doesn't simply result in a page full of holes, however. The Readability bookmarklet offers a range of presentation styles that can display text as a newspaper page, a paperback book or eBook - and the ultra-plain 'Terminal' style. You can also choose the font size and set margin width, powerful options that provide a similar experience to editing layout for the pages of a magazine before it goes to press.

Last month saw the launch issue of a new UK print edition of Wired, the magazine published in the US by Cond Nast since 1998, with a British Web site - www.wired.co.uk - appearing simultaneously. It is Wired's second attempt to establish itself here. For two years from 1995, The Guardian published a UK edition in partnership with the US owners.

Internet Evolution, the United Business Media online magazine that investigates the future of the Internet", is reporting that Google is losing as much as $1.65 million per day on YouTube. Google is still a very profitable company, but its shareholders must be growing increasingly restive as they watch the daily dumping of so much cash on top of the $1.65 billion paid to acquire the video site in October, 2006.

An early warning system for investors to spot the next big business venture on the Internet has been launched by a San Francisco-based firm, YouNoodle, founded by two Oxford graduates. The firm claims to have found a way to value the noise generated online by internet bloggers, journalists and the companies themselves and create a scoring system that identifies the 25,000 ventures with the most potential to succeed.

Twitter has been all the rage lately with daily mentions in the popular press and endless celebrity endorsements. But the micro blogging site that restricts posts to 140 characters is also providing sales opportunities for business owners - if they can spend time watching for potential customers to appear. People with problems to solve or 'best product' and 'best price' queries to answer are worth finding. Beyond a mere micro-blogging platform, Twitter has emerged as a real-time search engine - and one with practical purpose for sales and marketing folk. Although Google can return thousands of results for almost any query, Twitter can tell you "What are people saying about (my query) right now?" In one real-life example, a manufacturer of stackable packing crates, who made regular Twitter searches using his product-relevant key phrases, more often than not found a likely buyer to contact. A simple "Have you looked at the stacking crates from Blogs Super Crates?" type of reply, with a link to the company Web site, not only clinched some direct sales, but also delivered extra visits to the site by other people who were searching Twitter for the products, or following others who were. The problem for business workers is that spending hours on Twitter to catch a glimpse of the occasional passer-by with potential interest in one of their products or services - especially in a small niche market - is unlikely to be the most rewarding way of using time at the office. But if you try a service like TweetBeep, which provides e-mail alerts for specific Twitter searches, and check the input once per day, it might just be the one-stop introduction to Twittering for business that you've been waiting for.

Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine, says Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually or simply gather the information to see what theyre doing right and what theyre doing wrong. All of this is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

Science blogger Rudy Rucker reports an interview with British mathematician Stephen Wolfram who is preparing for the launch of a revolutionary new search engine. Known as Wolfram|Alpha, and promising "the biggest change yet" in search technology, the search engine is designed to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any of its predecessors. It will parse questions like What is the location of Timbuktu? or How many protons are in a hydrogen atom? to answer the questions directly, rather than simply pulling up sites that a Google-like algorithm has selected as probable sources for the answer. Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha works out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer, and sends the page back to your computer. The launch date is set for later this month.

The search engine that became famous for its supposed ability to answer questions was Ask Jeeves. Its virtual butler mascot welcomed users and answered questions from the search engine's founding in 1996 until early 2006 when the faithful manservant was dropped along with the Ask Jeeves name. This month, at least in the UK, the butler is back. "83 per cent of our users told us they found Jeeves enhanced their search experience; they see Jeeves as approachable and trustworthy and, above all, helpful", said Ask MD Cesar Mascaraque. As part of the relaunch, Jeeves will be given Twitter and Facebook accounts where he will recount the travel adventures that have occupied him during his three-year leave of absence.

Melzoo.com looks much the same as any other search engine, until you enter a search term and the screen splits into two. Results are listed in the usual way on the left, but an extra large preview pane on the right shows a full-size snapshot of each listing as you hover your mouse over the text snippets in the left-hand pane. It's an easy way to scan a number of sites without visiting each one to check for the information you are looking for.