Microsoft have relaunched windowslive as a social networking platform. For some time they seemed to be desperately trying to buy Yahoo!, then [allegedly] tried AOL, they’ve got nowhere with Facebook, Bebo and the likes and seem to have given up hitting an existing, popular market. Even their most popular platform;  Hotmail has been falling behind as other webmail systems moved into the realms of AJAX programming (the ability to load web content without reloading the entire page), their Spam filter also leaves much to be desired, certainly compared to Gmail who’s spam filter is virtually flawless!

Microsoft have tried giving away free templated websites with Office Live (which they are still doing) but the uptake seems slow and promotion scarce (for which I’m certainly thankful for), the software itself is flexible but a little over-complicated. The bonus is that they provide the hosting and domain name for free which you can take with you if and when you upgrade. For small websites with few followers, this is an excellent solution.

So what are Microsoft doing now? They seem to have gone back to their corner muttering insanities under their breaths and started work on their own products again. I fear this is too little too late as they attempt to copy the best bits from other sites rather than being inspired and moving the web forward.

Microsoft should ideally stick to offline software and continue developing it’s own products rather than trying to hit the online market. As their web efforts increase, their software side seems to be diminishing, allowing open source equivilents and indeed Apple to take the limelight. Windows is, and always has been a great product, most complainers are complaining using this platform so they must be doing something right even though it’s not quite perfect for everyone. The online side of Microsoft, that is their email exchange software and various others should be opened up to avoid the need for specific Microsoft exchange servers. This way they can compete with Google documents (which is not 100% Word compatible, and certainly far from perfect) then they will continue to dominate the office and avoid loss of marketshare to these free services. Unfortunately as more and more people are storing documents online and slowly coming to terms with editing them online, Microsoft are losing out to online office solutions.

The moral of this story is really to stick to what you’re good at. In a previous employment, I worked initially on design, development, hosting, web, print, seo, stationary, and promotional products. Between two people it became impossible to do anything with 100% quality. We attempted to project manage printers etc. but this too impacted on what we were best at. Only when we removed these ’sidelines’ were we able to concentrate entirely on web design and development and spend time making things run efficiently with the quality we, and the clients were happy with. External products we could work with but were not seen as supplied by us, so once we sent clients out to a printer, we didn’t have to worry about how things were moving. This is a lesson I’ve brought into Zako Media and until we have the skillset and staff to offer a particular product or service, we won’t offer it. I only want Zako Media to give out work which we and the client are happy with, we will not dilute our efforts, attention, knowledge, time, or profits on external activities just to try and help make a sale.

Remember your last office powercut… how did you survive? Chances are you went to the cafe for an early lunch or even went home because everything important stopped working! We run everything on electricity, computers, internet routers, mobile phone chargers, laptop chargers, office radio, telephone systems, overhead projectors, clocks, fish tanks, printers, fax machines, photocopiers and many more.

Here are the top tips for running a greener office, bringing down your fuel bills and generally feeling better about your contribution to the world’s pollution.

Buy Only Green Energy

Many energy suppliers are giving us the option to buy 100% green energy. If you’re not the business owner, do some reasearch and present a case to your boss. By going green you stop oil being mined from ever-decreasing supplies and being burned on your behalf. You’ll be safe in the knowledge that your electricity is renewable. You will also be increasing demand putting more pressure on oil companies to drop prices and the government to take green energy seriously. You may be paying more for green energy but many of the following options can help to balance the cost and continue to help the environment.

Swap your computer for a laptop

Laptops are getting cheaper, much more powerful and are ready to replace the desktop computer. As well as being more convenient for transport and travel, they use less power. Laptop computers are designed to perform the same tasks while using up less power. They do this by running more efficiently, producing less heat, less noise and more efficient processing distribution. Home workers can also wander into the garden in the summer and continue working with a glass of chilled lemonade.

Swap bulky CRT monitors for LCD

Those big horrible monitors consume more power than an equivalent sized flat monitor and again the prices are coming down. The bigger they get, the more power they consume so swapping a 14″ crt for a 32″ LCD won’t change much. Research has suggested that a 17″ monitor is the perfect size for maximum productivity. Any bigger and the eyes get lost, any smaller and the eyes strain to see the size and work with more layered windows.

Turn off what you can overnight

If it’s not switched on, it’s not consuming energy and just as importantly, internet hacking is impossible. Turn off printers, desktops, laptops and anything else which does not need to be switched on overnight. I also mean off off, not standby off. Some standby modes consume just as much power as when turned on.

Unplug unused chargers

Mobile phone chargers, laptop chargers, battery chargers, walkie-talkie chargers, Tom tom chargers all produce heat when plugged in, even if they’re not charging anything! Yes this saves you a little time scrabbling about under the desk trying to find it, but it costs money, energy and contributes to pollution and the climate instability.

Energy Saving light bulbs

The traditional light bulb produces light, but it also generates a lot of heat. This heat apart from being a fire risk again costs money to produce. Energy saving bulbs are more expensive, but they last longer and can save you a considerable amount of money in energy bills, they pay for themselves within a relatively short space of time.

Use Natural Light

If you have windows, use them, natural light is healthier to work in, feels nicer, and best of all is free! (At least while Brown and Darling don’t know about it) It helps your body produce vitamin D, and a nice view of the park (or the building opposite) is always nicer than office walls. Better health and well-being increases productivity.

Support like-minded businesses

By buying from greener companies over less efficient ones you will help increase demand for green businesses and start to make a difference among your own suppliers and clients.

Be a paperless office

While paper generally now comes from renewable resources, the energy burned to cut and process trees, transport paper doesn’t. If it doesn’t need to be printed, don’t print it! If you need to empty your paper bin or shredder more than once a fortnight, perhaps you’re throwing away too much. Where can it be saved?

The big green debate

Not everyone agrees we can save the planet, not everyone agrees we’re destroying it, many people think it’s inevitable and we’re being encouraged to spend money where it’s not necessary just to line government pockets.The tips above are on a green theme, but with rising fuel costs and above average inflation, most of these will save you money, save on fuel tax and make your business more self sufficent. Laptops continue working for a few hours in power-failures. Computers switched off are hacker proof. Laptops can be secured in safes. LCD monitors take up less deskspace. Excessive amounts of paper with hot powered lights and machines can pose a fire risk. Some mobile phone chargers have been known to explode if left on for long periods of time. (These are usually recalled but the possibility of it happening again is there) Similarly with Laptop batteries.

Credit: Wind turbine photo courtesy of Patrick Finnegan.

Anna Patterson; a former leader of Google’s search indexing, Tom Costello; her husband who researched and studied search engines at Stanford University and IBM, and Russell Power; also worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection have come together to form Cuil. (pronounced ‘cool’)

Cuil claims to have indexed more pages than Google at a staggering 120 billion web pages. Google last month declared t had discovered over 1 trillion unique pages, but didn’t specify how many it had actually indexed. With insider knowledge at Google, we can only assume they’re right.

Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.

Check out Cuil here

Opinion? Cuil are trying something new which is always a good way to go about it. Google clones fall within days because they’re trying to copy and are always behind Google’s ever changing ideas. On the other hand, if the pronounciation of your name needs to be added afterwards, how are people going to communicate your brand effectively? It will have to develop its own pronounciation to avoid it being mistaken for its homophonic equivilent.

Testing it’s ‘context’ idea, I searched for ‘Two too to’and had a page of results, none of which talked about English grammar. An identical search on Google however came straight up top with n explanation of the homophones and common mistakes.

The site is also severely lacking features such as news and image search, but that’s exactly why people liked Google in the first place, it was simple, easy-to-use and effective. While testing, I did get a ‘our servers are running a bit hot message’ which is tech speak for, we can’t handle the pressure, but lets see where this leads… Watch this one closely I’d say. No one will beat Google in a day, but give them time and we’ll see what happens.

And why my wife’s site comes up with an image saying ‘born in Japan’ for example which is nowhere on the site is anybody’s guess.

Cuil isn’t the first Google rival to launch this year. Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made its official debut in January. Wikia Search hopes to provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their Web page rankings and other suggestions, as well as its own indexing of the Web.

With IT taking on more roles in our finances, security is getting tighter and pushing the world’s best hackers into higher sophistication. If a virus on a single school computer is a small rash, then a DNS attack like those on presently is the HIV of the internet. According to Kaminsky 52% of DNS servers are still at risk.

A website doesn’t really have a name, facebook isn’t really at facebook.com, it’s really at  69.63.178.11, Zakomedia.com is at 79.170.40.33

These numbers (known as IP) make no sense to a human, could you imagine it printed on your business card? The domain name was born. If your house were a website, it’s longitudal and latitudal coordinates would be the IP address and the domain name would be your postal address.

So when you type ‘facebook.com’ into the address bar, your computer sends this request to your ISP’s DNS. (In my case, Virgin Media) Virgin’s DNS server has a list and checks facebook in this list to determine it’s IP. If it can’t find it, it forwards the request to the next nearest DNS and this can go on. Eventually they will come back with the correct IP and send you to the correct website.

The security flaw affects just over 1/2 of these DNS servers and would enable someone to add a false IP to a name. This means a request to ‘www.natwest.com’ could give a false IP reading and send you to another site made up to look like the original and ask you to log in with your bank details… www.natwest.com would still appear in the address bar and you would be none the wiser until every penny was drained from your account to an unnamed Swiss account holder.

The truth is that DNS owners have known about this problem for about 2 weeks and many have still done nothing about them! This puts us, the consumers at a serious risk! 52% of the world could be lead to the wrong banking site to input their details… that’s not a gamble I’m willing to take!

So without trying to scaremonger, there is a way of testing whether or not you are likely to be affected. Go to http://www.doxpara.com/ and use the ‘Check DNS’ button on the right. Ignore the messages below, but read the text which appears. It doesn’t say you ARE affected, it simply tells you if your local DNS is at risk or patched to avoid this threat. If it is at risk, avoid sending sensitive data online. (i.e. banks, logins etc.) Reading the news, weather, and checking mail with outlook or outlook express should be fine. You can resume normal activity when a new test confirms you are ok. If you’re DNS comes out with the message:

xx.xx.xx.xx has other protections above and beyond port randomization against the recently discovered DNS flaws. There is no reason to be concerned about the results seen below.

Then you can be happy and relax in the knowledge that your ISP (whether it’s BT, AOL, Virgin etc) has it’s customers in mind and is keeping you secure.

BT, Virgin Media (no relation), Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB, and Carphone Warehouse, the top 6 UK ISPs have joined forces with the UK government to put an end to illegally downloaded music. Hundreds of thousands of letters will go out to suspected ‘criminals’ warning them of the crackdown. Hard-core file sharers could have their broadband speed greatly reduced to try and stop them.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI, which represents the music industry, said: “All of the major ISPs in the UK now recognise they have a responsibility to deal with illegal file-sharers on their networks.”

Illegal music downloads are illegal, I have no arguement, someone has worked to produce it and should get paid. With legitimite MP3 download sites competing so heavily, it’s not expensive to purchase the music you listen to.

What of our privacy? Does this mean that our in and out web data is being monitored and analysed?

In everything we do, we have a thing called choice and freedom. I walk into my nearby shop and I can choose to steal a Mars bar or buy it. I can choose to browse for hours on end while snacking on their frosties cereal, or I could choose to buy some gum and get out. I don’t expect or want the shopkeeper to attach himself to me the second I hit the door, holding my hands by my sides and walking me around, it’s invasive. Though I choose not to steal Mars bars and open their cereal boxes, the freedom to choose makes me feel human. I for one don’t want my freedoms removed.