Category: Uncategorized

I had a longer rant storing up about Cingular’s policies, but I just have to say… bleeehhhhhh!

Last week, I replaced the five-year-old candy bar Nokia with a Treo 650, in the process moving my AT&T account to Cingular, officially (my phone has reminded me for months that I’m on Cingular’s network). Despite signing up for another two years of service, despite being a customer for nine years, despite spending a good chunk of change on a new phone, despite signing up for unlimited data service, Cingular dinged me for an $18.00 “upgrade fee.” Hello?!?!?! I’ve been a customer for nine years. You bought the company for the customers, among other things — why annoy them and harass them? Especially when they are not the cheapest customers you have.

I complained to the store rep, I complained to the store manager, I complained to their customer service rep on the phone (while in the store)… all to no avail. The most aggravating part? Each time, all three people said they couldn’t do anything about the charge, and several times referred to those who made this (bad) decision as “they.” This is from people who WORK for Cingular. You can’t shuffle off responsibility to the invisible bad guys — you are the company, especially if you work in a store. I could have pursued the process online, but my situation seemed cumbersome enough that spending time with a person was likely to be more effective. I got little satisfaction. If my wife wasn’t already a Cingular customer, I would have moved my number.

After the upgrade fiasco, I figured I was in the story, I should combine our numbers into their family plan (same price, better minutes, with free calls between the numbers on the same line). How’s this for irony? The process involved my sales rep in the story spending 30 minutes on the phone talking to someone to wade through the process. It got done (with another $18 fee!), but… why bother having a store??!

Moral of the story: cellular customer service is still a quagmire, and I do believe there is a place for someone with reasonable rates to deliver a service that makes sense without beating up the customer. My time is worth something, and besides making me angry over $18, Cingular wasted 90 minutes of my life. I think a cellular company needs to hire Seth Godin and remind themselves that customers matter, and empowering employees to solve problems pays off.

Wellington: The Years of the Sword was written in 1969 by Elizabeth Longford, a descendent of her subject. Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was as close to being the British Army’s version of the Navy’s Lord Nelson as anyone got. If you want a short biography, try this Victorian Web page. The book, as the title suggests, delves into his military career deeply. Since I selected this biography based on Bernard Cornwell’s recommendation, no surprises, but welcome factual details and even a few (not enough) diagrams and maps. It’s not incredibly well-written, and it’s admiring enough to remind you that she’s writing about a relative, but it’s quite readable. Still, I’m looking forward to the fictional accounts of the Peninsular campaign more than ever.

I’ve seen this book before, so I think it must be in my mother or father’s house on a bookshelf somewhere, though I’m returning it to the San Francisco library tomorrow.

Five years ago, Dan Bricklin posted The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. This excellent essay explains simply what factors need to combine to create common value out of individual selfishness, and why it’s more likely in the information age. The recent flurry of activity around tagging and folksonomies prompted him, in January, into a brief return to some of the lessons from his original post. Not all systems follow the guidelines which emerged from his essay, and he added a reminder that no one must feel guilty for not contributing.

Broadly, though, the folks at the leading edge of web development are delivering applications which build on the lessons captured in his essay, whether causally or not.

Via Randy, I found Stefano Mazzochi’s post on, among other things, a method for disambiguating tags in a web-wide folksonomy. He ends the post with “And, to prove the point, we have built a system on this 🙂 Stay tuned.” It’s a deep look at a new idea… but he better deliver the promised system if he wants anyone to implement such a complex vision. Mazzochi states, after showing one of his hash-encoded samples: “Note that the lack of readability of that statement is a feature, not a bug: these instructions are meant for machines to be processed, not for humans.” Well, I would argue that getting tools deployed to create such technically sophisticated metadata is a non-starter. Many people adhere to the “worse is better” mantra that is credited (partly) for the web’s explosion. Still, clearly a smart guy and I’ll pay attention… Mazzochi was thinking about the economic and social aspects of metadata in 2002. From Mazzochi’s CV, you can watch a thirty-five minute video (RealMedia) on The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring. Most of what he presents is now almost common sense, but he was a year or two (at least) ahead of most folk, even Stewart and Joshua. At least in this video, Mazzochi clearly understands Bricklin’s points.

Along these lines, Ryan King gets excited about microformats, pulling together links to many different ideas that have been bubbling for months. I’m interested in those suggested by Adrian Holovaty. In all of these instances, as far as I can tell, the bootstrap factor is high, meaning that the individual user or site will not get a lot of benefit from adding this blessedly simple and human-readable metadata to their markup. Smart sites already draw these connections within their own sites, whether with explicit markup or not. It is absolutely valuable to individuals — and therefore to those that want to serve those individuals as customers — to cross site boundaries. The question is whether the sites and individuals doing the markup will reap the bounty directly, or only indirectly through increased relevance (and, one hopes, return) in external search engines and aggregators. If microformats delivered some selfish utility more directly, then the cornucopia of the commons would fuel their growth. Maybe I’m missing some examples of immediate return on investment (of time and tools)… let me know. Either way, microformats are an OK place to place some low-cost, low-friction bets with the hope of future goodness rebounding to those who help accelerate the bootstrap.

Just in case you haven’t tried Newsburst yet, here’s an easy way to follow clock: Add clock to Newsburst. If you’re not registered (free) at any CNET site, you’ll be asked to register. There are, of course, many more reasons to use Newsburst.

If you want to build your own “add to Newsburst” link, just start with \\http://www.newsburst.com/Source/?add=PUTyourFEEDurlHERE. (Apologies for Radio making that a link… I forget the escape character.)

Or use the form here to generate your own Newsburst button for your feed(s).

So Scoble posts that the HeyPix acquisition by CNET Networks’ Webshots is possibly a bigger photo deal than Flickr going to Yahoo. Later, Scoble points to a response from a member of Flickr’s board of directors, Frank Boosman. Only time will tell what all this means and who’s “right.” My one quibble with Boosman’s response is the misleading interpretation of the second graph, showing Alexa traffic rank for Webshots and Flickr. Check the Y-scale of the graph and then reevaluate for yourself what the growth means vis-a-vis the relative sizes of the two services. You can do the damndest things with numbers.

Remember, I’m both a Flickr and Webshots user, and I work at CNET Networks, just to get my biases out on the table.

Thanks to Jeff Carlson for pointing out the travesty of red ink’s demise in the classroom (CNN). With many teachers in the family, I know that red ink is still alive in some classrooms. Also, as a parent, if my kids can’t handle red ink on their work, well, we’re doing even more wrong than I thought.

Paul Graham, on Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas, notes:

If you’re going to spend years working on something, you’d think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You’d think. But people don’t. …
Part of the problem is that big projects tend to grow out of small ones.

Whittled down my current reading to, oh, two skimmed newspapers, three dense magazines, six open Safari windows, and two books nearly complete. I think I need to take some drastic steps off the information consumption path… but it’s a pretty interesting time all around, so I would definitely feel like I’m missing something.

Maybe I should set up a routine whereby for every 1,000 (5,000?) words I read, I have to write 100?

Actually, it’s not just geeks who will find the new Link Count numbers from PubSub interesting, but geeks will have fun arguing over a new dataset. Read all the details on Bob Wyman’s blog post. news.com.com was 34th in the top 100 for yesterday (March 31, 2005), with 161 sites linking 518 times. Thanks to each one. Only glitch is on the Out-links reckoning… because News.com sends its external links through a redirect, it’s difficult (at least) for a third-party to “see” these links as external. There are lots of outbound links, in nearly every single story published, but I guess that’s the price paid for tracking the volume and direction of links. Also, PubSub (for understandable reasons) is only tracking links IN the feeds, it seems, and News.com feeds include a short description, not the body text.

Thanks to Bob and PubSub for sharing this data. We can all discuss what it means, but useful to have another metric to triangulate on what’s going on.

I know the folks at Webshots.com, but sometimes I forget just how many real people are using the service. For all the blog excitement about Flickr, the Alexa.com details about Webshots are a useful reminder that there are millions of people using Webshots every day. Alexa’s traffic figures are hard to compare against other data… how I long for more transparency in this area… but relatively speaking, you don’t rank in the top 40 or 50 sites in the world without some serious size. (And check the surge since October 2004 in the graph.)

Webshots is 24th in the Alexa list of the top 100 English-language sites, and that includes some of the advertising networks (read: pop-ups). Wow.

Here’s my Webshots home page. For now, only one small public album… sharing family photos beyond family and friends just isn’t my thing, and the kids are (surprise) the subject of most of my photos. But I like the Ocean Beach shot.