problems

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Uncoverage

February 21, 2008 in problems | 1 comment

Not sure whether or not it’s a local thing, but Verizon’s cell service seems to be especially lame lately — at least for me. Riding home to Santa Barbara yesterday on the Pacific Coast Highway, there seemed to be more than the usual dropouts. Here in the Omni Hotel in downtown Los Angeles (on Olive), I’m getting one bar on the Treo 700p, and the service is marginal at best. (Now, in another meeting room, it’s none. “No service” it says.) I’d say it was my phone, except that my EvDO service, which uses a card working as a phone in the laptop, is outright dead. It was dead in West Covina yesterday too. Just a red light and no connection at all. The guy next to me saw me looking at my dead phone. “Verizon?” he said. “Yeah,” I replied. He shook his head.

Meanwhile, the hotel has no room Internet, because something went down and they’re waiting for something else to be “flown in” or something. Between flaky WiFi in the conference spaces, no Internet of any kind in the rooms, and EvDO that doesn’t work, I’m not getting much done online. So if you’re expecting something, bear with me.

[Later…] On an upper floor of the Omni, facing Olive and the Disney Hall, I’m getting five bars and a green light on the EvDO card. Speed, 940kbps down, 118kbps up. Much better. Alas, I have to go to dinner and stuff, so I still won’t get anything done. But at least I’ll sleep tonight. Last night I drove to Santa Barbara and back this morning, and the total was about 5 hours on the road, flanking 3 hours of sleep.

CRM well done, by CR

February 18, 2008 in problems, VRM | 1 comment

I’ve been a Consumer Reports reader and subscriber since the 1960s. And things have always been good between us, until this past few months, after changing my delivery address from my home in California to my apartment near Boston.

So, a few minutes ago, I went on the ConsumerReports.org website, to check out my account info and see what’s up. Turns out the address change in September failed, and somehow got turned into an old-old Santa Barbara address. So I changed it to the Massachusetts address, and went on to try to get some back issues. Then the system told me there was a problem with my address and looped me back into the Account Setup form, where I discovered that the street address took, but the city did not, so I had a new street address and an old city address. There was no way to tell this unless I went back and looked. So, the system was a bit busted. Fortunately, they do provide a number for calling in. And, even though it’s a holiday, a human being answered the phone immediately after I punched a number on a promting menu — and just the first of those, instead of one after a long series. The human, a native speaker of English, found that indeed the system had a problem, and corrected it all, even getting me all the available back issues, and reporting the problem to the magazine’s technical folks.

Consumer reports also provides a way to report problems by email inside their site, including plenty of room to explain things. I did that too.

All this is good, and worthy of kudos. Others should take notice.

Here’s hoping they’ll be up for welcoming VRM to match their CRM. Sure hope so.

Is Google selling out to the GOP?

February 17, 2008 in Berkman, Blogging, Ideas, Journalism, News, problems | 5 comments

… or is the GOP just buying stuff from Google and bragging about it?

Marc Canter wondered the former with Is Google being played like a violin, which he wrote after reading this press release from GOPConvention2008.com. From the release:

  As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP’s online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques.
  and…
  “As more Americans go online to learn about elections, we’re pleased to work with the Republican National Convention to give citizens around the world easy access to convention information and new ways to engage in the event,” said David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer.
  “This year, YouTube will bring a new dimension to this landmark event by enabling GOP visitors to share their unique experiences with the world through the power of online video,” said Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder. “We look forward to working with the convention committee and watching the action unfold.”

This would be pure PR jive and nothing more if the release were restricted to the first paragraph. But when two high-level Google Execs, including its Chief Legal Officer, provide sales blurbs to just one side (so far) of a partisan political battlefield, expect Serious Questions to follow.

To help answer those questions, some context.

First, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch, makes clear at least one strong trend in computing that is being led by Google (along with Amazon, Yahoo and others): Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. No, personal computing won’t go away, but much of what we need, from storage to applications and raw compute power, will be available (and increasingly relied upon) as utility services. As utilities, these are going to be as free from prejudice about usage as are electricity, gas, water and waste treatment. (That is, not totally free, but sensibly so.) Looking at what the GOP says it will do with Google utilities, I’d say that’s the case here.

Second, it’s important to study how utility providers such as Google engage with large customers (and whole countries) that some find objectionable. For a view on that, check out the recent talk by the dissident Chinese journalist Michael Anti at the Berkman Center. Ethan Zuckerman has a long and helpful write-up. So does David Weinberger. From the latter:

  Q: (colin) Anything that international companies can do?
  A: If Congress banned Google from doing business with China, what would happen to gmail? If Microsoft left China, what about Messenger? For Congress, it’s easy to be black and white. But the Chinese people depend on these tools to communicate about freedom and rights. The real cost is Chinese freedom. (Yahoo is different. It’s “a real bad thing.” It “didn’t do any good to China.”) The Chinese authorities want to embrace the Internet, to be part of the international community, not like North Korea. So we should encourage them to do more with the Internet and to continue to say that the Internet is good. The outside world should encourage as well as blame the Chinese government. The Chinese people don’t like blame and don”t like being told what to do.

Somewhere in there (not sure it got on the podcast) Michael said that Google had great leverage through a single simple fact: most people working for the Chinese government use Gmail. Leverage isn’t always something that is actively used. In fact, in many (perhaps most) cases it doesn’t need to be brought up at all. It’s simply a fact that must be recognized.

Whether one likes or dislikes Google’s engagement with China, or the GOP, at least it’s engaged. For some things it may be in a better position to make a positive difference than if it were not engaged.

As for Yahoo, Michael said that the company had completely lost face in China. Never mind that, as this TechCrunch post puts it, Yahoo owns only 40% of Yahoo China. And that Yahoo may have “been made a scapegoat for the flaws of US foreign policy”. The fact remains that Yahoo, according to the International Herald Tribune, “provided information that helped Chinese state security officials convict a Chinese journalist for leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site…”

There is no doubt that Google has been far more successful than Yahoo in dealing with China. Is it just because Google has a “don’t be evil” imperative and Yahoo does not? I don’t think so. Rather I think that Google has been smart and resourceful in ways that Yahoo has not. Specifically, Google has stayed true to its roots as a tech company with specific and easily understood guiding principles. Yahoo had those too, and for longer than Google. But Yahoo broke faith with those principles, and lost its integrity, when it decided to become an entertainment company and hired Terry Semel as its CEO. In doing so Yahoo ceased being a flagpole and instead became a flag — one that soon will be flying from somebody else’s pole.

Quotes du jour

February 17, 2008 in News, problems | 2 comments

I believe the unbroken web is the source of creativity, something that belongs to all of humankind…
I believe the arts belong to everyone and that artists should be revered in culture. They are not, especially in a world run by anti-creative, left-brained bean counters. I’m not sure it’ll ever be any different, and for me personally, that’s okay. For no bean counter will ever experience the rush that is touching the unbroken web. That, my friends, is a form of currency more costly than gold. — Terry Heaton

The cowards among us never started, and the weaklings died on the road. — Niles Searls, a forty-niner and later 14th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. Found via Hank Searls in his book Blood Song. Best quote from Hank: The adverb is the enemy of the verb.

UnAmerican Airline

February 15, 2008 in problems | 10 comments

Two days ago Jake McKee gave an amazing talk at There’s a New Conversation in New York. He came all the way from Dallas to share some of the great work he and his cohorts had done at the Lego Company, inspired in part by .

I didn’t get the whole backstory on the trip until I read this in his blog today.

The short of it is that American Airlines not only decided not to waive the opportunity to soak Jake an extra $359 for moving his departure from New York one day ahead to make his grandma’s funeral, but gave him this peevish, passive-aggressive policy-über-alles response: “American reviewed the policy a few years back and decided that since funeral homes, doctors, and clothiers don’t discount their rates, we shouldn’t either.”

Wow. What a shitty thing to say to a bereaved customer. Not to mention dumb and irrelevant.

Jake concludes,

  When I told Irving, the supervisor, that I’d been a loyal customer for years and that I felt that the “fare difference” (i.e. we charge more for certain times of the day for the exact same overhead) should be waived if for nothing else than because it was the best way American could return the loyalty I’d shown them over the years he said:
  “I’m not here to argue with you, sir.”
  And I’m not here to argue with you either, American. In fact, I’m not here to fly with you, defend you, or support you. Not only have I lost interested in maintaining our quasi-relationship, I’ll now actively work to find alternatives to using you. (Hard to do when you live in Dallas, but absolutely not impossible). I’ll encourage others to think twice about using you. All because you were more interested in potentially getting an extra $359.
  Bravo.
  You stuck to your principles, now it’s my turn.

And a sincere Bravo to Jake as well.

Late deliveries from the Gmail laundry

February 14, 2008 in Past, problems | 10 comments

I love Gmail for one thing: it launders spam out of mail going to my searls.com address. I have things set up so Gmail picks it up from my server, and I pick it up from Gmail. Last I checked, there were over 22,000 spams in Gmail’s spam box. And the last I went through ten pages (50 each) of those, there were no false finds.

But lately I haven’t been getting mail to Searls.com. Didn’t know what it was, but my wife just figured it out and provided helpful tech support. I needed to go into Settings in my Gmail account, then to Accounts, then down to Get mail from other accounts, and see when my mail was last picked up. Turns out it was 9 February. Here’s what the Fetch History said…

Now it says this:

So, some questions that maybe some of ya’ll can answer…

  1. Why did Gmail choke on the “timed out” message from my mail server, and not go back again?
  2. Why was it checking my server every several minutes before, and only every hour or so now?
  3. Can I make it speed up somehow? If so, where are those controls?

Here’s hoping my own conundrum may be helpful to others as well. No idea.

It is one helluva spam filter, I gotta say.

Aggregation aggravation

February 9, 2008 in Blogging, problems | 17 comments

Before I got pointed to this post by Steve Hodson, I hadn’t seen this post by Brian Solis, pointing to egos.alltop.com (“We’ve got egos covered”), which features my blog among others on the “egos” list. Alltop, a creation of Guy Kawasaki, describes its purpose this way:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”

In his headline Steve, who calls himself “a cranky old fart wandering the internet causing mayhem as he goes” (a self-characterization I can identify with, at least chronologically), calls Alltop’s egos page “yet another powder puff for the A-Listers”.

I’ve given up fighting the A-list label. But I’m glad to start fighting the egotist one. Even against a guy as I like and respect as much as I do Guy.

It’s a simple thing. I don’t blog for my ego, any more than I write emails or talk on the phone or do any of my daily work for the same reason. I blog to point at and comment on topics I think might be interesting, or that my readers might find interesting, and I’ve been doing pretty much exactly that, for roughly the same modest sum of readers (ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand a day), since 1999. There’s nothing sticky, commercial or especially self-serving about it — not even any advertising to distract or annoy the reader.

Writing about tech news is my day job. I do that mostly at Linux Journal. I don’t know any egotists over there, but they could use a little powdering just the same. The team there has worked hard over the last few months to make it a much better place to go for news and commentary on matters directly or peripherally related to the operating system that serves up most of what you see on the Web, plus a growing number of portable devices, movies, and much more.

So, Guy and Company: if you want to put my blog on one of your lists, I’m flattered. But if you insist on labeling me an ego, I’ll insist that you take me off.

Security at all costs

February 7, 2008 in problems | 3 comments

New Operation to Put Heavily Armed Officers in Subways, the headline says. It begins,

  In the first counterterrorism strategy of its kind in the nation, roving teams of New York City police officers armed with automatic rifles and accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs will patrol the city’s subway system daily, beginning next month, officials said on Friday.
  Under a tactical plan called Operation Torch, the officers will board trains and patrol platforms, focusing on sites like Pennsylvania Station, Herald Square, Columbus Circle, Rockefeller Center and Times Square in Manhattan, and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
  Officials said the operation would begin in March.
  Financing for the program will be funneled to the Police Department and will come from a pool of up to $30 million taken from $153.2 million in new federal transit grants to the state.

Are these “federal transit grants” meant to scare the bejesus out of ordinary citizens? Or could the money be put to better use, such as improving the subway experience in ways other than fright?

Why garb New York’s finest with the favorite fashion accessory of terrorists themselves?

Via Bruce Schneier.

Lets tawk

February 6, 2008 in Future, Past, problems | 6 comments

There’s a New Conversation is happening next week in New Yawk (my home skyline, though I’m from Jersey… you know, where New Yawk teams play). Wednesday, 1PM at the SAP Customer Center, 95 Morton Street. It costs money, but less than some cheap seats at professional ball games.

It’s a Cluetrain follow-up. Occasioned by the fact that it’s coming up on ten years since David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine and I started the conversation that ended up as the website and a book that still sells well.

Odd that Cluetrain is now marketing canon in many circles — and that “conversation marketing” is hot stuff — yet so much of the execution is no less bullshit than what we ranted against back at the turn of the Millennium.

What will we talk about? As they say where I grew up, Hey, you tell me. And the rest of us. I have ideas, but let’s start with yours. Put ’em in the comments below.

Advertising vs. Newspapers

February 1, 2008 in Journalism, News, problems | 1 comment

Robert Niles in OJR:

  News publishers like to point to television, free news online, English literacy rates and slew of other reasons to explain their readership losses. But the contempt that newspapers show for their readers by burying their editorial content beneath their remaining advertising surely is not helping keep readers around.

He goes on,

  Everyday I check the website of the Pasadena Star-News. And every day, the front section of the website’s homepage is obscured by a pop-up widget urging me to take a survey about the site’s new design. Click the red “X” in the corner to close the widget window, and the op-up appears every time you return to the page. (If you click the button decling to take the survey, the window disappears for the remainder of your session.)
  If I register with the LA Times website, the Times insists on spamming me with commercial e-mails for products about which I do not care. If I opt-out of the e-mails, the Times cancels my website registration. (Which is why I don’t have a Times website registration anymore…
  And let’s not forget the slew of pop-up, pop-under and screen take-over ads that accompany any visit to more newspaper websites than I am any longer able to count.

When we’re in Santa Barbara we get the LA Times, and I agree with Robert’s complaints. And I’ve been advising papers to get the clues for a long time too. This time, however, Robert offers a new clue that I really like:

  if news organizations are proud of their news content, why do so many insist on hiding it?
  Readers owe you nothing. They have no responsibility as citizens to read your reporting, and no responsibility as consumers to look at your ads. The have the right, and ability, to go about their lives without ever once glancing at your publication.
  If you want people to read your publication, you then need to do whatever is necessary to make them want to read it.
  That means leading with your best shot.

Lots more there. Read the whole thing.

Via the Head Lemur.

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