Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

03.17.05
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Linkylove or blog fuckwittery?

How many apples of rotten experience does it take to sour a whole barrel?

That’s a question that Adagio Teas should be asking themselves right about now. They recently made an offer on their website that if you link to them you get a reward ‘commensurate with your webpage’s Google PageRank’, and sure enough, if you search Technorati you’ll find a good number of blog posts from people who’ve been happy to take some tea off Adagio’s hands for the sake of a link. Nice bit of PR, you might think? Well, yes, until you get to Jay Allen’s experience, and then it all starts to sour.

Jay sent in a link to a blog post that he had written about Adagio Teas, but because Adagio were looking at Google’s PageRank to determine which of three rewards linkers should get – 0-2 get a tea sample; 3/4 get a sampler set, 5+ get an ingenuiTEA Set – and because the PageRank of a single post is not the same as the blog it’s posted on, Jay got only a tea sampler when he should have got the tea set.

Now that’s not, really, a big deal. What brings this whole story into the blog fuckwittery camp is the response of Adagio’s customer service representative, Ilya Kreymerman, who managed to show a complete lack of comprehension about how blogs work, i.e. that a post can be on the front page of a blog and in the archives at the same time. He then went on to be sarcastic and rude in Jay’s comments.

How, precisely is this supposed to help the situation? And how close are Adagio going to get to stuffing up a nice bit of PR with some ill-conceived ‘banter’ that does nothing but make them look like a bunch of nitpicking, tight-wad chancers?

This is something that has bugged me about alleged customer service representatives since pretty much the dawn of time. Listen, Mr/Ms Customer Service Person, your job is to say ‘I’m sorry. How can we make this better?’, not ‘This is all your fault, you’re an idiot, you should have done/not done this.’ Is that really so hard to comprehend?

Disgruntled bloggers are a vociferous bunch, and any company who thinks about using blogs to manufacture good PR have to remember that it can be easily undone. Piss off just a few popular bloggers and you’ll be really wishing you hadn’t.

UPDATE: Adagio Teas’ Ilya Kreymerman emailed me after reading this, and offered to send me tea because even though I hadn’t applied for their link scheme, I’d still linked to them. I accepted their offer, and true to their word they sent me one of their ingenuiTEA Sets and some tea. So, whilst I still think the tone of Ilya’s posts on Jay’s blogs were somewhat ill-considered, I will freely say that their wee tea set is pretty darn ingenious and cool. Unfortunately I never drink tea, but my parents say that the leaves Adagio sent are a good step up from “the usual stuff we drink”.

So, a good save from Kreymerman, or have I been swayed by a freebie? Bit of both, I’d say, but you can make your own mind up.

03.16.05
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Etech Camgirl!

I had really hoped to get over to Etech this year, but circumstances conspired against me and instead I am stuck here in Dorset, bemoaning my fate. Well, not completely… Thanks to iChat, a webcam, Kevin Marks and the very flakey network at the Etech venue, I’ve been Etech Camgirl, as Cory put it, smiling out at everyone from Kevin’s laptop.

Etech by webcam

The view from here

I’ve caught snatches of various presentations, although never enough to say for certain what they were about, and have mingled with attendees in the hallways and lobby. I have smiled and waved at a number of very pixelated faces, and attempted to say hello to some people who probably couldn’t hear what I was saying – I certainly had a hard time making out what they were saying – but it was fun anyway.

If you were amongst that number and asked me what the weather was like in England, I was trying to say that it’s been dull and grey here.

Virtual attendance it is not – no need for O’Reilly to get worried about people ‘getting in’ for free. But it gives me a feel for the conference, for what I’m missing out on, and it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. I just wish that the networks were a little more robust, and that webcams were better, and then maybe, just maybe, it would I would have spent the majority of the last few hours actually watching and listening, instead of restarting iChat, attempting to get a video link going, and cursing the connection when it craps out.

Fingers crossed that next year I get to be there in person.

(Crossposted from Chocolate and Vodka.)

03.15.05
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Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business

When people think about ‘business blogs’, they usually think about blogs used as marketing tools by businesses who want to open a dialogue with the public. Thus discussions about business blogging tend to revolve around issues like authenticity, transparency, honesty and voice.

There is, however, a ‘dark matter’ of blogs which we know exists but which we cannot observe directly. These ‘dark blogs’ are those used internally by companies for purposes such as team management, event logging, cross-shift communications or knowledge sharing. Because dark blogs are behind the firewall we can’t see them, can’t evaluate their usefulness or find out what hurdles had to be jumped in their implementation.

Yet, because blogs are easy to use, flexible and cost-effective, they are an obvious choice for business use. Coupled with RSS feeds, aggregators, and other social software, it is possible to create a powerful knowledge sharing system which can be used with minimal training and IT outlay.

For the last few months I have been talking to a number of blog software vendors and blog technology companies, along with businesses that are using blogs behind the firewall, and have gained their support for a new research project – Dark Blogs.

In Dark Blogs I shall be interviewing businesses from a variety of industry sectors to find out how they use blogs, RSS feeds, aggregators and other social software; what challenges they faced and how they surmounted them; and the impact that blogging has had on their business.

The case studies, some of which will include a podcast/webcast, will be published here on Strange Attractor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The first one is already underway, so keep your eyes open for it!

If you are interested in being a sponsor or a case study, please email me and I will send you a prospectus.

03.15.05
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Blogs in Action

Six Apart have organised an event on 24 March at 6.00 PM in London called Blogs in Action, which will examine how individuals and companies are using blogs in business. The panel includes Neil McIntosh from the Guardian Online, Dominique Busso CEO of Vnunet Europe and Charlie Schick of Nokia Lifeblog, John Dale from the University of Warwick and Business Blogging award winner Paul Dale.

03.06.05
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Technorati release related tags

Technorati have expanded the power of their tags with the release of a related tags feature. If you search for the tag, for example, you’re now shown all related tags – , , , , , , , .

Dave Sifry tells me that the way they are collating these synonyms and related terms is by seeing which tags are being commonly used together and then assuming that the most frequently used tag combinations are revealing a valuable relationship between terms. “I’m amazed that it works so well given how simple it is,” he says.

This is almost precisely what I suggested in January when tags were first released, and it’s a good step forward for tagging. One of the things I like about it is that it’s revealing the way that people are using tags together, rather than attempting to impose some sort of formal thesaurus. For example, if you look for the tag ‘language’, you also get the tags politics, English, projects, culture, writing, personal, and books, which I’m betting no one would have predicted in an imposed taxonomy.

Of course, I still have to remember to actually tag my posts…

03.04.05
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Streaming mp3s

Thanks to Jascha, I can now give you the LSE debate as a stream, rather than just a download. It’s amazingly easy to achieve this:

1. Copy the full URI to the mp3 file, e.g. http://uri.com/an_audio_file.mp3 (ensure there are no spaces in the URI as that seems to stuff things up)
2. Paste the URI into a text document
3. Save the text document as an_audio_file.mp3.m3u
4. Upload the .m3u file
5. Link to the .m3u file in your post
6. Users clicking the link will then be able to listen to the file as a stream, instead of having to download it

Of course, all this kerfuffle with podcasting/streaming this LSE debate recording might lead you to believe that there’s something really wonderful about it that makes it terribly important to have disseminated across the web. That’s not really true. It’s more proof of concept for me, because soon I hope to do some more audio stuff and this happens to have been the first time I’ve ever tried to podcast/stream on Strange Attractor. So sorry if you end up listening to it and think “I went through all that for this?”

03.04.05
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Full feed!

In case you were wondering, the jiggery pokery in the RSS feed over the last 24 hours was due to the kind people up at Corante Towers fixing it so that it’s a full post feed instead of excerpts only. I prefer full feeds, so I’m pleased with the new arrangements. Means you can now enjoy Strange (if ‘enjoy’ is quite the right word) from the comfort of your aggregator.

03.03.05
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MP3 of The Fall and Fall of Journalism debate

As I mentioned, I have a recording of nearly all of Monday’s LSE debate, minus a bit at the end and some feedback I edited out, which has now been uploaded to Corante. It’s a bit of a monster mp3 – 80 mins long and nearly 28 MB. Here’s a normal link to it, and I’m also attempting to podcast it, but bear with me if that goes a bit pear shaped.

If anyone wants to do edited highlights or a bit of processing to remove some of the noise, please feel free. If you want the original wav, I can provide it.

UPDATE: Ok, MT doesn’t enclose the enclosure, so I’m trying a Feedburner feed. Sorry for inflicting my learning curve on you. This would be so simple in Blogware.