Tim Hardy

Two weeks ago, one of my credit cards was cloned.

I pay for my internet connection using that card so, after cancelling the Visa, I tried calling Bulldog Broadband to update my payment details.

No one answered that day or the next or the next or …

This morning I held from 7.50am to 9.40am. Finally I hung up and called their sales line. The phone was picked up within two rings.

The sales person, however, was obnoxious when he realised I was an existing customer and hung up on me.

I called back and demanded to speak to a manager.

She apologised, took my new card details and promised to have my account updated with the correct details. It took less than 30 seconds. Too bad I had already wasted close to 20 hours listening to hold music in the last fortnight.

So, if you are struggling to get through to Bulldog I advise you to call their sales line instead of their Customer Service, Technical Support or Finance departments, none of whom ever answer the phone. It’s 08000 15 16 17. Be assertive.

Any company that cannot be bothered to properly staff its Customer Support areas deserves to have its sales lines tied down with non-sales issues. If this starts hitting them in the wallet by preventing new sign ups then maybe they’ll do something about the problem.

If you do not have a Bulldog account and are tempted by the adverts - resist!

Mary Hodder summarizes and comments on discussion about the effects of rankings on weblogs:

Whenever there is a measurement, a power law develops where those at the top sit and the rest bend their behaviors toward them, trying to attain top status they don’t have. Link counts mean people change their behavior to get more links. It’s not the spammers I fear, but us.

But if we get rid of rankings, and instead see topic based communities with long standing conversation, can we get out of some of that power law dynamic? I’m not sure. Maybe not. Maybe we must simply refuse the metrics all together. I think it’s an open question.

Women are not fairly represented in the most popular weblogs and I note, with shame, that my own blogroll these days is almost exclusively male. When I first started weblogging in January 2001 perhaps a third of my regular reads were from female webloggers. What is now called the blogosphere was pretty evenly mixed.

I took a long break from running a public weblog (switching to a private one to keep track of links that interested me in the way I use del.icio.us now) and when I returned with this present one the medium seemed very male.

I really welcome the attempt she’s championing to move away from a “top lists” approach where new entrants to the scene link to the current favourites in the hope of a link back thereby reinforcing the A list’s dominance. There’s a post-Cluetrain self-congratulatory air among popular bloggers that conveniently ignores the fact that they, like the old media they deride, tend to treat their readers as passive consumers.

Creating tools that flatten the curve and build communities of interest will enrichen everyone intellectually and emotionally (although a few may find their Adsense revenues declining).

The real problem is scaling attention. Readers have limited time. As more and more blogs are available, it will become harder and harder to find and discover the gems buried in all the noise. We need to help readers focus, filter, and prioritize.

The real problem of scaling for growth of the blogosphere is not scaling the tools, but scaling the readers.

(Gred Linden: On the State of the Blogosphere)

You can’t grep an mp3 nor speed-read a QuickTime file. If filtering signal from noise is difficult in text-based blogs that can be parsed with well-established tools, think how much harder it is to find good content in podcasts and videoblogs, the content of which is not (yet) machine-comprehensible. Until speech-to-text synthesis improves, the only answer is for aggregators to analyse users habits and suggest feeds based on current subscriptions.

My ideal recommendation tool would include an option to ignore the most popular podcasts, blogs and videoblogs and only suggest those buried deep within the long tail. As more and more people unsubscribe from the A list such filters would help bring them into contact with people who haven’t already grown so popular that they think of their subscribers as an audience rather than as fellow participants in a wider conversation.

Google have just improved their support for wildcards in search, enabling you to search for a phrase with key elements replaced with an asterisk.

Their quoted example Glasgow is the * capital of Europe (sounds like a nice place to visit, huh?) inspired me to try something similar.

Top ten results for google search: “george bush is the biggest * in history” reveal

I’ve wanted this feature for a while (and full regex pattern matching) but now that it’s here my mind goes blank and all I can think of doing with it is making cheap shots, however, I’m confident that this will prove very useful in the near future.