Christmas  Gift Ideas for Geek and Dudes

So it’s Monday morning and a year to the day of the first post I’ve decided to edit this one and add and subtract  a product or two so, here are a few gift ideas for dudes and geeks.

Looking for Xmas gifts for ones dad or brother, or boyfriend or husband  at Christmas is never easy – I’m not saying this post will make that task any easier either and most of these ideas for Christmas gifts are quite probably a little out of the budget range for some, but…,you might be feeling generous so what the hey. There’s a mixed bag ranging from a tenner up to a couple of k, so fill your proverbial boots and happy Christmas shopping! 

Zagg Sparq Ipad/ Iphone Dual USB Charger

First off, a damn handy present for iPhone heads like me would be a
iPad iPhone Dual Portable Charger in the manufacturers words “Energize your digital life with four times the portable power: the ZAGGsparq 2.0 is the standard for on-the-go charging. Convenient for travelers and business people, it carries four complete recharges for most power-hungry smart phones. The ZAGGsparq 2.0 recharges with a standard outlet and provides two USB ports for powering mobile devices. Perfect for everything from cell phones to hand-held gaming systems. Dead batteries and expensive spares are a thing of the past.” Looks pretty good if you ask me!

150 things every man should know

We men like random stuff, so here’s a book that looks a lot of fun and is probably going to be a big success -”150 Things Every Man Should Know: Telling You the Things Your Best Friend Can’t” .  Fundamentally a lot of us are a little bit dumb and could do with reading stuff like this, just to remind ourselves or save face of asking a smartass who does. Not quite worked out the how to shave without cutting yourself bit yet? (see below for another answer)  or not sure of your ‘having a piss etiquette’ or what about more mundane topics  ‘tie tying’, ‘tyre changing’ . The dude it seems has written a book to solve all these woes. I haven’t read it, but if I got it in my Xmas stocking, then I’d probably smile and read it.

Macbook Pro

I must say I’ve always like Apple products , they are stylish, reliable, cool and geeky. My daughter has a mac book, she’s had it for a while. I’ve never used it but it does have a certain style and difference to it that for whatever reason, traditional PC manufacturers just haven’t quite managed to emulate.  We had a visitor to the office the other day who was raving about the coolness of his new apple macbookpro saying how fast and light and generally brilliant it was and I must confess I did start to think, hmmn, I see where he’s coming from.

In any case, you can buy a Macbook Pro for as little as £749 for a 13inch or for £1795 you can get a new MacBook Pro 17inch with its 2.8GHz processor 4GB ram 500GB hard drive.

iPhone 4

Next up on my I’d love to have is the IPhone4 – I still have an iphone 3g, – I like it, it’s very cool, it has bundles of apps and does lots of cool stuff. It is kinda deficient though in some respects, it’s missing the whole video thing. I can’t upload video content to places like youtube and posterous,  it isn’t as fast and it’s really crap for battery time. That said, it’s an amazing piece of technology that I can read emails on,  read webpages, tweet, facebook, audioboo etc.

So please, any budding Father Christmas’s out there who’d like to treat me to one,  I’m pleased to tell you that you can buy the  iphone 4 new from  £610-00. Yep, a lot of money for a phone, but this is no ordinary phone after all. This is a phone on steroids.

Android Phone

Or maybe you don’t like Apple stuff – perhaps you are turned off by the whole idea and want something a little bit more flexible – Android smartphones look pretty cool and their functionality is pretty much on par with iPhones.

I’ve seen a few videos over the past year or so, one in particular that caught my eye was augmented reality – in plain speak this a feature that overlays what your camera see with map and locational data. So lets say that you are in location x and want to get a better feel for where you are, then this phone hooks up with things like Google street view and has the ability to label places and reconfigure the vista as you move. Another neat function was the ability to hook it up to Google base and get prices from shoips without even entering the store – need to get the best priced camera in Tottenham Ct Road? No problem just walk down the street, enter the product name, point and scan the high street and the various prices will flash up on your screen overlaid on the shop it locates. This HTC Hero Sim Free Android Smartphone is listed at £369.99 from amazon.

Braun Series 7 Shaver

I hate shaving, most men do. Show me a man who enjoys a shave and I’ll show you a man who erm..has too much time on his hands. My daily shave ritual usually entails, lathering up, plugging in a new mach 3 shaver head bought at the exorbitant price of around £9 for 5 shaves. Every now and then ( more often than not) I cut myself. It’s a pita – face bleeds, tissue gets stuck to said cut, and you sit on the train looking like the dummy who cut himself shaving again. So, no more of that methinks, it’s time to save on my shave! ( ok poor choice of pun but you get the enthusiasm, no? ) Enter the Braun Series 7 790cc Shaver in addition to the fact it has the words 790cc in its title ( WTF motorbike engine size speak) it also sounds like it belongs in a start trek episode and is adorned in the same colours as what miss 7 of 9 used to wear. It has  an almost robot R2D2 look to it, leading me to conclude that the designer was definitely a trekkie and star wars fan too. It isnt cheap mind, but over time It would certainly save some time, pain and money too.  It’s priced at £165 ( reduced from the RRP price of £249.99) so even if you spend just £5 per week to shave, you’ll be quids in within a year and have less war wounds too. Jesus look at me, I sound like a fonkin salesman.

X Rocker Pro Gamer Seat

I like the look of this – I might even buy Jord one for Christmas. Its a seat for gamers. I’m not that much of a gamer myself, but I could just nestle down and have more of a go with this thing. It has surround sound, sub woofers, wireless, it even vibrates too which is bound to push any gamer experience up a notch, and for fat boys like me, might even be adaptable to some kind of massage game. Do they sell massage games for Xbox? You can buy the X-Rocker Profor £129.99 or get it at boys stuff for £199.

So there you have it, just a few ideas for xmas gifts. If you happen to make a purchase from any of these links I should point out that I do get a small commission ( painfully small I might add). That said I have shopped around and believe it or not amazon in most cases was often cheapest simply because of the various relationships its established with product providers.

I can’t tag this post, my db is borkden, so please no whinges or whines about my lack of categorisation or tagging, ta! Happy shopping!.

Related posts:

1. Will Apple Approve or Reject the Spotify App?

I’m writing this on a phone so forgive the formatting and lack of links and screenshots, i’ll tidy up later.

There’s a lot of change on Google these days, a lot of activity in spaces that Google were once content to monetize with ads.The clear separation that once existed between Googles organic results and its paid ads inventory is becoming increasingly blurred as it pushes on into query spaces that were once the preserve of a diverse bunch of web publishers.

Unwritten Contract? WTF – Explain Yourself Man

Defining the contract is important, it went a little like this. Google would spider and index webmaster content and show the outputs to user queries in its web results. It would overlay these with ads and monetize through clicks from people interested. It wouldn’t participate in the SERPS directly unless there was a clear deficit in the marketplace. The distinction was clear and plain for all to see. Organic and paid were separate, Google wasn’t in the business of ranking its ad supported services over competing services. It was not an abuser of its monopoly position.

So, let’s look at a very recent change and ask the question, “Has the unwritten contract between Webmasters and Google been broken?”

For this query http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=distance+from+rome+to+geneva I’m seeing that Google now displays a map, with the distance and a link to directions above its organic results.

This reduces the likelihood of a click through to an organic result and helps drive traffic to Googles map product. You can see it in action in the graphic below.

In a week where the search giant announced a change to it’s tos regarding the map api, what are your thoughts on what appears to be yet another step of many encroachments into the organic space? If you were Google, you might well say, ‘Encroachments’ wtf, how very dare you but read on, as it’s a little more sophisticated than that and Google well knows it.

It’s our dinner plate and we are going to eat it

Last week or so it was ‘what’s my ip‘ and their learn more hyperlink.Providing users with both an answer to their query and a link to a Google page explaining. Net effect, other tools and publishers all lose as google pushes its own content.

Whilst some might “say no big deal move along”, others might see the wider implications of things like this and note how Google continues to eat at the table of organic.

What may seem like innocuous moves, the reality is that they often reduce people’s need to leave Google (take dictionary queries or date/time/currency/math based queries) taking traffic away from publishers that build content and thus increasing queries and ad clicks on Google. If the user finds what they need, then why even leave Google. Net impact, happy user, blissfully unaware of the slow death of content creators.

The logical extension of much of the above is that ultimately, Google finds ways of replicating what others do to a point of Google becomes a super affiliate feed of products and suppliers. Organic traffic becomes marginalised and joe public is hoodwinked under the guise of a better search experience. Meanwhile publishers become poorer dying a slow death and Google grows richer.

If you’re a brand then you might be safe or erm, maybe not as this post about yelp describes.

Before anyone shouts deal with it, or that’s business, or go build a search engine and do it yourself, please, let’s try and be intelligent here and react from the perspective of a publisher. Many of the “Google deserves it all” type debates have been done to death so I doubt anyone want’s those back and forths rehashed. My view is that with great power comes great responsibility. Google has a responsibility to behave in ways that aren’t anti competitive or that stifle creativity.

Publishers built the web but it’s ok as we’ll just replace them

I’m more concerned with what if anything publishers can do about it. Sure, the answer of build a fabulous product that everyone wants and loves and needs rings true, but that doesn’t do much about the fact that for many people, a chrome browser or a search box on Google is their default way of finding things. If Google keeps chipping away like it does, then one day it might very well be your cool ecommerce/travel/hobby/science/news/art site that gets marginalised.

Without traffic, publishers on the web can’t survive. The unwritten contract that once existed between Google and webmaster is effectively broken.

What say you?

Meantime, here’s a nice track by the O’Jays

Related posts:

1. Google Position One Accounted for 75% of Clicks #ajaxserps
2. Dear Google, Stop Trying to Control the World’s Information

Yet Another Woe No More Analytics Post

So, Google decided to take the gloves off and twist the screw that little bit harder down on organic search. Caution, I suspect I might curse and swear and rant a little but hey, you can always hit the back button

I’m not going to rant about the outrageousness of it all as that’s been said by all and sundry. If you’ve landed here and don’t know what I’m talking about then, the short explanation is that Google have made a move in the name of privacy but have added a pretty hefty “by the way clause”  that’s sending shock waves through the online marketing community.

Put shortly, if you are one of these people who enjoys crunching numbers and delivering actionable insights derived from user queries to a domain then, that’s all about to change as you will no longer be able to determine the query part of the journey. All you’ll know is that they arrived on your site from Google. If it’s a paid click then no worries there, Google will allow that to stay as it’s valuable to the advertiser and useful to Google.

Valuable in the sense that advertisers need to know how their adspend on Google converts. (No point spending money if you don’t know how well it performs)  and useful to Google as if people don’t spend money their whole house falls. Google isn’t interested in how your organic campaigns perform or convert. There’s no money in it for them.

Privacy – We Care About Your Boss Snooping On Your Search Behaviours

Senior Google folks  have played the privacy card saying lots of things around how currently, people can spy on what you are searching for and that’s all a bit terrible.

It isn’t for me to say that that’s a big pile of horse shit other than many people don’t really buy it and are choosing to use language that’s a whole lot more culturally base. What I would say is that I’m far from convinced and somewhat disappointed by it all as to be honest, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t think that they’d ever encroach on this ground and that they’d be happy with existing levels of cash flow and profit, which if memory serves for Q3 were around the 10 billion dollar mark.

I’m not going to point to  lots of examples, you can take my opinion or leave it, but in my view Google isn’t a fan of SEO at all.  They know precisely how much commerce is generated through their platform and perhaps understandably would like more of the actual marketing spend to find its way to their bottom line. Put simply, if  SEO is too easily measured, too easily demonstrated that X spend on SEO channel equals X ROI then quite rightly marketing budgets are going to be adjusted to reflect this. This of course means less of such spend for Google.

Sure, Google have produced 100′s of videos, run webmaster forums designed to support webmasters, there’s WMT and a host of other initiatives designed to deliver help and insight in to creating better websites. Yet for me, like most things Google does these days, the impact of these are always two fold.  Owning the message for me is an important part of controlling or influencing what it is you want people to believe. There’s no point in saying you’re a plumber if you are dressed in a Dr’s outfit holding a chainsaw. If you want to be the authority, the go to guy, then you’ve got to walk the walk and make sense to those who care about what it is you purport to deliver for them. Who you going to trust? That brand new shiny SEO agency who give you lots of probables and perhaps’s or that nice authoritative search engine who sends you buckets and buckets of free traffic daily, giving you tools that allow you to query their data and take actions that’ll improve your bottom line.

SERPs Should Be Diverse Ever Changing Places that Reflect the Interwebz

For an age and then some, Google have come up with all sorts of double edged swords that have been presented as being user focused tweaks designed to improve the user experience.

Whilst a sizeable number of these have, a side benefit (for Google) has often been that SEO as a channel has often been marginalised. Let’s have a quick looksy at just three that are fresh to mind (i’m sure there are lots of others).

Universal Search is Lovely and For You, You Lovely Users

Take Universal Search – User gets to see pretty pictures and youtube videos and news items related to the query. Great, just what most people need, right? We all need pictures, news from time to time and videos too. Google saves us the time of typing the extra words like news, or pictures or videos to our search term and just shows them regardless. It’s no accident that they all appear above the fold too right? Right where we need them, distracting our attention and pushing down those other pesky organic results that little bit further down the page.

Net impact for organic  site owners in positions 4, 5 or beyond? SEO became that little bit more difficult. Difficult meaning, costing them more of their marketing budget to get where they need to be.

Google Instant – Giving Users  What They Need Instantly, Coz Percolated Takes Forever to Brew

Take the whole Google instant thing – great bit of UI, see results change before your very eyes as you type out your stuff. The really cool part is that Google can even show you related terms with high adwords publisher interest and funnel you to where they’d like you to be.

Net impact on organic is that  long tail searches with low CPC’s tail off as people are steered to head terms with more value to Google.  Why show you stuff that’s obscure or that advertisers aren’t aware of? Google doesn’t earn on those.

Pandas – Big Fluffy Lovely Bears You Want to Hug

Then there’s the so called Panda update(s). Designed to remove crap from the search results for terms important to searchers. Stories abound of how all sorts of crappy content farms have been hit and pushed down the SERPs. Great! Yay! But wait, there’s also lots of stories too that suggest that quality publications have also been hit and the affect on search generally has been to cause flux and disruption across lots of otherwise relatively stable verticals.

Net impact on organic is that yet again the message to site owners is subtle yet clear. Organic search marketing is a risky use of your marketing budget. Be too successful or too aggressive then you might fall foul of the many hundreds of vagueries that pepper the Google guidelines. Far better to spend you marketing budget on something safe and measurable, something like adwords perhaps.

Facebook is Evil and Doesn’t Respect Your Stuff – Come to Google – We are Lovely and Do No Evil and Give you Your Data

Google+ is that new social network where you can do a lot of what you already do on Facebook but just find that your main friends and family aren’t there or if they are, then they aren’t really doing very much. My weird friends and family aside, the fact remains that a reported 40 million people are now on it. Google has been a little guarded around how people are using it and probably have a plan around how it all ties up and binds their multiple properties in to one little happy Google web where we all spend our time using the 100′s of Google products to satisfy our busy lives because that’s exactly what facebook is doing and it scares the pants off of Google stockholders!

If you aren’t sticky then you’ll end up getting stucky

The Google of old was a place where most user activity was downstream – People came, searched, found and went on their merry way.

Today the web’s changed, technology and the barriers to entry have changed. Web properties with huge user bases have the ability to change and adapt at a frightening pace.

Facebook could for examples sake, release an amazing new way of finding content, delivered on their platform. The access to billions of ‘likes’ and user metrics from embedded code is providing them with terrabytes of user behaviour which, make no doubt will be used to develop products and tools that will be monetised and value added. Google knows this and would be foolish to ignore the threat to its model and product. Removing the ability of landing pages on visited websites to read the query string is a big step in insulating  itself from further encroachment on what it considers to be its own intellectual property. In one fell swoop it can deny such properties the ability to glean this.  The fact that it’s presented as a progressive privacy move would be near on genius, if it weren’t for the fact that they are stuck between in a rock and hard place and have no choice other than to make an exception for its advertisers.

So ok, a lot of what I’m saying could easily be shot down as conspiratorial – the subtleties of Google are such that they seldom do anything without a back up plan or reasonable point of view for doing so. I’m merely reflecting my gut and echoing the sentiment of a lot of what I’ve read either publicly, or to an increasing extent discussed privately behind closed doors. There’s a 1001 other conspiracies around Google, its algo, its penalty systems, its quality raters and more. There’s no surprise there, it’s a consequence of secretive mysterious organisations that people will add 2 and 2 and often get 5.

Google isn’t evil, don’t be farking ridiculous

To say Google is evil is of course ridiculous. I have many fine friends who are lovely decent people who work for them, impassioned clever people with dedication and a love of the web. I don’t doubt that the majority of the employees within it are of similar mind, striving to deliver and iterate and incrementally improve upon what it is they work with. But let’s not pull punches on what the wider impact and actions of more senior decision makers are here either.

A Message to you Googly

Just because you’ve built a product that’s changed the world, generated massive wealth for millions via a product that has the most buy in known to modern man, does not mean that you can just rampage unchallenged and change base fundaments at will! Come on, guys, you know this already – stop making out that you’re this infallible piece of humane perfection that is putting us all first all of the time with no thought for personal profit! We don’t believe it, we aren’t idiots! If anything you have a whole lot more responsibility to do things for the right reasons; half cocked excuses that purport to be one thing whilst being another cannot be hidden in the depths of a secret sauce, they are transparent for all to see, as this case quite clearly reveals.

Please stop trying to be everything,  stop trying to control the world’s information, that’s fucking dangerous and leads to tyranny! Just be happy with what you have, what you’ve created and continue to enjoy the billions that you’ll continue to make YoY. We don’t fucking want you to be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple or Amazon or insert long list of others… Just focus on what you do well. We aren’t dummies, you know that. Just stop, please? Thanks.

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1. Is the unwritten contract between Google and Webmasters broken?
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Virgin Media Broadband Customer Services Sucks

Update:I wanted to add that eventually my problem was resolved. FWIW I think VM do have people who are genuinely dedicated to delivering a quality product and that there are amongst their number some very good CS people. My personal thanks go out to Sam T  for her professionalism and successful resolution of my issue

So, I’ve been a Virgin Media customer for longer than I can remember ( > 10 years). I’ve just got off the phone with Michaela at customer retention who despite having heard every detail of my complaint, was unable to talk to a colleague within the company and explain things on my behalf. She advised that I should spend a little more of my precious time writing to them, so that they could make me wait a little longer and inconvenience me a little more.

I’m naturally averse to doing that, as like you and many others out there, if there’s one thing that narks me more than most, it’s corporate bullshit. Especially corporate bullshit that’s designed to wear people down and systematically pick people off through sapping their will.

My VirginMedia Broadband Slows down of an Evening

Recently I’ve been having broadband issues with a service that I pay something like £25 per month for. Up to 20 meg broadband as I believe it’s called.

The ‘Up To’ words are quite important of course, as I doubt anybody using  their 20meg services ever gets that. It’s a theoretical figure that assumes that all being perfect, you could get in theory.

I digress. If I’m honest, I’ve had issues with their services for months. Sometimes of an evening, it’s just rubbish, it slows down to the point of unusability. I’m told that this is due to throttling. Other times I’ve been told that it’s due to a cap, in that if I download x data during the day, my ability to download data during the evening will be curtailed.

Hmmn, well I’m not one of these people who download films, or music or any of that other high bandwidth intensity stuff.  I just do the whole twitter, FB and surf thing. Most of the time I’m answering customer emails or ftp’ing the umpteenth tweak to a script I’ve hacked, or reading up on quora or stackoverflow or some other obscure techie thing that weirdos like me like to play with.

On ‘fast’ days I used Speedtest.net to gauge download and upload speed. I can’t remember what speed exactly but on such days it was around 14MBPS. TBH, I was happy with that. It was fast enough for me and didn’t leave me sitting there thinking ‘Where’s my 20mbps!!”

Over the past 5 days or so I’ve had very poor service. So poor that it’s been unusable. From 6pm it’s not even worth me trying to get online, it’s akin to the old days of 14kb modem dial up only worse. As I touched upon earlier, I’ve had times like this before, which I’ve grinned and borne which have usually sorted themselves out. Not ideal, but not really worth the short term pain of speaking to someone in India, who usually antagonise me with tech BS platitudes at best or at worst insists that I restart my modem or router to restart services.

Apparently, my Virginmedia Broadband is suffering from low SNR

The other day, having had an FTP upload ceased midflow, the proverbial straw had broke my back and  I decided that it was time to give the guys at Virginmedia a call. I explained to Ganesh that the service was not working and blah blah blahed about how it usually sorted itself out and that I’d already did the restart router/modem things and…well, Ganesh bless him, was no doubt duty bound to ask me to do it all again and after a time the answer back was that I was the recipient of an SNR issue in the area.

SNR – hmmn I thought, Signal to Noise Ratio, Subscription Network’s Rank, or Subscription Not Really worth a carrot perhaps!?

See on other times, I’ve been told other stuff.

Faulty modem, faulty router, attenuator adjustments required for signal boosting, server failure, cable failures, network faults…the list could be endless.

SNR is a new one though, so awesome, excuse number I couldn’t really care what number it is.

If I’m honest, I couldn’t really care less what the reason is either.

I pay for a service and expect to get it. I demand continued service at a level that I’ve paid money for. Whether Virgin Media care or not I do actually spend in excess of £900 per year with them. Yep, £900 to pump a few signals down a cable which includes a nice £1.50 per month for my paper bill troubles.

I’m told that my current woes will be fixed by June the 2nd. The SNR is specific to my area will be resolved and all will be well.

VirginMedia have nationwide network issues

In these days of web democracy one can quickly find out if one is alone in ones experiences.

A quick search on Google shows that people in many parts of the UK are having issues with the Virginmedia service. http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=virgin+unusable+of+an+evening shows a good smattering of results bemusingly from the virginmedia community pages themselves (well done Virgin, trying to own your online rep)

A look at some of those threads reveals all manner of things relative to exchange capability, the changing nature of users (Gamers, Video, Audio etc), SNR and  Over subscription (probably the most grating, why take on new customers for a service that isn’t delivering to existing customers).

Why I think Virgin media Customer services are poor

In the world view that I inhabit, customers who pay people money to do things for them have some basic rights. Besides all the legal obligations and various duties of care, people like me believe that where a customer is inconvenienced above a certain threshold then at the very least, the company that has caused them problems should at least try to recognise that and recompense them for their troubles. To put customers through various loopholes and give them the run around is to be frank, complete and utter crap.  If a customer isn’t very happy and explains the reasons why, calmly and dispassionately the correct response is to do your utmost to find a way to help. It’ll help if I explain the sequence of events, otherwise I just sound like some rantsmith with an axe to grind.

I won’t include the previous two days of calls to Ganesh and co, as  I’m sure you’ve better things to do, but here’s how it played today.

I called VirginMedia and eventually got through to someone in…India – I explained the situation (again) and was told that technical services might be able to help. I explained that actually, no, they wouldn’t be able to as I wanted to complain about the service and not seek the same responses to answers I’d already heard. Alas, he was insistent and I dutifully waited and explained to technical support that I already knew what was wrong and just wanted to talk to customer services, they argued their corner and eventually patched me though to customer services who listened and made the right kid of noises, until that is they mentioned that I’d get a pro rata refund only.

Pro rata refund only – I typed that again because as I type it, it releases a little more adrenalin and fires me up a little bit further. So, for my 5 days (and numerous other periods of disconnectedness) I’m to receive a pro rata sum. £25 / 31 * 5 = £4.03.

I should add that yesterday I went out and bought a mobile dongle from O2. Long story short is I’ve spent £30 because I need to have services indoors due to the fact that my service provider wasn’t providing me with a service.

I explained this to the nice lady at Virginmedia and explained that I was less than satisfied with what she was offering and that in my view, the offer wasn’t that good. I’d already laid out £30 of my own money, not to mention the time spent on phones trying to resolve it or the hassle of being unable to do what I needed to do on the various evenings I’d had no service. Her hands were tied, she was sympathetic but unable to provide more than a certain level of recompense, she could pass me to customer retention who might be able to help (at this point I’d expressed a view of exasperation an was on the verge of cancelling contracts).

After some time waiting about for the next available operative – Cue Michaela at customer retention – There was no record of what I’d said previously, the nice colleague at customer services hadn’t explained my situation, so I then had to explain it all again and convey the irritation I felt at having paid money etc blah blah blah and that I was now seeking reasons why I should even continue to be a customer and pay them the £900 per year that they currently get hoping that the reasonable response would be something along the lines of “Mr Watts, very sorry to hear about all this, we don’t want to lose you and appreciate the royal pain in the arse that this must be so in recognition we’ll give you at the minimum a sum equal to your reasonable loss that we hope compensates you…we do value your business etc etc” Reasonable huh? But no, Michaela bless her cotton socks, despite being cognisant of every nuance of the situation, tells me that I should WRITE to customer services and complain!.

Me: Um, I’m doing that now, verbally, to you at customer retention. Can’t you do this for me? Can you not convey my concerns to the relevant people who can help me, and take a decision and deal with my concerns? I’ve already invested a considerable amount of my time trying to resolve this.

Her: No Mr Watts, I’m in customer retention, the procedure is that you complain to customer services by letter and an appropriate person will deal with it.

Me: I really don’t understand why despite listening to all I’ve said,  that you expect me to waste even more of my time trying to resolve this! This call is recorded right? Can’t you just forward the audiofile so they can listen?

Her: More petty obfuscating nonsense determined not to help or resolve

Me: Ok, thanks.

I’m not astounded by all of this, I’m simply flabbergasted that a system designed to help customers who have issues could be used in a way to frustrate and aggravate. Changing services to another supplier is fraught with all manner of headaches. Unknown quantities, time out to e there when they turn up being but two that spring to mind.

I’ve thought about writing to Virgin media customer services, I’ve thought about writing to Neil Berkett or Richard Branson, or OFCOM  even but…really, to continue with this merry go round of nonsense serves little purpose other than to waste even more of my time. Customer service shouldn’t be a revolving door of buck passing and annoyance. It should deal with customer issues and get the problem resolved. Customers don’t want to know about policies designed to restrict company loss, they want to be treated fairly and efficiently with no nonsense. There are of course exceptions. Rude people, chancers, conmen and liars should be given short shrift, but I like to think that I’m neither of the above.

Naturally, I’m a little pissed by all this - It’s a lovely day out and I could have been out in the sunshine or reading a book or doing some work but…

Consumers have few tools these days, the most effective are those that get eyeballs and get brands to sit up and take note.If you want to help me, or maybe make others aware of the kind of things they can expect from Virginmedia when things don’t quite work or go wrong, then you could share this post on Twitter or Facebook or wherever else it is you hang out online.  Maybe someone else will get some insight in to what they can expect.

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Don’t feed the pigs excrement

I was thinking about the recent farmer update and around some of the things said and around how the algo might work and how new or existing farmers might keep on feeding the pigs and chickens.  A side win is that it also helps one to refocus ones efforts through prudent little implementations and tweaks that might help engagement and perhaps insulate from similar future changes. You can never afford to sit on your laurels in someone else’s playground. We might think that this web thing is open and accessible to all, but for today at least Google still is the defacto gateway and for that reason alone any business intent on getting traffic from them, would be foolish not to sit up and take note.

Are the Sheep Happy? Be a good Shepherd

Kates’ post here http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/ppc/google-bounce-rates-the-untold-story/ reminded me of past considerations of bounce rates and the masses of misunderstandings that were out there around the issue. I’d both heard and read people going on about bounce rates as a quality metric as if it was some one size fits all thing that applied carte blanche to every web page out there. As Kate rightly says different pages have different outcomes. If user A gets what they want, and leaves within a short time, then the less informed amongst us might be forgiven for sniffing and thinking, crap page, hit and run, poor user experience.

Yet of course this is patent nonsense as the page in question might just have exactly what the user wanted, requiring no more time or interaction on the page other than the hitting of the red x or the back button. Some sites  like blogs, often have a one hit wonder effect, be they shared through a social network or arrived at through a search engine query. The user visits with the express intent of reading about that particular issue and that’s that.

They don’t want to go deep and read about a lot of  indirectly related topics as their focus is elsewhere. Old style forum threads in comparison have much lower bounce rates, due in the main to things like pagination or general time difference between search indexing and user visit. Lots of page visits of very small time samples followed by rapid exit might be a signal of a poor user experience. OTOH, it might also be the obverse (photo gallery for example) . The truth is that unless, there’s some like for like standardised similar type site to compare it’s very difficult to determine algorithmically, what is and what isn’t a poor user experience based upon single metrics like bounce or time on site.

There are lots of other examples, that have differing outcomes most of which I’m sure the experienced Internet user has encountered at one point or other, and I’ve kind of veered off the main point a little as this isn’t directly related to the content farm thing; at least not in the totality of reasons why you’d get your arse kicked in this update but it does nonetheless, bring to mind the core of what you should be considering when bringing people to your site and making them happy. Give them a shitty user experience where they don’t want to come back againor begin to rank for everything they want and they’ll start to complain about it. If they complain enough in sufficient numbers, then sooner or later you might just be toast. Thinking about shit like the above, get’s you back on track.

Elsewhere on the farm..

A thread at webmasterworld http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4276279.htm cites the Cutts and Singhail http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1 post on Wired which is full of interesting little nuggets.

From an algo watcher perspective it’s fascinating stuff full of little clues and perhaps the odd red herring, yet much as I snark the truth is that in many ways it’s full of things that should really be common sense to the accomplished Webmasters of this world. A look at the list from Sistrix http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html shows the various winners and losers.

Outside quality raters were involved at the beginning

…we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

The cynic in me had already covered the ground of hmmn, how many low quality type Q and A sites are out there and how long would it really take a multi billion dollar corporation to task a team of individuals to seek out and identify crap sites, or sites that were clearly just taking the piss a little with ads and stuff like that.  How long would it then take to run the sites through a bunch of  quality raters http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/new-google-spam-recognition-guide-for-quality-rater-reviewed/ and score them across the various metrics? So this kind of re-inforces that as fact

Excessive ads were part of the early definition

There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?”

If you look at some of the sites involved prior to getting Google thumped, you’ll see that a lot of them were indeed rife with adsense and ads from other networks (some still are) . It wouldn’t be so difficult to have a script look for such instances and then determine a threshold above which, you get issued with a nice pair of lead boots to weigh you down.

The update is algorithmic, not manual

…we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons.

This part is of course all the more interesting as it more or less says that here are a bunch of sites with lots of quality signals and on the other are sites with not as many.  I’m not going to sit here and dissect the strategies of all those bumped, but there really is gold in them thar hills. Sure there are anomalies. Mahalo has been hit despite a big PR push on it’s recent change in approach. The powers that be IMO have decided that a continual get out of jail free card just wasn’t in their PR interests. EHow, that much maligned repository of textual verbosity has also survived the cut no doubt someone demanded that their media http://www.demandmedia.com/ was worthy of a little more time http://www.fastcompany.com/1723737/did-demand-media-ipo-just-in-time.

Some people (aka spammers) will no doubt have seen the opportunities that these ructions present and will have been up bright and early repositioning downgraded content into new loftier place holders. Lessons will have been learnt, content will take account of things said by Messrs Cutts and Singhail and the show will roll on. Only time will tell if Google has done enough to slay the beast of public scrutiny, these things come in cycles and for now at least the monster seems to have been given a bit to chew on.

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Bing Bong Bell, Google’s in Da Hell

There’s a been a lot of noise about Bing and Google this week regarding Bing stealing Google results. Matt Cutts is at the centre of it having had a bit of a ding dong with Harry Shum see video below (40 mins long) over Googles assertion that Bing have been a little sneaky and have scraped/stolen/reverse engineered/indexed Google SERPs.

I’ve no axe to grind with Matt or Google but on this one they seem to have got it wrong and misread the landscape.

Emulators emulate emulators emulate emulators…

Like for Like

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2. Dear Google, Stop Trying to Control the World’s Information
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Marketing Conferences – which ones matter to you?

In an age of information overload – marketers and techies have to choose wisely in their choice of which conferences to attend. If you are a speaker or product promoter, then it’s vital to get your voice heard before your prospects and potential new customers.

If you are looking to broaden your knowledge, network or understanding, then conferences and events can be a great way of achieving this.

Of course, you have to draw the line somewhere.  You can’t spend your life attending conferences week in week out. Your liver won’t think too highly of you and your pocket could become considerably lighter as a result.

Be it adtech, pubcon, SES, SMX, Blogworld the list could go on….What are your must see’s for the remainder of 2010 and 2011?

Would love to hear your views!

Update: Marty and Amrit were kind enough to respond to a tweet I asked earlier. Thanks guys!

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Paul Carr Tech journo for Techcrunch, Guardian and author of various books has had his WordPress install hacked.

For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s the guy who deleted his 10,000 follower twitter account, Facebook account and practically every other social web service out there, thus rendering himself, almost invisible on the webs  ’social’  accounts.

The hack works in a way whereby it identifies user-agents and serves up different content based on the agents user name. So in the case of Mr Carr’s website, the agent in this case is Googlebot the bot used by Google to spider the web.

The hacker script serves up content with links to Cialis and other Pharmacy type websites to Googlebot, whilst showing the unhacked content to everyone else. The clever thing with this hack is that most people will be unaware, until that is, their rankings tank in the search engines as their site content gets penalised. I’ve seen smarter hacks, that left the home page and recent posts intact, whilst targeting older posts that mightn’t show in search. This gets them the links they need to boost their pharm or gambling sites in the serps.

Curiously, this hack doesn’t actually link to any of the products it discusses. Perhaps they’ll add those later…

A simple easy fix is to set up a Google alert for your sitename/brand and an associated word, like Viagra or Cialis.

It’s also a good idea to establish a Google webmaster tools account, as they may alert you to the hack too.

Update your wordpress install folks, don’t let the bad guys win.

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1. Why WP Needs a Compare Cache Against Post Plugin
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