I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.
Want to hear and see his stuff? (more…)
Warning: This is a rant.
With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.
I’m a slow reader, but I’ve found a way to catch-up: podcasts.
Of the podcasts I’ve listened to recently, these two were really interesting. Both were from the excellent IT Conversations and they talk about how these very successful startups came about. The John Newton one also talks a lot about open source business models in an industry that’s quite dear to me: content management. 
Customer service is still in its infancy on the web. Here are some ideas how to make it better.
A lot is different between doing business online through websites versus offline in a shop or office. For one, customers to a large extent help themselves. The only trace we have of customers are lines they leave in the web server and web application log files. If we don’t look, it’s easy to forget they’re there altogether.
In Joel’s post on customer service he lists 8 steps to remarkable customer service. They’re nothing really new, the same old exceeding expectations and service recovery stuff, but since they’re something I also really believe in I thought I’d chime in.
For products that are sold online, websites often does such a good job at selling the product that customers end up using the product without ever talking to anyone in the product company. When we have problems, however, we don’t want to waddle through more than a few pages of information; there’s just no substitute to having a real person guide you through troubleshooting and fixing problems.
Fog Creek isn’t just the only one to realize the importance of good human customer service; Godaddy’s founder, Bob Parsons, says one reason he pulled out of the IPO was that he realized his values were at odds with his advisors, and a key difference was their view on customer service: his advisors’ wanted to cut costs while Parsons wanted to expand.
Customer service is practically the only human contact point left in this online world, and as such it’s more important than ever.
Seth Godin in his latest post writes about the Wii again, and he still doesn’t like its name:
It still has a dumb name, though.
Seth’s right that good names have to be both findable on the Internet and evoke the right feelings in people, but I think he’s dead wrong that “Wii” is a bad name:
It is already very findable. Nintendo made sure they got wii.com, and wii.nintendo.com is the first hit for a “wii” search on Google these days.
It is evokative in the right way. It sounds like the kind-of cute sound someone would make while playing a game, thus it could probably be considered onomatopoetic for “fun”. Secondly, it’s got the obvious connotation to “we”, meaning a group of people, friends.
It is differentiating.
Seth got the target audience wrong at first:
it’s not teenage male players. They’re broadening the market, making games
that are fun to play for casual gamers, NOT the hardcore gamers.
“Wii” as a name is in stark contrast to the techie and macho “Play Station 3″
and “XBox”, further increasing the feeling that this is a different type of game
console for a different type of people. It makes PS3 and XBox sound like complex
and boring tech toys, not like something fun you’d like to play with. Strike ‘em where
they ain’t, Nintendo
For a while now I’ve been aware of this situation, but thinking it would pass I didn’t do anything. Well, it hasn’t, so I thought I’d start sharing what I see.
At various places, one or more of the DNS servers you get from, e.g., wifi hotspots, will be configured to always resolve any domain name lookup. That means typos like www.doesnotexist11.com will resolve.
What do they resolve to? They resolve to IP addresses for websites of advertisers. It’s most likely a pay-per-referrer business model.
Sipping a US$ 13 beer I cannot help but feel Norwegian again, even if the beer is a Kilkenny.
There are of course many contrasts between Norway, my home country, and Beijing, where I spent the last 8 years of my life.
Norway is very rich in natural resources—espically in oil, which has seen some growth recently—has a small population, and a “Robin Hood” social democracy.
The entire population is one big affluent middle class; nobody’s rich, nobody’s poor. With overtime pay the cleaning staff of my school made more money than the head of education in my county, even if they were both working about the same number of hours. This is perhaps as close to the communist ideal as you can find in a materialistic world, making Norway the 2nd highest GDP per capita in the world, and the 1st in terms of human development accoring to the UN.
And when the oil prices crash? Well, Norway’s saving its money in a petroleum fund, currently at US$ 245 billion.
This lack of income disparity has one very apparent effect: services become very expensive. Combined with a weak dollar and yen it’s perhaps no wonder Oslo surpassed Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world. Swedes are taking over a lot of the service jobs as they know the language, the pay is better, and the working hours less than back home; as much as 2 hours less per day for, e.g., nurses.
Here’s a quick a dirty chart of the costs of some items in Norway and Beijing, all converted to US$ for easy comparison:
| Item | Oslo | Beijing | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 min cab ride | US$ 32.00 | US$ 1.50 | 21.3✕ |
| 0.5l Kilkenny | US$ 12.16 | US$ 4.50 | 2.7✕ |
| stone wall at home | US$ 5,000.00 | US$ 375.00 | 13.0✕ |
Huge taxes on gas and cars combined with high wages explains the big difference in cab fares. Kilkenny is an import in both countries, and only the service is really different, meaning less difference overall; electronics are even closer in price. Installing a stone wall involves a lot of service: some digging, transportation, installation, and cleanup, thus the big price difference; there’s certainly no lack of raw material (stone) in Norway.
So if you want to see what it’s like when the world is completely flat—when globalization has had its way and equalized all wage disparities—head to Norway. Be sure to bring enough plastic money, though.
Or as programmers like to say: Hello World! After spending so much time investigating the blog engines out there I thought a “vrooom” might be a better title for this, the start-up post.
Although my favorite technical environment would be Django and Python, and Socialist Software has made a decent implementation of the WordPress K2 theme using Django, I still opted for a real WordPress installation so I can get used the the full power of a mature blog software. At least this way, when the itch of not running on Django gets too noticable, I know how to scratch it 
I plan to write on subjects that matter to me at any given time, syndicating the whole or parts of the site (using tags) to other places. This include:
Don’t hesitate to get back to me with comments. I expect the more feedback I get, the more I’ll write. We humans are funny that way.
Thanks for reading! This blog is on the roll…!
