Email Addresses - get that email through!

I've just bought 3 tonnes of topsoil.

"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" I hear you cry!

I'm still broken from levelling my front lawn and reseeding it last week.  But that isn't the point.  It's good topsoil, I was able to order it online, it came in those big bags so I could ask the truck driver to use the crane to place it as near the place I was going to use each bag as possible and the whole process was simple.  My local garden centre would only deliver one tonne at a time with a separate delivery charge for each tonne!  Rolawn, the supplier I chose, dropped the lot at 7:30am last Thursday with one charge.  And it's good soil, crumbly, light (except in overall weight, obviously) and easy to work with.

I thought that was where the service ended, but today I had a nice surprise - an email asking me for feedback on their products and service, and asking me if I have friends to recommend.  I like it when folk go the extra mile, especially since the email was signed personally by Katherine Atkin, their Customer Services Manager.  It's a great touch, because most folk just fail to do that.

Katherine and I have been chatting by email about the process.  I'm not about to reveal any Rolawn secrets, nor to make the conversation public.  We've been chatting about ways of enhancing the feedback quantity she receives.  Good or bad feedback, well handled, makes great marketing.  She is 100% on top of her feedback, no concerns there at all.

My thoughts were on making sure her outbound emails got through.  The reason is that they come from a generic "From Address" which has a generic name.  They come from "feedback@", which, increasingly, is a technical problem.  Spam filters increasingly target generic email "from addresses" and tag them as SPAM.  That's bad news on two levels:

1. They may report the email domain and/or IP address as a source of SPAM (bad, bad news for the sending corporation)
2. They may simply filter the email out before it even reaches the junk email box.  Hotmail does things like that.

That means that the very positive email asking for feedback may cause problems (at worst) or simply not arrive (least worst).

In addition, folk respond better to emails from a person.  But, if you don't recognise "Tim Trent" in your inbox you still might not open it, so a good subject line is required.  Rolawn has one, by the way.

A very old technique is to invent a person.  A feminine hygiene company has, for years, had a Sister Marion, who is a department which deals with customer service.  The name is appropriate, and the department signs all correspondence as Sister Marion.  So the technique is to invent one.  Rolawn needs a gardening sort of name, and an email address that is monitored by Customer Service, and a name that is known to the switchboard and the post room.

You, if you find this useful, need a name appropriate for your business.

And the phone calls are handled very easily.  "Tim Trent's desk... I'm sorry, he's away from the office today, I'm his team leader, how may I help you?"

And yes, I'll use Rolawn again.  Good product, price and service.  I just don't have anywhere that needs any more topsoil!

To those receiving this blog by email, an apology

As you see below and in the left hand margin, I use Zookoda to allow people to opt in at their sole discretion to receive a weekly digest of this blog by email.

The form is simple, the enrolment process is simple and, best of all, it's 'Confirmed Opt In', so it meets all the requirements for permission based marketing.

Unfortunately there is a bug in the Zookoda system at present which means that the order of the digest is not sorted by date correctly, and items from prior digests do sometimes creep into the current digest.  Zookoda is working on this bug at present, but, as they point out, "it's a free service" and I should thus not expect a speedy resolution.

So my apologies for something that is "in my control" insofar as I chose the service, but "outside my control" because they will fix it when they fix it.  I could change the service, but having all my eggs in the Google basket by using a Feedburner subscription service seems to be playing into the hands of a monopoly.

Are "Free Goods social networks" really a good thing?

Let me start with saying that personally I love Freecycle.  At a personal level it is superb. So far I've used it to shift a lot of unmarketable stuff from my garage.  eBay works for a lot, and car boot fairs work for a lot else, but Freecycle shifts the remainder that charity shops won't take directly to someone who wants it.

And, despite my comments about its current mode of operation, my local Freecycle network has saved several tonnes of usable stuff from ending up in landfill just yet.  That has to be a good thing whether one's in favour of recycling or not.

On a personal level it works superbly well.

But I've been thinking.

First, will it decrease the amount of stuff sent to landfill, or will it just delay it?  That's a complex debate.  At some point the thing wears out.  What happens to it then?

Second, lets assume that these social networks become a huge success, and that we, globally, start to pass our used and unwanted stuff on to others who would like it.  It's pretty much always going to be local.  My old freezer going to Africa is unlikely.  If we all do this, who buys the new items?

If fewer and fewer folk buy new items, what happens to the companies who make the things in the first place?  What happens to the employees?  What happens to the global economy?

If a thing only has a value to the first owner, what then?  Surely we'll use them until they die and then scrap them?  Will they be offered "spare or repair" then?  

Is this type of network Utopia or a global disaster?

I suspect that it is neither.  Not enough people use it to make it particularly wonderful, nor to be an economic threat.  But it makes you think.

What is a Customer?

I looked at Wikipedia.  That's 'a good start.

A customer refers to individuals or households that purchase goods and services generated within the economy. The word historically derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods there, and with whom the shopkeeper had to maintain a relationship to keep his or her "custom," meaning expected purchases in the future.

Does this mean that, where no money changes hands, or where there is no bartering, one is not a customer?

If you are a member of a news service (for example, if you sign up to the mailing list for this blog) does that mean that you are a customer?

If you pick up a free newspaper like Metro on a London train are you a customer?

My thinking is that, in each case, you are.  And that means that you deserve to receive the best customer service each type of transaction can offer.  

Why?

Because every service provider wants you back, wants your habit.  We want you to frequent our particular shop.  For our own reasons we want you back.  And our customer service, good or bad, is our marketing message to you.

Freecycle

On Wednesday, at ad:tech, I learnt that Freecycle is a social network that protects the planet. I thought it was just a place where folk offered stuff to other folk free.  I was quite excited to learn I was doing something good by offering stuff on Freecycle.

You see there is a load of WIIFM in Freecycle.  I can get rid of stuff I don't want without taking it to the dump.

It works very simply, and I'm a fan.  You join a Freecycle Yahoo email group, you post your items and they get emailed to the group.  I've moved a lot of unwanted stuff.

The place I post messages with things for sale is an official freecycle.org site.  It says:

"If you are on moderation (normally if this is your first post) then your message will not appear until a moderator has approved it. This measure is taken to stop spammers from joining groups and immediately posting junk - you should be taken off of moderation as soon as the group moderators are satisfied you're a genuine member."

That's pretty reasonable.  It stops spam.

After I'd posted half a dozen messages I asked to be taken off moderation.  It seems I have to prove I'm trustworthy first.  Well, Ok, but boring!  But then today, oh today, I advertised several things.  And here we met bureaucracy.  That paragraph above may be policy, but not for "my" local moderators!  They just emailed me after I'd posted a few things in a batch of four or five or maybe six separate items:

Dear Tim,

Please put this (a Volvo workshop manual - Tim) in the same email as the crook lock and resubmit. I fully understand that it makes things easier for freecyclers to see if items are in individual emails. However, it does mean a lot more work for us volunteer moderators. We moderate a large amount of emails each day and without stating the obvious moderating one is a lot quicker than 10.

At present the Bracknell sites moderation rate is fairly efficient, however as more people sign up we obviously have more emails to moderate. Continuing to post individually will mean we will become less efficient and in the future it may take a few days before emails are moderated, like on other sites. If you would like it to take longer for your items to get onto the freecycle site, please feel free to post individual emails.

Kind Regards

(name edited out)

BFFreecycle Moderation team.

So, the policy of coming off moderation seems not to be a real one, or we have people who are making their "job" as a volunteer harder.  The system is such a simple one.  The concept is great. The marketing spreads by word of mouth.  So why on earth would the volunteers turn it into a job from hell for themselves?

This is meant to be easy and fun.  I've emailed the volunteer moderator back and asked why on earth the group is still being moderated.  Good grief, even Wikipedia trusts people!

If we aren't trustworthy, ban us.  If we are, then treat us as adults and let us post things freely.

ad:tech London 2008 - Responsibility in marketing: Is it all just hype?

Wednesday's session was on responsibility in marketing, specifically being green and responsible. "Where there's muck there's brass", and this is true of green manure as much as of matured cow dung.

I should set out my stall.

• I am in favour of recycling.  It's common sense provided there is a return on investment, and it makes good sense not to pollute
  
• I am against 'greenwash'.  Lie to me and I will find out.
• Making money out of becoming green is a necessity if it is to become global reality
• I know that 5% or so of the world has a refrigerator, and that at least 50% rather wants one.  Some of that 5% bleating about recycling old fridges is a global irrelevance.  Didn't Alfa Romeo get there first with the Alfasud?  Ah no.  That was recycled old washing machines.  No wonder it felt like  spin drier to drive!
• Mount St Helens had more of an effect on the Earth's atmosphere than China's pollution probably ever will.
• I do not understand carbon credits.  I do as a concept, but not as something ethical. In fact buying a bit of greenery so I can drive a Ferrari without guilt seems to me to be sanctimonious fraud.

So I'm cynical.  And I brought that to the party.

We had a great panel and an even handed chairman.  For the PC brigade, that is Chairman, where the suffix "man" is not a male person, though this one happened to be.  I kind of feel I need to point that out, because "green" and "Beardy Weirdy" seem still to go together.  And then there are the guys...  Enough of that!

He involved the audience, and we handled their concerns along with whatever our agenda happened to be.  He's from WPP.  The other panelists were from Clownfish, Nokia and The Carbon Neutral Company.

Do not get me wrong here.  If we use climate change as a lever to reduce appalling industrial and other pollution, I see that as a good thing, but, when I hear that "the cost in watts of maintaining an avatar on Second Life is the same as the energy consumed by a Brazilian in a year" I tend to start to wonder if the Emperor really is wearing a fabulous suit.

Yes, I care about efficiencies in the data centres, I'm not Jeremy Clarkson, but that figure is, while probably 100% verifiably correct, so bizarre as to make me wonder if "a Brazilian" is a number coming after "billion" or "trillion", and if the whole thing is a joke.

There truly is a point to this rant.

There is?

Yes.  Here it comes!

"Get my attention with what you are doing and why your product, service and route into my personal space is good, ethical, ecologically sound, and you have won a good part of the battle to market to me. I will at least look at your offer"

That's it!  Really, it's that simple.

You have to show me WIIFM, and then you get my attention.  You have to know what I'm likely to be in the market for.  I am not in the market for heavy engineering, but the builder who has so far failed to finish my kitchen is in tears and suicidal because he is alcoholic and depressed, and I sure am in the market for a solution to that!

Once you have my attention and my permission, you had better keep on proving WIIFM  [What's In It For Me (I know you wondered)].  And you had better not lie, because The Power of Google will bite you, not because this blog is widely read, as both my readers will testify, but because others will find you out as well.  And they just might be important!

It isn't a matter of compliance with regulations.  I was on the panel in my capacity as Managing Editor of ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com, and it's clear to me that ISO14001 just gives a warm and fuzzy feeling, and the UK Direct Marketing Association's jamboree with DEFRA just produces a big mutual hug.  Nothing's going to happen with regulation unless it's mandated.  And mandating "green" plays into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who say "This green stuff is all about protecting the developed world from the developing world by preventing them from being able to compete."

Anyway I'd never heard of ISO14001 until I tried to find out what regulations marketers had to abide by and found that there aren't any!

It's a matter of plain old business common sense.  If you are competing for my business then you have to be better as a provider of ROI than the next guy.  But you have to understand what my own personal ROI needs are.

Do I just want a financial ROI?  Or do I want the apparent kudos that goes with using a carbon neutral cab company to make myself look good?  Can you provide both?  And do my customers care?  And what are the ecological implications of using direct mail to reach me vs email?  And will you make sure you tell me why you chose direct mail (which I think ecologically unsound and am probably wrong about)  instead of email (which I perceive as pretty much free after the design is done, and thus good for the environment).

What will you do about my perception, a thing which probably does not match reality?

On WIIFM, Nokia is, wisely, recycling mobile phones.  It's either that or turn them into pretty bricks for the patio.  But WIIFM?  Do I care about community projects to place a new park bench in my local King George's Field?  What is in it for me, personally?

Crack that and you have my full support.  You see I love it when I get something personal out of doing what is a good and common sensical idea.

Until then I reckon the entire green ballyhoo is emperor's new clothes.

Captain Cruiseline Now has a UK Number 01607 9999999

Yup, I'm sure it's the same company, but this one offers a holiday in (I hung up before I found out)

01607 9999999 is the number on CLI, and you get a recorded message.  This one's a holiday, not a cruise.  Now it may even be genuine, but I suspect an advance fee fraud scam.

I've reported it, of course I have.  Just wanted you to know that you do not wish to answer this call when it shows up in your phone's display.

So, what do you do about this call if you are a UK phone subscriber?

1. You report it (a very simple task) to the UK Information Commissioner.  You can do that online on this enquiry form
2. You report it to the Telephone Preference Service if your phone number is TPS registered, and you can do this online, too.

Then you sit back and ignore the calls.

What don't you do?

You do not give them any financial details at all.  None.  Not a thing.

Phorm, and the British Computer Society

I've just been sent a paper by Andrea Simmons 0f the BCS Security Forum on Ph0rm and its products.

Andrea says:

Phorm over function? Perhaps that's the challenge in relation to marketing desires clashing with privacy hopes. But given the starting point of the Phorm furore, in the Spring of 2008, we are now in the Autumn of 2008 and its been nothing but data breach after user faux pas exposing countless millions of individuals' personally identifiable information that has focussed the spotlight firmly upon the need to apply "privacy by design" principles from the outset - something that the ICO will be taking a very serious view of in the coming months. The BCS Security Forum is equally involved in keeping a watching brief

The paper is published on ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com, and well worth a read

Should we be worried by Phorm and Webwise and OIX, or pleased?

At this stage I have no idea.  I learnt about the company and its technology from a comment on the article immediately below this one.  In a nutshell Webwise analyses surfing habits in co-operation with your ISP.  When you visit a Webwise enabled site that carries advertising it is designed to present you with advertising relevant to your own (computer's) surfing habits.

So, if you spend your life on motoring sites, you will see adverts for the automotive sector.  If you spend your time on religious sites, doubtless you will get adverts around the relevant faith. If you go to porn sites (people do, honest!) you will doubtless see adverts for unusual bonking.

So far so good.  I do prefer the adverts I tune out to be relevant to me.  It sounds great.

"Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear."

Ah yes.  So, if I visit sites about TATP (that alleged liquid explosive of alleged plots to bring aircraft out of the sky), Islam, arms dealers, and rucksack suppliers, those surfing habits are logged too.  Since we have the offence in the UK of "Attempting to travel on the tube while suspected of being Muslim" for which one can be summarily executed, should I now be worried that, as well as serving me relevant adverts (which I do not care about), I am being served up for surveillance?

The Home Office (as reported by the UK Information Commissioner) appears to consider Phorm's services to be alwful only with informed consent and opt in.  The UK Information Commissioner also looks at it under the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations 2003.  Follow that link and read.

He also says:

In the view of the Commissioner Phorm can operate Webwise and OIX in a way which is in compliance with the DPA and PECR but must be sensitive to the concerns of users. The Commissioner will keep the Phorm products under review as they are rolled out and his view will be strongly influenced by the experience of those users who choose to participate in any trials and the way in which they are able to make that decision. The Commissioner will also continue to be interested in the dialogue between technical experts and Phorm about the way in which the system operates

This is heartening.  Let's keep him informed.  I'm undecided about it, but I am concerned.  I'm grateful for NW for alerting me to it in the comment on the blog article below this one.

See you at ad:tech 2008 at Olympia?

Now I've written the headline I'm suddenly worried that it isn't at Olympia after all!

We have a great lineup for the ad:tech panel I'm speaking on.  The pre-panel call was exciting, intellectual and challenging.

Responsibility in marketing: Is it all just hype?

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 02:10 PM -03:10 PM 

''Marketing'' is traditionally associated with growth and consuming more. The challenge facing marketers is how they can meet their traditional sales targets in a climate in which we might need to consume less. This session will offer frank discussion around aligning your communications with sustainable principles and practice.

Questions addressed will include:

• How can marketers overcome the inbuilt incentive to greenwash everything they touch? 
  
• What role does the other communication functions play in achieving goals, including PR and customer services?

So, will we all "go green"? or is hyping greenery a load of puffery?

Frankly, I have no idea at all.  I'm relying on questions from the floor.  So come and ask.  Plus I'd love to meet you there.

Another Pointless Privacy Gesture from Google

In June 2007 I covered Google's "slashing" of its search engine data retention period to 18 months.  My conclusions then?

So, it's an empty gesture, and not even newsworthy except in its emptiness. It will probably satisfy the gullible, just like planting a tree is meant to assuage guilt about carbon emissions, but that is as far as it goes

In September 2008 they've announced the halving of that period.

May I be one of the first to say "whoopee!"?

Now let's add Google Chrome into the pot, plus the fact that most folk once they log in to Gmail stay logged in so all, repeat all their search engine activity can be attributed to their account, and we have... A monster.

Add to that the insane choice of US Vice Presidential candidate in Mrs Merton, the one who has travelled to Canada, Mexico and a couple of US bases somewhere else (so that will just the the USA, then!), and you have great scope for governmental abuse if the USA is stupid enough to elect McCain.  They will take over the data records based on the alleged "War Against Terror".

My conclusions now?

So, it's an empty gesture, and not even newsworthy except in its emptiness. It will probably satisfy the gullible, just like planting a tree is meant to assuage guilt about carbon emissions, but that is as far as it goes

Google needs to implement a zero time data retention period for search records.  It doesn't need the IP address for anything except its own commercial purposes, and those purposes begin to look to the outside world as potentially invasive to privacy.  But adding the massive power of Google to the USA's paranoid right wing potential next president and vice, and it's a ticking bomb.

Data Loss is a Good Thing

For those of you who have read 1066 And All That, this will not be a surprise to you at all.  Others may be less sure.

Data loss is rather good in terms of alerting the public to the quantity of data held about them and able to escape into the wild at any moment.  Data loss today hits the news.  Data loss even 10 years ago barely caused a ripple, even though the Data Protection Act 1998 is 10 years old this year and its predecessor was enacted in the 1980s.

There's an excellent ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com article on PCI DSS, which aims to prevent any information that could be used to make a counterfeit card or a fraudulent online transaction from falling into the wrong hands.  Good.

There's current news about PA Consulting Group who lost an unencrypted USB memory stick given to them by their client, the UK Home Office,  and have now lost a £1,300,000 contract and are having the rest of their contracts renewed because they lost a whole horrible load of personal data on UK prisoners.

There's been loads of news about data loss, and we've all, pretty much had enough.  It is not hard to safeguard data.  It isn't even expensive!

I've worked recently for a hugely ethical US corporation reviewing their data privacy issues.  They have a home based sales team (great green credentials there) with laptops.  And they solved the challenge of taking backups of the sales automation system on the laptops by issuing each rep with a USB drive.

One day when one rep was out doing her job her house was burgled.  Guess what was stolen?  The devices at that time were unencrypted.  The data could have made its way onto eBay (where have we heard that recently?), but so far hasn't.  At no huge cost the drives have been replaced with encrypted units with the encryption keys controlled centrally.

None of this is hard.  And it will all be driven by public concern.  The question is, will you be ready for your data loss?

Why not hire me to find out for you?

Of COURSE Google is the God of Search

We recently launched a site full of Man Pages.  Now look, this site is not for you.  No, it really is not.  Look, it's for geeks.  Geeks don't come here!

Google is happily indexing it.  It's reached ~12,200 pages of the ~62,000 pages on the site.  Yahoo seems to have managed eight (single figure, not thousands).  MSN that was, Live.com that is, has ~gasp~ managed 14 (that is one and four, fourteen, not 14,000!).

All the site visitors come via Google.

We've made it easy.  We have Sitemaps (machine readable sitemaps) for the search engines, and we've lodged them properly with the three big hitters.

Only Google has done anything with them.  It deserves its status as 'the only game in town'.

We bow before the great God Google and make obeisance at its feet.

Oh the site?  Now look, you really, truly have to be a geek.  It has no relevance to you.  Man Pages are not what you think!

You can't say I didn't warn you!

Caveat Emptor

I was reading terms and conditions on an online backup service today.  This one is part of it:

How the Company may modify the Agreement
The Company reserves the right to change the terms, conditions, and notices under which it offers the Services, including any charges associated with the use of the Services. You are responsible for regularly reviewing these terms, conditions and notices, and any additional terms posted on the Company's web site. Your continued use of the Services after the effective date of such changes constitutes your acceptance of and agreement to such changes.

Does this mean "All your pretty things belong to us"?

Trust me, there is no way I'm going to use a service that can change its terms and conditions without warning me, and they can! They can say "What you have uploaded i snow ours if you continue to use the service."  And since removal after that date constitutes continued use, even if you cancel as soon as you've removed them...

I read on:

Termination; Access restriction
The Company may terminate the Agreement, or terminate or suspend your access to the Services at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice. Upon such termination or suspension, your right to use the Services will immediately cease. UPON SUCH TERMINATION OR SUSPENSION, ANY INFORMATION YOU HAVE STORED ON THE COMPANY'S HARDWARE AND/OR USING THE SERVICES MAY NOT BE RETRIEVED LATER, AT THE COMPANY'S SOLE DISCRETION.

Wow.  So they can terminate the backup agreement and leave customers without the data they backed up.  I can see how non payment might lead to that, but otherwise it's a bit steep.  That builds trust straight away.

I was half wondering if there was a term in there that would grant a perpetual royalty free licence to them to use your stuff, like Google had (by accident) when it launched Chrome.

Always read the terms and conditions, and decide what they really mean before entrusting your most precious data to any service.  But, to me, these terms and conditions make pretty poor marketing.  They are just another axample of a company not reading its own terms and conditions.

Please may I have MY picture taken with the cute puppy?

Isn't it strange how some corporations attract both fanatical loyalty and have a celebrity status?

Even when they get things wrong people queue up to say "No, forgive then, they're wonderful, they're special, I love them to bits!"

We've just seen this with Google whose legal terms and conditions on the launch of Chrome were such an absurdity that they had to change them suddenly.  So I've been trying to think of other celebrity status corporations.  I'd love your help.

So far I have:

• Google
• Ben & Jerry
• Apple
• Microsoft (though folks also love to hate them - a paradox)
• Dr Oetker
• Heinz (though their Gay Deli Mayo Kiss Fiasco was a bit rich)
• Oracle (hated, loathed and adored at the same time)
• Manchester United Football Club (come to that, pretty much ANY commercial football or sports club)

My brain's drying up, but yours is fertile and there's a comment section!  Please feel free!

And, if you can, do, please, try to tell me why these corporations whose sole aim is to make a profit for their shareholders, can do no wrong for people who don't even own a single share?

Spammed by a D & B company?

You probably know that I'm the Managing Editor of ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com, a news aggregation service which does just what it says on the tin.  Yesterday I was speaking at one of Thom Kohn's Data Protection seminars at The Law Society.  Thom runs Transatlantic Events and puts these seminars on annually around the world.

One of the speakers was my old colleague Tim Beadle of Marketing Improvement.  One thing Tim said very clearly was 

"Never, not ever, never, never never buy in a list containing email addresses unless you really need it.  And even then don't do it!"

Imagine my surprise when Peter Andrews, our staff editor, showed me an email to Milton Bennett at our ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com domain from Harris Infosource.  Milton does not exist, never has, and is not even a figment of our imagination.  So someone made him up, and someone sent SPAM.

There's an article about it on C&P.  What idiots!

Adroll - an excellent concept, but where's the cash?

Every so often we ring the changes on the adverts we carry on our various sites.  Google AdSense isn't the only game in town for a publisher, but it's easy to set up and use.  Some of the other services aren't so easy.

I was delighted to see Adroll's offering, and I deployed it here, for a while, and on a couple of other sites.  The concept is sane, and is, broadly, "Put our harness around your current adverts.  If you make more money with us then our advert gets shown, otherwise your usual advert gets shown."

As offers that are too good to refuse go, that rates highly on the list.

So we popped our AdSense advert code inside Adroll, and settled back to make our fortunes.

No, look, we're not that stupid.  What we did was we monitored it to see what really happened. On our fun site, The Chocolate Cake Church, we watched revenues fall from small (it's a new site) to smaller.  Adverts from Adroll predominated, but no sensible revenue was forthcoming.

Adroll was evicted.

Here, the same thing happened.

Adroll was evicted.

We put them on PartnerMine.Com, the dating tips site.  It runs a banner without any existing adverts in.  We sold a campaign.  It's additional to the AdSense revenue, so that's fine.

So we brought out our big hitter, ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com.  All the other sites are lower traffic.  C&P carries a decent traffic payload.  We're near the end of a two week trial period. There are two rentable spaces at the foot of each and every article.

I've even tried to offer a taster campaign.  I offered it with the other sites and that's how we sold a campaign at all.  But I can't find the way to offer it any more.  And the only way to get support is to ask in the help forums.  Only no-one answers.

Tom Foremski likes them, which is one of the reasons we started with them at all.  They have a Facebook page (it's ok, anyone can have those) where they look sufficiently nerdy to have probably got this right (look at the pictures of the old office!), and one of them rides a bike to work.  Unless the old office is his garage, of course.

I'm not knocking warm garage start ups at all.  Look at HP and Dick and Dave, after all.  And look at Google, Microsoft, etc., who also started small, garage or not.  But shouldn't these guys answer calls for customer service on their forums?

If they want serious business advertisers and publishers, yes they should.

It really is a wonderful concept.  I really want them to succeed.

Chrome and Google Analytics

Like any webmaster I'm interested in the browsers people use to visit my sites.  Unlike sites like Tripadvisor (can't recognise Chrome today), or Facebook (can't work with Chrome today), my sites don't care what browser you use.  But my business partner and I are interested!

Today I have had a reasonable number of Chrome equipped visitors drop in to this blog, and I thought you might like to see how, today, Google Analytics recognises Chrome:

Yes, it thinks it's Safari running in Windows!

A few years ago I worked for Gartner.  For the five years I worked there we wondered how the 900lb gorilla in its space could be so silo oriented and still make money.  Seems that Gartner wasn't (isn't?)  alone in being silo oriented.  Mind you, Google is bigger than Gartner.  Bigger silos, then!

But isn't it (pick one from: funny, hilarious, pathetic, stupid, aggravating, weird, expected, usual, bizarre) for Google to come up with what is, for it, a big launch and fail to have its analytics product actually recognise and shout about its exciting (getting carried away now, sorry) new browser? That would be marketing, would it not?

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Update: Google Analytics has caught up.  Chrome is now featured with its own separate line. I still think they might have done that earlier.  "Let not the left hand know what the right hand is doing!" 

[updated 4 September 2008]

Chrome reveals surfing habits to wife! Granny shocked!

I appreciate that this is the very first release, and it feels very 'public beta'.  Everyone is (presumably) on release 0.2.149.27 build 1583.  But I think they have one thing terribly wrong.

All my family uses the same login on our various computers.  We don't bother with separate XP user names.  It's not compulsory and we don't see why we should.  And so we don't have different profiles or sets of bookmarks because we call up the same instance of any browser we feel comfortable with.  It's "private enough" that way.

When I first kicked Chrome into life, Google's import routine had worked well.  It had dragged in my FireFox history.  I could see this because it was all presented to me in plain sight on the default "this is the page you get when you open the goshdarned thing" page.  I didn't like that.  It showed my latest bookmarks in plain view.

I do not want my wife or son to know that I've bookmarked teenagevixensluts.com and that it's my most popular site!  I do want some privacy.  Neither looks in "my" part of the bookmarks (probably!), and I see no reason to make it more public in plain sight.  And I don't want to know that my wife has visited buyyousocksforchristmas.co.uk because I like the endless variety of surprises that new socks can bring, nor do I want to see the top sites my son's visited.

I worked out how to turn that off!

Phew!

I can see teenage vixen sluts to my heart's content now!

So imagine my surprise when I clicked the sweetums ickle wickle + sign to get a new tab and the whole list was back!  And my distaste when I discovered I could not seem to work out how to open a new tab that's blank!

Yes I know I can open an incognito tab for porn!  But is that the point?  What about all the times dyslexia typed in hotmale instead of hotmail in FireFox?  I don't want bottoms and dangly bits on display in my new tab, I truly don't.  We boys may all have them, but not in plain sight! If I want to look at them I'll go there in private, thank you very much!

And Granny's visiting at the weekend.  We want to let her see our holiday pictures.  Got to be careful, now, not to open a new tab.  I expect she'll pretend to be shocked and want to see more if we do!

Trusting each other not to bother with bookmarks or surfing history is one thing, but having buttocks, attractive and unattractive, displayed to you in a thumbnail is quite another!

It's too late for individual accounts now!  That was the answer.  We've all been outed now!  And I know what socks I'm getting for Christmas!

Chrome, the Unfinished "Symphony"

Let me see.  Google, did you actually TEST this browser?

RSS feeds:  You get raw XML, not even formatted.  A "known issue" apparently

JAVA:  Very amusing.  It needs a beta release that you have to find via help!  I'll save you the trouble:  "Many websites use the Java plug-in. Google Chrome requires Java version 6, update 10. Please note that this is currently a beta version and may be more unstable than some previous version of Java. To download this beta version of Java visit http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/ea.jsp."

And something has taken hold of my laptop and is doing something to it out of my comtrol.  I wonder if that is related.

Google Chrome Fails Facebook

Now there's a thing.  Chrome works with almost any site except the social networking site, Facebook.  Me, I'd have tested that.  That's where you get the early adopters and viral marketing.

I expect they'll fix it soon, meanwhile back to FireFox for that.

I bet FaceBook folk are unamused, too!

What happens is that some links are clickable, others aren't, or reposition the page, or, or, or....  And yes, I've reported it using the link provided.  At least that's better than when Safari came out for XP!  Safari's bug reporting link never worked at first and crashed the browser!

When Chrome visits a site it announces itself to the server as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13"  Now there's mega-compatibility.  Or not, it seems!

Interesting that Google Analytics doesn't yet show Chrome visits as Chrome, too.

Do we need another new browser?

Yesterday, with almost no fanfare, Google launched Chrome.  It's a browser.  Yup, that's it.  A browser.

Loads of folk are getting overexcited about it and are vying with each other to praise it.  Move over Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor has more New Clothes.

The browser market is a weird one.  Have a look at this graph from one of my sites showing browsers used by visitors over the past couple of months:

It's a run of the mill site with a pretty normal visitor profile.  It has the normal proportion of dorks, geeks, nerds, real people and weirdos that all web sites get.  IE is definitely losing its domination of the market.  Two years ago the same site had 86% IE users.

But most people don't even realise that Internet Explorer is a browser.  They think it's "The Internet", and, as "The Internet" it doesn't even strike them that they have a choice.  Except Apple folk.  They use Safari.  And a good number of them think that Safari is "The Internet" too.

So where's Google's market?

I doubt they can erode the 60% that IE has in this site visit graph.  60% of a decent sample size of just over 40,000 visits is a good few folk, and they are probably pretty set in their ways!  So they must be aiming for a share of the 40% which FireFox dominates.

In this site's market anything below Safari doesn't even get on the radar, so Big G is really going for the FireFox market.  But Big G funds FireFox already to a great extent. It partners with Mozilla to keep FireFox going well.

Perplexed yet?

Me too!

I'm an early adopter.  I've tried pretty much every browser available on a PC.  I dislike IE, but I can see why the Chrome user interface is very IE like (negative point for me, positive for an IE user).  But can Chrome make inroads into the IE default "shipped with your PC" marketplace?

I like FireFox, but release 3.0.1 refuses to function on my laptop, and the help desk, when I could find it, told me of an arcane process that I have to use my intelligence and computer literacy to go through in order to see if I might be able to make it work by disabling "plugins", which are not the same as "extensions" and can be disabled in release 3, but not in release 2. Well, as they say, "Stuff that for a game of soldiers!"

Opera and I gave up on each other after about 20 minutes.  Safari is good, but I don't get on with it.  I go right back to Netscape Navigator.  Been there, got the T Shirts from every browser!

So I'm trying Chrome.

Early verdict?

Not especially startling, but easy to use.  At least as good as IE, not as good as FireFox, especially if you are a power user and use the extensions.  I prefer it to Safari for my own needs, but Safari is not really "True Safari" on a PC anyway.

But one thing it does really well is to open pdfs.  Do that in FireFox and acrobat reader's plugin takes over the browser.  Chrome loads it and lets me get on with my life while the document opens.

To me this means it stands a chance.  I've been using it for about 3 hours now.  It wasn't as easy as it ought to have been to position the graphic in this article, but it was ok.  It'll do.

Great.

What a slogan.  "Get Google Chrome.  It'll do!"

There is one annoyance, though.  One of my sites, HaveBalls.Net, earns revenue from adverts, and not Google adverts.  I use Adbrite there because the adverts are perfectly targeted to the site.  You'll see what I mean if you go there.  in IE and FireFox and other browsers there is a "splash screen" delivered once per user per day that earns revenue.  Not with Google Chrome.  No splash screen.

Would it be churlish of me to suggest that this might be by design?

Nuisance calls from householdsurvey.com

Ye gods, do these people think I am insane?

A recorded message and a long survey (I chose to take the survey and answer with random rubbish, which proved that they are not interested in the answers) led me to Answer Solutions in Central Florida.

Googling them led here.

Some idiot will call me within 72 hours, now. Apparently I have been rewarded with a cruise. I don't think so. Oh no. I smell a scam.

Anyway I will annoy the telesales agent.

A query on their domain name shows the following:

[This section has been edited to reflect the true state of affairs.  A typo caused an incorrect set of data to be placed here, and I apologise unreservedly for my honest error]

Registrant:

Dot Net Global

801 International Pkwy

Heathrow, Florida 32746

United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain Name: HOUSEHOLDSURVEY.COM

Created on: 06-Sep-04

Expires on: 06-Sep-09

Last Updated on: 25-Feb-08

Administrative Contact:

Farrell, Doug dotnetdns@hotmail.com

Dot Net Global

801 International Pkwy

Heathrow, Florida 32746

United States

4073307375

Technical Contact:

Farrell, Doug dotnetdns@hotmail.com

Dot Net Global

801 International Pkwy

Heathrow, Florida 32746

United States

4073307375