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Archive for the 'Rant' Category
In Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin writes about dining critic Joanne Kates:
One of my dearest friends is Joanne Kates, the restaurant critic for The Globe and Mail, the most important newspaper in Toronto. Joanne carries a credit card with someone else’s name on it (I promised I wouldn’t say who). Despite her precautions, her picture is posted in the kitchen of dozens of top restaurants. Why? Because once a restaurant knows that Joanne is wearing a wig and sitting in the dining room, the staff can influence the review.
Once a server knows it’s her, he can make sure the service is perfect, the food is hot, and the check is calculated properly. Once he knows it’s her, he can guarantee that the staff will do their best.
Seth goes on to explain what is wrong with this strategy under the rules of New Marketing:
You’ve already guessed the problem with this strategy. The problem is Zagats (and Chowhound.com, and a thousand other restaurant blogs). There isn’t just one Joanne Kates in Toronto anymore. Now there are thousands.
You can no longer be on the lookout for Joanne. Now you have to be on the lookout for everyone.
Joanne is everywhere - there are thousands of people walking the earth with PageRank 4 or better blogs at their fingertips, ready to heap praise (or crap) on every remarkable experience.
I’ve done this a dozen times - rewarded a truly wonderful experience with praise, and been critical of a bad experience. Within an hour yesterday, Donna and I had two remarkably contrasting experiences:
- A good chat with the guy that owns Plonk around boutique Ciders (he is knowledgeable and genuinely interested in customer experiences) - and we’re happy to recommend his shop to friends (and we know several people who are happy to do the same). We bought a mixed half-dozen Montieth’s beers, a Trappistes Rochefort No 10 ‘heavy’ for after-dinner enjoyment, and we plan to return.
- A disinterested and contradictory set of serving staff at the Belgian Beer Cafe in Kingston. Their all-day menu shows that the Moules Moutarde (mussels in mustard) have bacon with them - when no bacon appeared in our Moules, we asked the waitress if we had the right dish, and she checked with the kitchen who told her that there was no bacon in this dish. What we had tasted good, but it wasn’t what we ordered - and we would never have noticed at all if we hadn’t had to wait so long for it to turn up. We didn’t make a fuss, but we won’t be going back, and we won’t be recommending it to friends.
Can you see the difference between the two experiences? Both were remarkable - in one, the service provider cared and the beer seemed to taste better for it - in the other, there was a notable lack of care, and it cheapened the experience for us. No big deal either way, but we both have blogs, and both of us are happy to talk about it.
If you run a business, read Meatball Sundae. If you take nothing else away from it but this then it is time and money well invested - that there are thousands of Joannes out there just waiting for you to do something truly great for them (or screw them around). Either way, they will talk about it.
Craig commented on my Big Brother Law post:
A couple of questions;
do you wonder just how deeply Coonan is connected with the issues of modern communication networks? (I know I do.)
Do you wonder why legislation like this is proposed when there is already sufficuent legislation in place to deal with these issues (if they really are issues.)
And lastly, from an IA POV what do you think about the proliferation of legislation dealing with exceptions rather than the big issues. Coulod democracy do with a knowledge manager?
I replied:
Hi Craig,
thank you for your comment.
I am fairly sure that Helen has some good people advising her - and in this instance, advising her that a little wowserism will go a long way to appeasing people that have extreme views on the place of nudity on TV. I take your point (by inference) that she probably doesn’t know a lot about the communications needs of the average Aussie.
I believe that the issue is one that has been created purely to maintain the 1950s family orientation of those people with extreme views.
It has been said that if it’s on the news, it isn’t important - because road accidents, heart failure and cancer deaths happen every single day. If it’s on the news, be sure that someone will legislate for or against it. There is more media kerfuffle at the moment around a 12 year old model than there is about the thousands of Australians who will die in terrible pain this year - there is evidence that the cancers with a high profile get more funding, and are eventually better treated.
I do not think that democracy needs a knowledge manager - I think that we all need to take it upon ourselves to think about what the real issues are (and I include myself in this, absolutely). We need to be our own IAs - filtering out infospam and soap operas (including BB) and looking behind the bread-and-circuses piffle to what is really important.
What do you think?
Cheers, Andrew
So what’s important? 12 year old models or road deaths caused by truckies who are being worked to extremes by big supermarket chains? Kevin Rudd’s night out on the town or “fashionable” cancers getting more funding than others? Paris Hilton exposing her genitals or the sad state of our health system?
For me, it is about improving the quality of life for as many people as possible - that’s social responsibility 101. Everything else is a distraction - and when we forget that it is a distraction instead of the main game, people die needlessly. We can blame whoever we want, but there is a personal responsibility that we can all take to stay informed about the real issues. I’m as guilty as anyone on this - perhaps more so, because I know enough to know that there is a difference.
I know I have.
I’m worried about the implications of their security breach, and if you have applied for a job through Monster.com, you should be worried too. It’s not every web-based service provider that can claim to have exposed the personal details of 1.6 million people to identity thieves.
It is official: John Chow has finally lost it. After his rant on removing the minimum wage, today he is argueing for a flat tax rate to free up the rich and complaining about not getting a 100% tax break and paying superannuation for his nanny. Good grief
There are a lot of ill-informed right-wing fantasies that he might next indulge in. My pick for the Top 5 are:
- national service (AKA the draft) as a means to solve unemployment,
- forced removal of children from poor homes,
- Flouride as a government conspiracy in mind control,
- homosexuality as a curable disease, and
- forced sterility of convicted felons.
Anyone else care to guess what is next?
(PSST John: - just quietly… if you don’t want to pay a fair level of tax, move to Australia, mate, we look after business owners quite well here )
Zern Liew has published a magnificent rant on what a hazardous business it is to be a consumer in the modern age, where economies of scale are causing us (and our pets) active harm.
I’m given to the odd rant or two, and I like to think that I can tell a good rant from bad. Zern has researched this one well. It is well worth a read.
All Facebook has revealed that Facebook has a privacy flaw that is exploitable by hate groups. Basically, Facebook users can search out other users on terms like “Christian lesbians” and then leave abusive messages for those users if they disagree with their lifestyle choices - even if the “Christian lesbian” concerned had a non-public profile.
In the IT security world, this problem has a name - it is called “stupidity” or “we screwed up”. Facebook should close this loophole, and soon.
There are two ways of handling this sort of thing when a person is searching for information that they are not allowed to see:
- You tell them that it is not available for a specific reason, and if you want to be humane about it, tell them what that reason is and what they should do if they want to access it (it becomes a known unknown).
- You don’t tell them that it is not available (it remains an unknown unknown).
Option 1 is only useful where the person concerned has a potential need to know the information and there is some mechanism for providing it. I can’t see having a bug up your behind about someone else’s lifestyle choice as a legitimate need to know - what do you think?
Ever buy a toy as a child and race home, open it, and discovour that it is useless without the batteries? Toy marketers caught on a long time ago that a prominent “Batteries not included” label was appreciated by parent and child alike, because unmet expectations can be avoided. Some include the batteries now (Nintendo do this for their Wii) - I believe that if you make something, you should always include the batteries.
My partner Helen and I are discussing investment and lifestyle choices now that we’ve been cohabiting for a while. I bought a few books on investing in shares and property. Helen needed a book to read on the bus to work the other day so I suggested one from our “to be read” pile: Margaret Lomas’ “The Truth About Positive Cashflow Property”. She handed it back to me that evening and said “She says not to read this one until you’ve read some of her other books, what else do you have to read?”.
I thought I must have screwed up when I bought the book - I have my moments, but I do pay attention to order when buying books. For example, I wouldn’t buy part 3 of a science fantasy series without having read parts 1 and 2. I looked at “The Truth About Positive Cashflow Property” today - there on the cover is the recommendation from Neil Jenman, famous for his honesty in an industry not famed for it. There is the list of Margaret’s other books, and on the front, her smiling face. OK, so maybe it is in the front matter. Nope, there are pages of raves from other readers, but nothing about “Don’t buy this book until you’ve read my other ones”. Then I read the introduction - nothing there on prerequisite reading. I was beginning to wonder if Helen had misread it, so I started on the first chapter. Four pages into chapter one, there it is:
It is crucial that, in order to grasp the basics of how to successfully invest in true positive cash flow property, you read one of the books in my How to series, plus A Pocket Guide to Investing in Positive Cash Flow Property.
She goes on:
Once you have educated yourself about positive cash flow property and you are fully conversant in the process you must follow to buy it, you will then be ready to read this book.
As a reader I have a few options. I can get over feeling suckered and go and buy the other books. I can throw this book in the bin and never intentionally purchase another book by Margaret Lomas. Or I can ignore her advice and read the book anyway, and see if that buys back some of my trust - which is a conundrum, because if I trust her I would not read any further. Whichever way I go, I feel foolish for having bought the book in the first place.Why has she done this? If her intention was to prevent the reader from making my mistake, she probably would have put the warning on the front cover - or at least the back - that this was an “advanced topic” book that requires some pre-reading. It is OK to do that, serial fiction authors do it all the time, as do the writers of academic texts. Because I have a trust issue with her, cognitive dissonance leads me to think badly of Margaret even when there is no evidence to support it. So now I think, rightly or wrongly, that she has deliberately hidden this warning in the text of the book (nine physical pages) so that I would have to buy her other books to find out what happens in this one. I don’t know her from a bar of soap, and was prepared to trust her until proven otherwise, so I may have this wrong. Neil Jenman’s recommendation aside, I have no logical reason to feel this way about her - but as a human being, I distrust what I percieve has burnt me.
How could she have avoided this? By being up front - totally transparent - and discussing the prerequisite books, if only for a paragraph or two, somewhere that could not be missed, and stating plainly why they should be read before this one. Who knows, I might have decided to buy one of the others first.
But for now, the book goes back into the shelf, because Margaret should have included the batteries. I will seek out other authors that cover the same or similar material, and sadly I may be a little wary of Neil Jenman’s recommendation on the next one. This is a pity - my late father spoke highly of Neil and in his (brief) career in real estate said that he was a man to be trusted.
Unexpected behaviour is a user-centered design issue. It is where you get, well, unexpected behaviour. Imagine clicking on a link that says “Search” and it takes you back to the site home page. Hmm. Oh wait, in the top right hand corner of the home page there is a search widget. If you miss it, or even if you don’t, you will be annoyed because the system behaviour was unexpected. Other examples of unexpected behaviour include:
- random popups,
- hellish MIDI muzak when entering a site,
- the Blue Screen of Death, and
- zero response on an action (like clicking “OK” and nothing seems to happen).
I’ve been banging on about unexpected behaviour as an issue for years now. Others (like Jeff Johnson in GUI Bloopers
This morning I had to look through an interface provided by some system integrators for a project I’m working on. There was not a single menu item that linked through to a screen of the same name. Not one.
This is basic UCD101 stuff - it is not rocket science, it has been known about for years, so why do people still do it?
A lot of it comes down to “you can only know what you only know” - and this is why there are specialist designers and usability professionals whose job it is to watch such things. Expecting system integrators and coders to get this stuff is like expecting your GP to perform open heart surgery - sure, both the General Practitioner and the heart surgeon are doctors, but both have their areas of specialisation.
The US Government has indicted online payment exchange E-Gold for money laundering. This has been coming for a good long time - some privacy advocates have been saying for years that the War on Terror was really just an excuse to crack down on international currency transactions.
I never had an E-Gold account, but I knew people that did, and none of them ever seemed to be working to undermine anybody. They weren’t child pornographers, or credit card fraudsters, or working to scam people out of investment funds. Just people running or using cottage online businesses.
It has been said that societies progress to the stage where everything that is not proscribed is prescribed - that everything not prohibited becomes compulsory. For me, I think that absolute control is an illusion, and the tighter the fist, the more that slips through the fingers.
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