defenestrate99

Ok, maybe just one more chance

After TypePad and I had our first big row following a dismal service failure, it sent what seems to be a sincerely worded apology, which has me considering taking it back:

We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

TypePad has offered a variety of compensation packages and taken an innovative strategy of letting the customer decide how much of a service credit would make up for the inconsistent service. Everyone is defaulted to a 15-day offer. That is, if you never read the apology email and never even noticed the problems, you will still get a free, 15-day extension of service. You can also up the compensation to 30 days if you believe "performance issues made it very difficult...to use the service on multiple occasions," or even to 45 days if you thought "performance issues affected [you] greatly, making [your] experience unacceptable." The last possible choice is to decline the credit on the grounds that it didn't affect you at all.

I picked 30 days. I could still post and my blogs were accessible to all six of my readers. The slowness and lack of statistics cost TypePad the extra 15 days. As a marketer constantly grappling with retention issues, I find this to be a very intriguing concept. And I am not alone in thinking this was cool (of course, others think this is a sign of desperation, or justification to file a class action suit). I desperately want to know what the most popular compensation choices were and if TypePad is losing more or less money than anticipated.

I also appreciated Mr. Dash of Six Apart stopping by to check in. Any time you have a VP taking responsibility for service problems with customers directly, you get an idea that the company understands what it takes to maintain a good relationship with customers.

Pay attention, service providers, because you too will inevitably screw up, and TypePad looks to be doing a great job at minimizing the damage. As much as I hate to say it, I'm used to TypePad now, and the switching costs are not something I want to deal with unless the service or relationship deteriorates to the point where I have no other choice.

Thank you, TypePad, for giving me another choice. I hope it sticks.

Goodbye, TypePad.

I have decided that I am officially on the prowl for a new blog service. I am tired of TypePad's downright awful page speed and their apparent inability to provide stats with any degree of consistency. I get, like, six visitors a week and I'm throwing in the towel. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for someone with substantive traffic having to rely on this level of craptacular service. Service that I pay for.

Alright, blogosphere, wow me with the wisdom of the beehive.

[shakes magic 8 ball]

To what service should I move my blog, and why?

P.S. Don't you think that, of any service, TypePad should have natively provided the word "blogosphere" in its spell check dictionary?

I Wonder What Sort of Comment Spam I'll Get for Posting This....

This fantastic little vignette by Paul Kedrosky artfully implies that start-ups could learn a lot about emerging technology by surveying what adult entertainment vendors are doing online. I find this to be both funny and true.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a colleague several years ago while our company was sending out RFP's to best-of-breed billing companies.  My colleague already had her favorite vendor picked out. When I asked her why, she responded, "because their biggest customers are online gambling and porn. If they can handle fraud for those verticals, they can certainly handle ours."

I can't tell whether Mr. Kedrosky was being entirely glib or not with his suggestion. I'm sure he is realistic in his expectation that very few companies out there would devote resources to surfing sites of ill repute for the purpose of sorting out what's new and exciting (not that way) in technology. There's a line-item I'd like to see on an expense report.

Google Print

So Google launched Google Print, its searchable book database, much to the chagrin evidently of anybody who works in the publishing industry. I'm going to leave legality of the venture, which is certainly questionable, to people way smarter than I to debate (Here's a great Pro-Google argument, with some solid Anti-Google arguments in the comments. Go crazy).

I would just like to say, for the record, in my professional opinion, that Google Print is super cool.

Here's what I want, though: There needs to be some way to tie relevancy to the search based on the recognition or popularity of the source. Say, for example, you remember a snippet of poetry that begins with "I think that I shall never see" and type it into Google to find it in print. Here are the first five results you'll get in order:

1. Page 132 of Dangerous Liasons - "When I think that I shall never see Danceny again I could die."
2. Encarta Book of Quotations - Quotes two lines of the Joyce Kilmer Poem "I think that I shall never see; a poem as lovely as a tree."
3. Page 125 of The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers - "I think that I shall never see / a boy as lovely as S.T."
4. Page 75 of A Great Plains Reader, excerpting The Rites of Autumn - "I had rewritten Joyce Kilmer's line in my mind. 'I think that I shall never see, the other side of a tree.' "
5. Page 66 of Pop Art: A Critical History - "There is an Ogden Nash quatrain that I feel is apposite: I think that I shall never see / a billboard lovely as a tree."

Sure, number 2 is close, but you have to go to the 9th selection on Google's list to get the full poem by Joyce Kilmer. And I am perhaps making an assumption here, but it is my firm belief that most people are not thinking of page 132 of Dangerous Liaisons when there hear the line "I think that I shall never see."

Give the searchers some way to vote on relevancy after the sought after text has been located. Have those votes factored into future search results. This is a beta, and I'd be more than willing to help seed the votes in exchange for access to this much fantastic information.