Digitally Refreshing

Every time I see that information-revolution advert on television I’m think “I really must write that piece about Irrepressible.info, an Amnesty International campaign”.

So here you have it…

So much money is spent on taking market share (not just by search engines) and not enough on empowering people to actually see and interact with the Web in the first place:

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

Censoring web access if rife throughout our world, the acronym WWW hardy rings true in today, perhaps we should use Most of the World Wide Web instead (MWWW).

Read more about which countries’ governments are restricting Internet access or check out this handy Internet censorship map from OpenNet – complete with mouseovers for more information, it’s quote detailed and very interesting.

So, back to Irrepressible.info, if you don’t agree with what’s going on, visit Irrepressible.info and sign their petition.

It wasn’t until today that I noticed the small red word which reads ‘new!‘ on Google Maps…

Now you can plot points onto a Google map, save it and share with your friends online. I like the Chelsea Walk, created by Paul Thompson.

If you’d rather just sit back and relax, take a tour of Our Earth as Art, created by Jonathan Perkins. It’s amazing.

I spend a lot of time using Gmail. I often work remotely so it’s a lifesaver – something that I simply couldn’t do without. A fixed email application on my laptop just wouldn’t do (I need to get to my mail from anywhere) and I find other online email systems clunky and hard to use.

Anyway, that’s enough praising Gmail because I’ve always been slowed down and frustrated by the lack of ‘drag and drop‘ when it comes to attaching documents to an email. Having to rely on attaching a file via a typical dialogue box can slow you down considerably especially when you’re working on several projects at once and have files all over the place.

That was until I found a drag and drop plug in for Firefox which allows you to actually drag and drop multiple files from explorer into Gmail!

Download the Firefox drag and drop extension.

Backing up photos leads to a lot of reminiscing. I found this image amongst a batch of photos I took whilst driving to work in South Africa. I would stop and take a photo every kilometre so that friends and family could see what I experienced every morning and evening.

The drive started in Northwold and finished in Sandton.

Part two will consist of a UK version. There will be no driving – just walking, bus and tube.

I visited Information-Revolution.org with all the excitement of surfing in the nineties, only to be disappointed at the end result. At first glance I thought that some company had spent a great deal of cash creating a ‘revolutionary’ ad campaign (as seen on the television and all over the tubes) for the sake of pointing out that people use Google quite a lot.It’s an interesting idea, if web users request information through one source, that source could manipulate said information to their advantage. Interested, I read on.

After the propaganda style intro text (which you had to irritatingly scroll through within an iFrame) I was drawn the ‘alternate search engine’ area. Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo were listed – in that order. Ask was selected by default – but I’ll get to that.

Through further research via semi-hidden links at the bottom of the page I found out that it is, in fact, Ask who is behind the site. Then it dawned on me, it’s not that they’re want an information revolution, rather they want a larger piece of the search engine market.

How saddened I was. Probably more irritated that I had allowed myself to be taken in by just another ad campaign.

I’m not going to review the effectiveness of the search engine here, you can look elsewhere for that. But I would like to say that this attempt at changing the way people use the web has got to be one of the most ineffective campaigns out there. I would love to peer over the shoulders of Ask’s marketing department to see the actual ROI of this exercise.

I know people who don’t even know they are using Google to visit websites, Through my experience with user testing I’ve seen many people actually type URLs into Google’s search field to visit sites. They are not even aware of the ‘address‘ bar in their browser. If Ask want people to use their search engine to find information they are going to have to move far, far away form the subversive marketing strategies they employ today.

Headings, margins and paragraphs behave differently in IE7 and Firefox 2 depending on how you set up your style sheets. You can see this illustrated when you compare the same page in the two different browsers.

The page below has no styling and contains only heading 1, heading 2 and paragraphs tags.

You can see (above) how the font sizes are pretty much the same, but the spacing above and below the headings and paragraphs differ.

Things become a little clearer (and more bizarre) as you begin to add styling to your page. Below I’ve added font family and size, margin and padding attributes to the body class.

Now look at the results below.

You can see (above) the heading sizes are wildly different and the spacing between all the elements still differ.

Next I’ll reset the margins on all headings (1 and 2 in this case) and specify their font sizes

See the results below

You can see we’re getting there, but there still seems to be too much margin around the paragraphs in IE. So I’ll reset the margins on all paragraph tags using the following code

See the results below

Perfect! So if you want your content to look the same in Firefox 2 and IE7 then remember to reset the margins and font-sizes on all your paragraphs and headings. Obviously you don’t have to use the values I specified here, you can make your headings as large or as small as you like!

My previous post concerned the level of service I received from Orange Broadband (previously Wanadoo) and how poor it was, however the quality of the connection over the past few days has been good and I find myself surprised by the contrasting level of service. I think that there are two separate areas of concern here, call centre agents and the systems they use and the actual broadband connectivity.

If the connectivity is okay, then why is the customer support so bad?

I Google researched the poor service I experienced and have found several articles detailing similar stories. It seems this has been going on for quite some time, when will orange listen up and sort this out?

A few comments from the BBC News website

I am not surprised to hear about the Orange problem. I had a Wanadoo account for some years but it was disconnected when Orange took over. No warning. Mails to that address now just disappear into a black hole without either myself or the senders being made aware.
Mick Low, Tonbridge, UK

I’ve had no broadband since 27/09/06 (date of LLU Migration exercise) and have spent many hours and much money on calls to helplines. They take you through unnecessary checks and fob you off again and again with instruction to call back in 48 hours for the latest update saying the more you call , the higher your priority. Freeserve was fine and Wanadoo was fine. I thnk its time to boycott everything Orange.
Pauline Jenkins, Cardiff, Wales

So glad I left Orange. No connection for weeks, and the most laughable customer support I’ve ever come across.
Peter Fender, London, England

My Orange broadband has been disconnected for 4 weeks! Their technical support and customer service is by far the worst I have ever experienced. They also refused to allow me to cancel my contract and move to another supplier unless I paid £300. John Arthrell, Colchester
John Arthrell, Colchester, England

After 3 weeks of fighting over the phone, I’ve finally sorted out an internet connection with Orange Broadband. Below is a letter I sent to their customer services department.

Read what other people think of Orange Broadband.

Orange Customer Care
PO BOX 486
Rotherham
south Yorkshire
S62 5ZX

RE: Disgusting level of service

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to recount to you the 3 week nightmare that I had to endure whilst trying to make use of the broadband special offer I received when I upgraded my account from pay-as-you-go to an 18 month contract.

On Friday 16th February I called Orange broadband support (dialling 150) from my Orange mobile phone (xxxxx xxx xxx). I spoke to an overseas call centre agent who went through a few details with me but sadly couldn’t help as I was not sitting at my PC at home, I decided to call again when I would return home from work that evening.

Friday evening I sat down again, this time in front of my PC, armed with all the necessary cables and paperwork. This time when I phoned support I was transferred to a local call centre in the north of England. The agent was extremely helpful, telling me how to bypass the irritating and useless installation CD and setting up the connection profile on my PC – so that I could see the LiveBox.

The same call centre agent was also able to get me onto the Internet! There I was, 30 minutes later surfing happily away on a speedy line.

The next day (Saturday 17th Feb) the line was dead. I was disconnected from the Internet. The errors I received were either PPP server down or Invalid ADSL authentication.

Read the rest of this entry »

I sat down the other night and ordered my groceries online from Sainsbury’s, for the first time.

I registered, made sure they delivered to my area using a postcode (handy feature that) and I was able to add my loyalty points card, this was expected but I’ve been disappointed at the lack of continuity before.

It was a standard shop, ranging from cleaning products to vegetables to toothpaste. The products were categorised well and the breadcrumb ensured we didn’t get lost at the back of the store looking for Oxo Cubes.

When I couldn’t find a product, or didn’t know which of the categories to dive into I simply used the search. Mind you, if you don’t know how to spell correctly (how do you spell broccoli, isn’t there an h in there?) then the search isn’t useful. Sainsbury’s need to apply some Google-esque search technology.
The products added were always visible in my shopping list to the right of the screen – complete with the ability to increase / decrease amounts or remove altogether. Once you added a product to your list a marker was left in the store listing, stating ‘added to list’, handy feature, I thought.

Adding the products took some time, but no more than if I were jostling along side a thousand other shoppers on a busy Friday night. Plus, you’re shopping list is saved so that you can go back and simply re-order or edit and re-order. This then makes online shopping far, far quicker if it wasn’t already.

The most significant aspect of online food shopping was the way in which I chose products. There was no shelf in front of me, no opportunity for marketeers to push products into my line of view which I didn’t want, there were no aisle ends with flashing lights nor attractive promotions people dispensing bite size chunks of pizza or pie.

Instead, when I visited an online ‘aisle’ all I saw was an alphabetically listed selection of products with a price. Within that list were products on special offer, denoted by a small marker image. It was easy to glance at these special offers and make a decision based on the information displayed. I actually purchased £19 worth of special products – as I was neatly informed on my shopping list. In fact I began to look for specials, it was just so easy to spot them, and quickly understand what they had to offer.

Maybe eventually the online ‘aisles’ will end up like the physical ones, confusing and assembled based on the price of shelf space.

The food arrived during the pre-selected time slot with no problems at all. It worked like clockwork.

There was a £5 delivery charge. Does that tarnish the experience? Well, it beats the fare in a taxi to the shops, or compares to the £1 – £2 I would spend in petrol to drive there. Ultimately I’m spending that £5 on time. Time for me not to have to go to the shops on the weekend.

This time of the year, being so close to Christmas, I wake up in the morning an throw on my jeans, tshirt, jumper, socks and slippers and rush downstairs to put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea – making sure the central heating is working, on the way.

In South Africa I would have have thrown back the sheets – thrown on a pair of shorts and enjoyed a glass of ice cold orange juice on my stoep.

After warming up with my cup of tea, I hop on the tube with the other 8 million commuters working in London and surfaced somewhere in the middle of town with another cup of piping hot tea. I take a walk through Hyde Park, the sun rising behind me, warming my back and the backs of others as they jog and cycle towards the heart of London. How they cycle through the bitterly cold wind amazes me.

In SA driving to work would have been a breeze – does everyone really leave Gauteng in December? Where do they all go? I wish the traffic could be like this every day! I get to work, park underground, arrive at my desk via a lift and gaze through the window into a crystal clear summer’s morning.

Back in the UK I take half a day at the office and come home to finish up. That’s not a problem as I have an 8MB line running to my house and then a wireless network set up from there so my whole family can be online at the same time. The the whole thing costs me a monthly fee equivalent to a dinner for two. In fact technology is cheap – allowing me to run a home office.

In sunny SA I would have driven home in the evening and made my way to a long awaited braai to welcome the festive season in. The sun’s just beginning to go down, along with a few drinks! Right now I would be standing around the fire discussing, rugby, cricket and the finer points of lamb fillets.

Meanwhile back in the UK, it’s down to the pub with a few mates. Glad I’m taking the taxi, it’s dropping down to -1 tonight, after a pint I’ll be over the limit anyway. Besides you can’t park in London for less than a bank loan – and that’s if you’re prepared to fork out for the mandatory congestion charge. But I’m not complaining – the rest of London is a £1 bus ride away.