So I was amused to get this comment today:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site….

I think you can see where it’s going. One can’t help but feel that just maybe he knows a lot of spammers and knows I get a lot of spammy comments because he is a [fill in the obvious blank]. How frustrating.

Oh yes: is this legally blackmail?

As always, feedback is very welcome.

If you’re trying to get in touch with me, my usual email addresses and mobile phone number should work just fine.

Update 2007-01-13: I should add that some feedreaders will treat all the items in the feed as new, because the GUID will have changed. Just mark them all as read. Apologies for the inconvenience.

To that end, here’s a positive story: if you’re looking for a letting agent in or around the Winchester area, I can’t recommend the Winchester Letting Company highly enough. They’ve been superb from day one: helpful and friendly. The two problems I’ve had so far with my flat have been resolved in less than 12 hours, including when my boiler broke this morning and they resolved it before lunchtime. They charge no ongoing fees, and are generally all-round helpful folks. If you’re looking to rent somewhere round here, give them a try.

Hope that helps tip the balance a little, folks. As always, if you have any thoughts about what I write – good or bad – please feel free to leave a comment.

• Sex
• Atheists
• Copyright
• Science
• Gifted Students
• The Apple Mac
• Web Design
• Earthquakes
• West Nile Virus

The last one is the most surprising. I’m not even sure what the West Nile Virus is. Perhaps that’s why there are myths about it. But at least as regards the other subjects, it seems to be a slight cheat, and writing cliché, to ‘correct’ a set of myths without demonstrating that they exist. For example, here are some alleged myths concerning the subjects above:

• Married couples have less sex [if I might be slightly glib, this sounds a bit like the argument that crime rates go up when you jail more criminals].
• “If it doesn’t have a copyright notice, it’s not copyrighted.”
• Atheists have no sense of morality, since morality comes from God.
• Scientific knowledge can only be discovered by highly trained professional scientists.
• Gifted students do not need help. If they are really gifted, they can manage on their own.
• Quitting [smoking] is just a matter of willpower.

Does anyone really believe any of this stuff anyway, or are these myths mythical?

• Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I've since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I'd leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]
• Mr. Google, please stop developing so many interfaces – and plug them all together. If I want to do an exhaustive search for something, I now have to search Google Web, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, and possibly others. This is not a good thing – you’re straying from the simple search you started with. Some of those searches do show up in the main search results, but you could do a better job of tying them together to show what I’m actually looking for. This could be a real competitive edge, especially since the basic searches that MSN and others provide are now actually quite reasonable.

Google still have an edge in providing what people want – for a company so technically-focused, they either have talented marketers or are just lucky. Please, Google, keep it up.

• 200 posts – approximately 1.6/day since 25th June.
• 246 comments – approximately 1.96/day, and an average of 1.23/article.
• 2,958 spam comments caught by Akismet – approximately 167/week – although this is nowhere near my personal email, which hovers more around the frightening figure of 4,000/week – I love SpamAssassin.
• Maximum number of comments for any one post is 15, minimum 0 (unsurprisingly).
• 28 post categories.
• Customer Service, SOA & ESB, and Technology are the three categories that have recieved the most interest, according to the Popularity Contest plugin. Maths is apparently the least interesting. Even such a tawdry category as Sex has managed a respectable 13th place, although apparently there is more commonality between the two than you might think anyway.
• Ranked 131,144th on Technorati, with 85 links from 19 blogs.
• Random photo on sidebar selects from 1,135 images.
• My favourite post is Why Trade is Beneficial – The Ebay Way.

If these were my businesses, I’d do a quick back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis to make sure this type of research was worthwhile (although I’m not sure what numbers I’d use). From a customer perspective, though, this feels like the way service should be – more please.

I work on one of the test teams for WebSphere ESB, and we’re currently working hard on the recently announced 6.0.2 version, so I haven’t been posting quite as much on work topics recently as I normally aim to do. But if you’d like to take a look at my past postings on SOA and ESB or WebSphere, or indeed anything else on my blog, please do, and please feel to leave a comment, ask a question, or get in touch.

Thanks.

One of the reasons I like working for IBM is that it’s happy to allow me and my IBM colleagues to blog externally. Of course there are guidelines – obviously I can’t give away confidential information. It’s still a brave act for a company like IBM, however, and many others of equivalent size are rightly nervous about allowing the same – what happens if the PR and marketing folks lose control over companies’ images? This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of PR and marketing as disciplines, but it’s clear that there’s a risk of exposing non-alignment – people have different opinions, after all, right? Sure, yes, there’s that risk. However, although I hope our customers can see that IBMers are working together to produce good quality products and services for them, at least we have the reassurance that we’re being judged on our merits.

I’d encourage any other IBMers who aren’t already doing so to blog externally. You can find more information internally in the usual place (how’s that for keeping a secret, huh?).

All in all, pretty impressive.

‘I have been passed details of your unsatisfactory response from 82ASK…’

‘We have given you two free credits in the hope that you will continue to use the 82ASK service, and to apologise again for your unsatisfactory response.’

‘It appears in this instance our usually reliable sources have let us down, and we will endeavour to find a better source for questions of this nature in the future.’

Not only are 82ASK over-compensating for their error, they are obviously also actively seeking customers, such as myself, who are unhappy. This is fantastic customer service, but is also a good example of how to exploit new technology: many people who previously complained in private, or simply didn’t use a service again after an unsatisfactory experience, are now blogging about it, as I did. 82ASK are obviously actively searching for such comments. Although they were still wrong in their answer, 82ASK have been very generous and humble, and I almost feel bad now for complaining. I will use them again.