Andrew Ferrier

Google have created a powerful brand based on creating simplicity from complexity (what all good IT is about). Their tools aren’t perfect, but they’ve made life easier for billions, and so I think they still deserve some free feedback from time-to-time. So, a few thoughts:

• 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.

Chris Tomkins and I both work on the WebSphere ESB team, and have been blogging about it and related IBM SOA products for some months. We’ve now decided to join forces and launch a new blog called SOA Tips ‘n’ Tricks. This will contain technical tips on ESB and other products as well as wider issues – we don’t know exactly how it will evolve so please feel free to leave us some feedback on the things you read – what you like, and what you don’t. I plan to discontinue writing about ESB or SOA specifically here on my personal blog, although I’ll continue to discuss wider IBM issues.

As this blog reaches another milestone (this is the 200th post), I get the feeling I’ve written far more than I set out to. So I thought I’d round up some statistics:

• 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.

Well, it looks like writing about customer service can have an effect. About two months back I wrote about how 82ASK had disappointed me – they found my prose, replied, and made it all OK. Now, another recent posting about the LOVEFiLM/Screenselect merger has elicited a comment from the LOVEFiLM team. They haven’t entirely addressed my concerns, but their proactive approach is encouraging, and might tip the balance in favour of hanging on, if and when problems do occur.

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 didn’t realise this was going to happen, but after my recent posting about the virtues of corporate blogging, ibm.com has gone all-out and has posted a directory of IBMers who are blogging externally on the front page, so it’s entirely possible you’ve arrived from there – in which case, welcome!

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.

I find it entertaining when people state ‘Walmart wants…’, ‘Ford thinks…’, or ‘BT needs…’. It’s quite painfully obvious that corporations don’t have feelings or thoughts. What is true is that people within them do. I’ve thought for some time that one of greatest contributors to a corporation’s success is when the thoughts of its people are aligned. Unaligned thoughts are unlikely to be useful. Aligned thoughts can happen by accident (less likely) or because of good quality leadership (more likely), but in either case it’s important to recognise that they are still individual thoughts.

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?).

I’d been struggling for a while to find a decent RSS reader for Windows. However, I’ve now been using Feedreader for a few weeks, and am very happy with it. It fully supports nested folders/categories, which is nigh-on essential if you’re regularly monitoring as many feeds as I am (>100). You can effectively aggregate several feeds together by viewing them at the folder level. Feeds can be viewed using the text contained within the feed itself, or you can easily open the original blog entry inline. The OPML import/export support seems robust, and fully supports the nested folders. Feedreader will also discover feeds in a relatively intelligent way if you feed it a blog URL, as well as supporting searching across all cached blog entries.

All in all, pretty impressive.

I am now on the official list of IBM external bloggers. You can find plenty of my colleagues there also, blogging on a variety of IBM-related and other topics.

Apologies for the shortage of posts recently; it’s been a very busy week – I should be back to normal posting behaviour by the weekend.

I’m very impressed. A few days ago I wrote about how 82ASK had screwed up the answer to a question. This evening, totally unprompted, I get an email:

‘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.