February 28, 2006
Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler!
It's Fat Tuesday! And this year especially, we should all raise a toast to New Orleans. Better yet, raise a toast and open your wallets.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:51 AM
The Long Tail, Redux
Gerry McGovern has some contrarian ideas on The Long Tail.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:05 AM
Gilbane San Francisco
Hot off the press is a PDF of the brochure for Gilbane San Francisco, which will be held at the Palace Hotel April 24-26. I will be doing a DITA tutorial there.
Also of note: CM Professionals will host its fifth summit on April 23rd and 24th, also at the Palace Hotel, in conjunction with Gilbane.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:46 AM
February 27, 2006
Get me Rewrite!
Judging from this, we know why they need an editor.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:57 PM
Browser Toolbars
I am not a browser wonk, and since switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox in November 2004 because of the IE spyware curse, I have done nothing but keep my Firefox up to date, make my Onfolio tool work with Firefox, and added a single search engine (IBM Developer Works) to Firefox's convenient search box. But one of my clients, ThomasNet.com, has come up with a toolbar to highlight its content, and it looks quite useful. It also strikes me as a good example of how to blend a user's day-to-day habits with a publisher's content. If you are an industrial buyer or otherwise work in manufacturing, you should check it out. If you are a publisher, I would also recommend you take a look and consider how you could merge your content with your user's day-to-day tasks.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM
February 26, 2006
DITA or DocBook?
Since I have been spending a fair bit of my time talking about DITA lately, I often get asked about adopting DITA or DocBook. I should write a few thoughts down (and have in one of the Gilbane Report white papers), but in the meantime you can see what Eliot Kimber has to say.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 PM
February 23, 2006
Some Boys are Born to Wander
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 48
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares just such a story.
Some Boys are Born to Wander
From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It's spring,
and soon they'll be gone above timberline,
climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home.
He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years
till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son--too many switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.
Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed
his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.
First published in "New Letters," Vol. 69, 2002, and reprinted from "A Thousand Miles of Stars," 2004, by permission of the author and Texas Tech University Press. Copyright (c) 2002 by Walt McDonald. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:26 PM
February 21, 2006
More Thoughts on eBook Market
Burt Helm, who does a solid job of covering electronic publishing at Business Week, has a new article on the potential for the eBook market. He discusses the Sony device again, and also speculates on what Apple might be up to. (Which reminds me that I havent heard from the Sony PR person yet.)
As I have said in a couple of places (here and here), having a good device is one thing, but you also need excellent foolproof sites for marketing the content and supporting the customers. I had a bear of a time with my older son's Napster installation this past weekend. A hiccup in his membership led to several hours of troubleshooting, and eventually led me to reinstall the firmware on his MP3 player. I have to say the Napster tech support was mediocre at best--and this after 20 minutes on hold. The Creative Labs folks (maker of his Zen Micro MP3 player) were excellent. They knew eactly what steps to walk me through, and were very systematic about it. So good device, and good technical support on the device, but the site definitely let him down.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2006
Traffic and Trackback Spam
I shouldn't have talked about my site traffic the other day in nearly the same breath I mentioned the problem I was having with trackback spam. It turns out the two things are related, as I am now being bombarded with attempts to post trackback spam. Props again to Brad Choate and his spamlookup tool; it has blocked 826 trackback spams today alone.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:45 PM
Holy Cussing
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 47
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
The poet, novelist and biographer, Robert Morgan, who was raised in North Carolina, has written many intriguing poems that teach his readers about southern folklore. Here's just one example.
Holy Cussing
When the most intense revivals swept
the mountains just a century ago,
participants described the shouts and barks in unknown tongues, the jerks of those who tried to climb the walls, the holy dance and laugh.
But strangest are reports of what was called the holy cuss. Sometimes a man who spoke in tongues and leapt for joy would break into an avalanche of cursing that would stun with brilliance and duration. Those that heard would say the holy spirit spoke as from a whirlwind. Words burned on the air like chains of dynamite. The listeners felt transfigured, and felt true contact and true presence then, as if the shock of unfamiliar and blasphemous profanity broke through beyond the reach of prayer and song and hallo to answer heaven's anger with its echo.
Reprinted from Southern Poetry Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2004 by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2004, by Robert Morgan, whose most recent book is "The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems," Louisiana State University Press, 2004. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:56 PM
DITA Tutorial
So as part of Gilbane San Francisco this coming April, I will be giving a half-day tutorial on DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The following description is also available on the conference website:
Tutorial B: Working with DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture
DITA is quickly establishing itself as the leading method of creating XML-based technical documents and other product support content. DITA’s success is based on several things—a tag set that is straightforward and easy to learn, a publicly available toolkit that allows users to readily create print, Help, and other output, and specialization—a flexible and powerful means of customizing the DITA for your organization’s requirements. This tutorial will combine hands-on exercises, demonstrations, and discussion where attendees will learn DITA tagging, work with the DITA Open Toolkit, and understand how specialization can best be done. Tutorial attendees will receive and work with a (time-limited) copy of XMetal Author DITA Edition.
Interested? Feel free to email me, or, heck, just go ahead and register (and get a free video Ipod).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:31 PM | Comments (1)
Vital Source
I am downloading and will be looking at the vitalsource bookshelf, an eBook reader and manager that one of my clients is interested in. So far, I like what I see. The installation went smoothly, and I went through their bookstore and selected a few free titles and a demo title (a seven-day license to the first four chapters of an introductory calculus text).
The downloading has a nice feature where you can immediately open a book as it finishes downloading, even when you have a number of other books in queue.
I have begun looking at some of the eBooks. The reader has a very simple interface (a good thing in my "book"), but I haven't quite grasped the basic navigation ideas yet. The basic rendering looks excellent, though the calculus book is a workbook, so it is hard to judge if the math is dumbed down or if the original typsetting of the book was as simple as the eBook seems to be.
I will be digging a little deeper.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:13 PM
Sony eBook Device Again
Over at DRM Watch, Bill Rosenblatt has some thoughts about whether the new Sony eBook Device will have an impact on the moribund eBook market. Bill focuses, naturally, on some of the DRM aspects of the device, and sees their execution on this product as a good test of their new DRM strategy. I agree with Bill, especially since Sony stumbled so badly recently with their music DRM. But I also think the success of the eBook device also depends on Sony Connect, which is, well, er, ummm, lame.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM
30th Street Station
I had a few minutes to kill in Philadelphia's 30th Street Station yesterday, and happened to notice a sculpture I hadn't seen before. It's enormous, and hard to miss, but it is kind of tucked away from the action. It is about 10 scenes in one, but I snapped this one. The sculpture is called, "The Spirit of Transportation," but I might call this part, "Amtrak on a Bad Day."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:13 AM
I am by no means an expert on the many Web sites and mechanisms for social and business networking. But over the years I have tried a few (Tribe comes to mind, but I tried a few more whose names I can't even recall right now, so obviously they weren't terribly effective for me). But the one I have invested some time and effort in is LinkedIn, and it has been fruitful for me. I can point to a couple of projects that originated there, and I enjoy being able to connect colleagues whose talents and skills I value.
So, via LinkedIn, I was really pleased today to hear from Bob DuCharme, someone whose work I have always admired. He has this great, readable book on XSLT, and his articles on XML.com are some of my favorites. (He has a new one on Hacking the XML in your TiVo.) I've added Bob's blog to my blogroll and CMS Resources page.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:27 AM
February 14, 2006
Traffic
Like many of you with a blog or Web site, I watch my traffic. I am not obsessive about it, but I usually check daily, and lately am both pleased and intrigued.
Pleased because there are more visitors all the time. I was getting a steady 700 or so user sessions a day when I lauched the combined blog in September of last year. I hit an average of 1000 a day around the end of November, and then averaged 1210 a day last month. The last week or so has seen a steady climb through 1300 a day, and then yesterday I had 1699 user sessions. I wonder how many of them were from T-Mobile?
The intriguing part is the number of people who go straight for the RSS feeds. Of the 3966 pageviews yesterday, 1560 of them were the feed for my blog, 130 of them were the feed from my eForms Resources page, and 98 of them were the feed from my CM Resources page. Even more interesting is that some downloads of my feeds are for multiple subscribers through places like Bloglines and Newsgator. Moreover, my feed is hosted in at least a couple of places, and I have only a vague idea how many people subscribe that way.
So clearly RSS is the growth medium for Web publishing, at least in my case. When I only had my brochure site, I would get 35 or so visitors a day. Yesterday, it looks like about 12 people took a good long look at the brochure site. Many of the rest of them were going straight for the RSS.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:15 AM
Trackback Spam
Back in the day (oh, six months ago) I was plagued with comment spam. Then I installed a more recent version of MovableType, and comment spam was reduced to a dull roar. Then, last Friday, I started to get bombed with trackback spam. Beginning Friday and continuing through this morning, I deleted hundreds of trackback spam that originated from 72 different IP adresses. I went through the painstaking process of deleting the trackbacks and then adding each IP address to my list of banned IP addresses.
This was really dreary, and I know the problem goes aways with a further upgrade to MovableType, but I am swamped. So I did a little poking around and found a tool, spamlookup, written by Brad Choate. Brad was an independent developer, but is now part of the engineering team at MovableType developer Six Apart. I had a little trouble with the installation files, but was bailed out by Brad and my man Paul Crook. Since installing it a few minutes ago, it has already deflected three trackback spams.
My life is now 1% better.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:00 AM
February 13, 2006
Just in Time for Valentine's Day
Information Please has a great roundup of love poems on the Web. There are thousands of worthy poems for such a list, but I still go for the oldies but goodies.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:03 PM
Amateur Hour at T-Mobile Redux
Gosh, I thought I had resolved the customer support snafus at T-Mobile. At the conclusion of round 1, I wrote: "So the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, called me today and said, on further reflection, they are going to eliminate the second early termination fee, and will send me a bill for the remaining service charges, which I will pay."
This was last Tuesday, February 7. Today I get a call saying my bill is overdue and will be referred to collections if not paid promptly. I was miffed, of course. I have an excellent credit rating, and am compulsive, in fact, about paying bills on time. So I explained, cheerily at first, that this issue had been decided with customer support and I was expecting a final bill, which I would promptly pay.
No dice.
The first person I spoke with, a Candace, employee number 1725431, said that they had no way of regenerating a bill, and by the time the next bill came out, it would be referred to collections. Well, I said, please talk to Carsia Johnson at 877 290 6323, x8029, and she can explain the arrangement we came to.
No dice again.
So I asked to speak to a supervisor, Mike, employee number 1725778, and he said the same thing, more or less. I impressed on him that this had been resolved, that Carsia Johnson agreed to have a final bill sent out, and I asked him again to contact her. I tried, several times, to read the phone number to him, but he refused to take it. Instead, he went to some lengths to find her email, but couldn't. I offered the phone number again; he refused. I said that under no circumstances would I accept this being sent to collections, but he said repeatedly that he had no control over when and how accounts are sent to collections. I said this was impossible, but he insisted. (More on this later, as it turned out to be false.)
So I said, ok, you're not going to call Carsia Johnson, so I will, and I picked up another phone and called her with him listening. I explained that he was demanding payment and threatening collections, despite the agreement she and I reached before, and I needed to hear from her as soon as possible. When I hung up, poor Mike was frothing. I had lied. He never threatened collections. But of course he had, saying that if the bill was not paid it would be sent to collections. That, my friend, is threatening collections.
So after a not so veiled threat from Mike, employee #1725778, ("If you are going to lie, maybe we should meet"), he hung up the phone. I burst out laughing at his threat, and asked him if he were threatening me, but he hung up before he could answer. So I called Carsia Johnson back and updated her on the new angle to this story.
In the first entry, I wrote, "When does shoddy customer service become abuse?" I think I know the answer to that question now.
This is just silly, really. Not only do these people not talk to each other, but they refuse to talk to each other. So, remembering how everyone I spoke to before had a different spin on the policies and the facts, I decided to call and talk to a different payments supervisor. This time I got an incredibly helpful guy, Bill (maybe it's the name), employee #1724182. I gave him the story, explained that I was waiting on a final printed bill, and my main concern was this idea of the account being referred to collections. No problem, Bill tells me (emphasis mine), you just have to set up a payment plan with as little as ten dollars up front, and the account will not be referred. (This after being told by Mike repeatedly that "he had no control over when and how accounts are sent to collections." Moreover, Bill told me, the new bill would then be generated tonight, and I could review it before paying the final balance.)
So I happily agreed to pay $100 today by credit card, and would pay the balance (another $150 or so upon receipt of the bill). Done deal (for now!).
One interesting detail emerged though, which tells me again how slipshod T-Mobile is at articulating and applying their policies. Part of the balance due is from a charge back that I insisted American Express make because T-Mobile had charged my credit card after I told them to stop charging my card. You might remember that the first person never told me the charging would continue. The second person told me that it can take 60 days for EasyPay to stop charging your credit card. Bill told me today, flatly, that T-Mobile should have immediately stopped charging my credit card. Bill is a supervisor, and the other two weren't, so I have to assume he knows the rules a little better. Why the three views of the same policy, and all so different?
So I have a call back into Carsia Johnson. No return call yet. I hope the remaining billing goes as agreed to today with Bill, but, gosh, who knows.
I will keep you up to date.
UPDATE: I got a call from a senior person today who promised to be my point of contact until this gets resolved. I expect a final bill shortly, which I will then pay. I will then request a letter explaining that all commitments have been met, nothing more is owed, etc, etc.
What a lot of grief...
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM | Comments (1)
February 12, 2006
This Explains Everything
No wonder the wingnuts don't "believe" in evolution. They would have to admit this is an example of natural selection at work.
UPDATE from the Delightful Irony Department: Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:29 PM
A Haiku
I watch the sun set
as your footprints fill with snow--
gone by tomorrow.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:08 PM
February 11, 2006
There is something about...
... a leafless oak tree against a winter sky.
This is looking up from the low point of my backyard, with my house on the left.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:04 AM
Nor'Easter Coming
So says the national weather service.
...BLIZZARD WATCH NOW IN EFFECT FROM THIS EVENING THROUGH SUNDAY
AFTERNOON...
SNOW WILL BEGIN ON THE SOUTH COAST AND ISLANDS BETWEEN 8 PM AND
11 PM TONIGHT...AND SHOULD REACH THE INTERSTATE 95 CORRIDOR BETWEEN
10 PM TONIGHT AND 1 AM SUNDAY. THE HEAVIEST SNOW WILL FALL OVERNIGHT
INTO EARLY SUNDAY AFTERNOON.
TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS WILL RANGE FROM 6 TO 10 INCHES ON NANTUCKET AND
BLOCK ISLAND...TO BETWEEN 8 AND 15 INCHES ELSEWHERE. THE 15 INCH
TOTALS ARE MOST LIKELY TO OCCUR FROM PROVIDENCE AND BOSTON TO THE
SOUTH COAST.
DURING THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM SUNDAY...BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE
POSSIBLE WITH SNOWFALL RATES NEAR 3 INCHES PER HOUR. NORTHEAST WINDS
GUSTING AS HIGH AS 50 MPH MAY PRODUCE WHITE OUT CONDITIONS WITH NEAR
ZERO VISIBILITY. ON THE SOUTH COAST...CAPE COD AND THE ISLANDS WIND
GUSTS MAY REACH 60 MPH.
Sounds impressive, but 28 years ago this week, we got through the Blizzard of 78. Now that was a storm; this will be a snow shower by comparison. Besides, I've got plenty of gas in the snow blower, and my roof rake stands at the ready.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:49 AM
February 10, 2006
International Conference of the Book
I received an invitation to propose a paper for the 4th annual International Conference of the Book. Turns out it is put on by my former graduate program in Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College.
I decided also to add an events section to my CM Resources page.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:02 PM
Journal of Electronic Publishing
Via DigitalKoans, I learned that UMichigan's Journal of Electronic Publishing has relaunched. Among the articles in the new edition: Joseph Esposito on, "What if Wal-Mart Ran a Library?" and Geoffrey Bilder on, "In Google We Trust?"
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:12 PM
Blogs, Blogs Everywhere
I've commented on the ridiculous growth in blogs, but Tim Bray has a much more clever take on it, and thanks to perl no less!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:03 PM
February 9, 2006
Geology
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 046
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
We constantly compare one thing with another, or attempt to, saying, "Well, you know, love is like...it's like...well, YOU know what it's like." Here Bob King, who lives in Colorado, takes an original approach and compares love to the formation of rocks.
Geology
I know the origin of rocks, settling
out of water, hatching crystals
from fire, put under pressure
in various designs I gathered
pretty, picnic after picnic.
And I know about love, a little,
igneous lust, the slow affections
of the sedimentary, the pressure
on earth out of sight to rise up
into material, something solid
you can hold, a whole mountain,
for example, or a loose collection
of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.
Reprinted from the Marlboro Review, Issue 16, 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Robert King, whose prose book, "Stepping Twice Into the River: Following Dakota Waters," appeared in 2005 from The University Press of Colorado. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:15 PM
Two Days, Two Great New Blogs
So I mentioned a great new blog I found yesterday, and today Eliot Kimber announced his blog, Dr. Macro's XML Rants. Eliot describes it as, "W. Eliot Kimber's personal blog about XML as a technology, tools that support it, what I think is and isn't good practice, and technical issues in general. Other keywords that might be relevant: XSLT, XSL-FO, schema, publishing, composition, formatting, Python, Java." But I especially like his tagline: All Tools Suck; Some Suck Less Than Others.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:41 PM
February 8, 2006
The Ten Thousand Year Blog
Thinking about Google Print and its role in digital preservation got me hunting around the Web for more resources and better examples of digital preservation. I was delighted to find a great blog, The Ten Thousand Year Blog, with the tagline, "Archivist-historian David Mattison’s musings and Web tracks on digital culture preservation issues."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:58 PM | Comments (1)
Star of Stage and Screen?
No, but I will be on the radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Fellow Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time today, and you can listen live here.
UPDATE: Sorry, that's tomorrow, Thursday February 9, at 1:00 Eastern.
UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:27 PM
Coco Crisp Links
Looking at my site activity logs, I seem to get a lot of visitors who arrive at the site looking for information on Coco Crisp. I have discussed him briefly here and here. One common search query is about Coco's real name, which is Covelli Loyce Crisp, but people also have queried about his nationality (born in Los Angeles), and how old he is (26 as of November 1, 2005). As a service to my loyal readers and these visitors, let me also provide the following useful and interesting Coco Crisp links:
- Coco's "Player Card" page, including lifetime stats, at ESPN.com.
- Coco's page at Baseball-Reference.com, which tells me that Coco was first drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals but later sent as the "player to be named later" to the Cleveland Indians in a trade for pitcher Chuck Finley
- An article from the Boston Herald analyzing Crisp's trade to the Red Sox.
- A Canadian Red Sox blogger (no, I am not making that up) wrote some thoughts on the Crisp trade before it was official and elicited some interesting response. The blogger was one of a dozen or so who used the headline, "Cuckoo For Coco Crisp," and if you don't understand that, read this.
- Here's a good analysis from FoxSports.com, prior to the trade, of what they trade would mean for the Red Sox and Indians.
- Here's Coco's Wikipedia entry, which explains where his nickname comes from.
- Here's something you may not have known about Coco--he recorded a hip hop song, "We Got That Thing."
- Here are a couple of pictures of Coco when he played for the New Hampshire Ravens (now the Fisher Cats) in the Cardinals' minor league system.
Find this useful? Don't hesitate to click the PayPal button on the right-hand side of my main page and send a handsome donation to the author!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:58 AM | Comments (1)
February 7, 2006
UMichigan Stands up for Google Print
I am not a fan of Google Print, but some people are. Via John Battelle's SearchBlog, here is a speech (PDF) by Mary Sue Coleman, President of the University of Michigan. She addressed the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers yesterday and explained the university's enthusiastic participation in the program. She makes some great points--and is very eloquent. I share her enthusiasm for digital preservation, but I still don't get why it's Google's job, especially when they are doing a mediocre job of it. If I were President Coleman, I would contain my enthusiasm until better partners--and better processes--come along.
UPDATE: I am clearly in the minority on this one. Peter Morville at findability.org was also very impressed with President Coleman's remarks.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:33 AM
February 6, 2006
Amateur Hour at T-Mobile
So I had T-Mobile for several years, mainly because I was addicted to my Palm device, and T-Mobile for a while was the only company around here that supported it. But then my Treos started breaking with too much regularity, so I went back to a good old cell phone. At that point, I stuck with T-Mobile mainly out of inertia--and for a while because cellular numbers were not portable. But, honestly, I was never that happy with the service. Coverage was terrible near my house and along certain highways that I traveled.
Christmas 2004 comes around, and I decide it is time for my boys to have their own cell phones, and, once again, I let inertia get the best of me. I signed up for a T-Mobile family plan--four phones, $80 or so bucks a month for minutes, and an average monthly bill of $160 or so with the per-phone fees, etc.
I knew right away it was a terrible mistake. Since my wife and boys were around the house a lot, service was miserable. We had all kinds of dropped calls, calls that didn't connect, long periods where we couldn't get through to each other. I called, they tried various lame ways to troubleshoot the problem. It never got better.
So I resolved to ride out the one-year contract I agreed to and then sign up with someone else in Christmas 2005. My sons broke one phone, lost another--both times I ponied up full price for the new phones rather than take a free or discounted phone and extend the contract. I was quite specific about this in my conversations with T-Mobile. Apparently I should have got this in writing, but more on that later.
Meanwhile, I continued to have serious problems. Once on a business trip to exotic Stamford, CT, I went through about three days where I had, literally, dozens of dropped calls and dozens more calls that never went through. My wife had similar problems on several days. We would call; the T-Mobile folks would wave their arms a little. Nothing would happen. I remember the problems in Stamford went away spontaneously when I was on the hotel phone with T-Mobile technical support. The fellow suggested it was because my phone had just traveled to a new zone, but I had been sitting on my bed with the phone in my hand for an hour.
Another time, also in exotic Connecticut, I was first on the scene of a horrific truck accident. Coming around a bend, I saw a truck careen out of the lane, through the guardrail, and down a ditch. I stopped, dialed 911--nothing. I dialed again--nothing. You can guess the rest. The call never went through. I called T-Mobile technical support. Lots of arm waving. Lots of lame guesses. No resolution.
So Christmas 2005 comes around, and I know I am leaving T-Mobile. I call them, asking if any early termination charges will apply if I cancel my service on or around December 25th. I am told no. I remind them that I have a family plan with four numbers. Are they sure no early termination charges will apply? No, I am cheerily told.
So I shop, pick Verizon, pick some cool new phones for my sons. I cancel the T-Mobile phones. I make an extra point of calling T-Mobile to tell them to no longer automatically charge my credit card.
You would think this would all work, no?
Well, here is what T-Mobile has done in response to my years of business and timely payments.
-- They sent me a final bill that included two early termination fees associated with the two phone lines where I replaced phones, paid for the replacement phones in full, and was specifically told my contract would not extend beyone December 2005. The total of the two early termination fees? $400.
-- They have continued to charge my credit card, despite my express request to stop doing this.
I called them today, and after a series of calls, finally reached someone in the executive office who agreed that one of the two $200 fees was incorrect and would be deleted. She refused to agree to waive the other one, so I left a message for Sue Nokes, senior vice president of Customer Service for T-Mobile (425-378-4991 for those of you who are also having problems). I haven't heard back from her yet.
(By the way, I love how the T-Mobile, corporate person, Carsia Johnson, avoided the point about the second charge being incorrect. I pointed out, correctly, that I paid full price for the second phone in order to avoid extending my contract. She did not dispute that, but instead said repeatedly, my record was "notated" to indicate I had agreed to extend the contract. So she is implying that I both paid full price to avoid extending the contract AND agreed to extend the contract. Talk about a "lose-lose.")
American Express was just very helpful, charging T-Mobile back for the money that T-Mobile charged against my credit card after I told them to stop charging my credit card and bill me directly. Unfortunately, American Express does not have a mechanism for blocking future charges by a specific company. So I called T-Mobile and asked why they had done this, and was told it can take more than two months for this kind of automatic payment to be cancelled (they call it EasyPay--I suggest EasyGouge instead).
Two months? Why on earth would something so simple take so long? More importantly, why was I not told this on December 26, 2005 when I called T-Mobile to cancel EasyPay and bill me directly for the last payment? I specifically told the person to cancel EasyPay so I could pay the final bills myself. This person said nothing, and on January 6, 2006 T-Mobile charged my American Express card against my authorization.
So here is my offer to T-Mobile. Drop the additional incorrect $200 early termination charge, and I will pay the remaining usage charges on my phone. If not, I will not pay any additional money to T-Mobile and will refer this to arbitration at the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office.
I eagerly await their call. They know how to reach me.
UPDATE: I emailed Sue Nokes, senior vice president of Customer Service for T-Mobile, this blog link. I also emailed their media relations folks. No word back yet. But I hope Ms. Nokes reads my explanation here. It will be the substance of my complaint to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office and the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy.
FURTHER THOUGHTS: In one of my initial calls with the regular customer support folks, a woman named Erin, employee #7139360 tried to tell me that I had been told about the termination fees during a call with T-Mobile in December. This is not true, of course, and she would have no way of knowing this. During this call, I specifically asked about termination fees and was told there would be none, and she is claiming the exact opposite with no proof. Why on earth would she say this then? Is this a matter of defensiveness on her part, or are they told to say such things in an attempt to get people to back off?
Also to a similar point. Why was the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, able to so quickly determine that one of the $200 early termination charges was incorrect? Why wasn't Erin able to make this same determination? And how did the original charge get on my bill if it was ultimately incorrect? And since both charges are incorrect, how did the second one get on my bill?
And to the question of why the person failed to tell me that my credit card would still be charged when I specifically said I did not want it to be charged: Was she simply unaware? Was she aware and trained to not say so?
When does this kind of "customer service" become abusive? The more I think about it, the more I see systematic problems in T-Mobile's customer billing and service--or worse.
I worked in customer support for years. You keep customers happy by empowering employees to do the right things by customers. I am guessing I spent somewhere between $5000 to $7000 over the years with T-Mobile. (I asked Carsia Johnson to look up how much I had spent on T-Mobile over the years and she said it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. That speaks volumes to me.) I have never disputed another charge with them. Wouldn't you think, given my long history as a customer and my consistent and well-documented story, they would give me the benefit of the doubt and rectify this situation?
UPDATE: I just got a call from someone else from T-Mobile, a Kelly, who sounded like she was going to take a good look at this. She promised a follow-up in 72 hours. I will keep you posted.
RESOLUTION: (2/7/06) So the corporate person, Carsia Johnson, called me today and said, on further reflection, they are going to eliminate the second early termination fee, and will send me a bill for the remaining service charges, which I will pay. She said she realized, after more digging, that I had had two accounts with T-Mobile. This explains some of their hostility, I think. When I signed up for the family plan in December 2004, it apparently kicked off a new account number. So they were treating me as someone who had service for a year and then was quitting on them, instead of someone who had service for several years (five I think, not exactly sure) who had finally had enough.
So I have to thank T-Mobile for resolving the immediate problem they created, but I suggest they look at the underlying problems that caused this series of mishaps.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:41 PM | Comments (3)
February 5, 2006
Greater Boston DITA User Group Meeting
The February meeting of the Boston DITA UG is scheduled for next Monday, February 13 at 6:30 p.m. at the Waltham headquarters of Information Mapping. The featured speaker will be Willie Williams, a technical writer at Idiom who will be presenting a case study on "Converting Unstructured Content to DITA XML." For directions to Information Mapping's headquarters, click here.
If you are planning to attend, please RSVP to Erin Freeburger at Information Mapping, by email or by phone (781.472.3083).
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:59 PM
February 4, 2006
A Little Unspoiled Florida in Disney
A few hundred yards from the hotel, I found this little pond.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:25 PM
Leaving Walt Disney
I had a little time after my meetings ended today to walk around Disney and take a few pictures. This is where we stayed and had the meetings, the Swan Hotel. What was the architect thinking?
Free WiFi here in the Orlando airport!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:18 PM
Catching up on my Reading
I have had a crazy week, so am just now catching up on some of my blog reading. A few things worth reading:
- Brian Jones has a nice introduction to using styles with the XML underlying Microsoft Word
- Ed Dodds did some useful digging and discovered that the SEC's RFP for its new EDGAR system suggests that XBRL is part of the system's future.
- Interested in what Reed Business Information is up to? Read this paidContent.org interview with CEO Tad Smith.
- Via Dave Winer, I learn that Cambridge, where I have my office, is going to put together city-wide free WiFi
- XForms and HTML expert Mark Birbeck has published a very useful introduction to XForms.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:04 PM
A Harbinger of Spring
So I am at Disney World, where, despite some rain, it has been warm enough to wear shorts. As Tennyson told us, "In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." Maybe it is because I am not such a young man anymore, but this early taste of Spring has me thinking of baseball. Spring training starts in a couple of weeks, and I just found out that I can sign up already for Yahoo fantasy baseball. In a week or so, I can look forward to this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:12 AM
Revenue-per-Click
I am spending a few days at Disney World at a client meeting that is focusing on issues like Web marketing, analytics, pay-per-click, and organic search. This morning one of the client's customers offered a case study of how he analyzes the relative success of approaches such as Google pay-per-click, other search engines such as Yahoo, and vertical search engines that focus on his business. Not surprisingly, the most general pay-per-clicks do not necessarily yield the best results. The best results often come from the vertical search engines--the more focused the search, the more specific idea the user has about what he or she is searching for, and so forth. Just by using the vertical search engine, the user has already qualified himself to a certain degree.
For this speaker, the right metric is not cost-per-click but rather revenue-per-click. How much real business follows from a given click through to your site? To accurately track this, he has his salespeople always enter a source for a lead into their sales tracking system. Did it come from Google? Another search engine? A referral from an existing customer? This field is mandatory (in fact, they have to enter this field first before they can create or enter the rest of the customer record). This encourages the sales person to get a very specific idea of the source of the lead, which they also find to be an important element in qualifying the customer.
After a couple of years of analyzing this, the speaker has a lot of proof that the highest revenue-per-click comes from the vertical search engines. Moreover, the general search engines like Google tend to produce too many unqualified leads--and these unqualified leads take additional time from the sales people working with more qualified leads. So this speaker is spending less money on Google pay-per-click going forward and will spend more money on the vertical search engines.
It seems this speaker is ahead of the game, and has arrived at a metric that not enough people are thinking about yet. A quick search of Google (!) gives me 43.4 million hits for "pay-per-click," 7.15 million hits for "cost-per-click," but only 12,100 for revenue-per-click."
It sounds like this in area ripe for more exploration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:29 AM
February 2, 2006
DRM at Davos
Bill Rosenblatt has a report on his talks at last week's World Economic Forum in Davos.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:16 PM
Seek and Ye Shall Find?
Courtesy of an excellent talk on vertical search engines by Mike Sack of Inceptor comes this nugget from a recent Nielsen/Net Ratings report: Internet users conducted 5.1 billion searches in October 2005. Mike said this works out to about 40 searches per user per month. The 5.1 billion represents a 15% increase over five months prior.
Mike highlighted the continued impressive growth in search engine advertising spending, and said continued strong growth will come from areas such as vertical search, local search, and spending by smaller- and medium-sized companies. Just as broadcast and print advertising spans the biggest markets and audiences (ads for the Super Bowl), it also spans the smallest markets (local stations and even local cable). Mike predicts a similar stratification for search engine advertising, with vertical search engines filling many of the needs.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:55 AM
