Customer service—whassat?

Tales from the frontline:

1. Yesterday, Charla was queuing for a ticket for a train she had to hurry for, and the guy at the till ignored her request for an off-peak ticket and gave her an on-peak one, failed to apologise or acknowledge his mistake in anyway, then simply blanked Charla when she asked to pay for the original higher-priced ticket (just to get to her train in time) and unhurriedly issued an offpeak ticket.
2. We watched Paul Merton's TV show Room 101 yesterday, where celebs try to persuade Paul to consign their pet hates to the eponymous (and fictional) room: Sheila Hancock lamented the complete demise of customer service at Chiswick Post Office (her local, one assumes), where, in place of verbal responses (let alone smiles), staff respond to customers' questions mainly in grunts and gnomic gestures.
3. I am looking for a business bank account, and found this review page. The reviews average at 1-2 out of 10! Everyone seems to have had nightmare service from all the major banks—and the private ones too.

What is WRONG with my dear country's attitude to giving service to others? Aaarrrghhh!! And, equally interesting, what is First Direct's secret in becoming a glowing counter-example, particularly when their parent bank, HSBC, also seems to frustrate its customers.

Giving service is a noble act. The Buddha and Christ taught us this thousands of years ago. Smiling at others is to shine a little sunshine into their life—and its sure to be reflected back to you. : ))

Technorati Tags: bank, buddha, christ, post_office, service, train

The podcasting bank

This is too cool—my bank has a podcast!

I must say, First Direct are a superb bank. I recommend them to anyone (in the UK).

Technorati Tags: podcast, bank

Value schisms and the charity mindset

Andrés is rightly annoyed by the paternalism of some (unnamed) participants at the recent iCommons summit, with respect to the relationship between the developed and developing world in the field of intellectual property:

The iCommons summit was an incredible event, but I wanted to point out something that kept bothering me in a couple of sessions, particularly the panel about the international role of Creative Commons.

I am perfectly aware that the lack of specialised knowledge of intellectual property from representatives of developing countries in international organisations is a big problem, and that it may induce some of those countries to comply easily with the tremendous pressure by developed nations and industry lobbyists. This is masterfully expanded in the great book "Information Feudalism" by Peter Drahos . However, I'm getting a bit tired of going to meetings were NGOs stress time and time again the perceived ignorance and naivité of those poor developing countries in extremely condescending and even patronising tones. I recognise that many of these people are well-meaning and commited to their ideals, and that their work does indeed help to alleviate some of the lack of education in this area. However, some of the rhetoric sounds like us poor brown people cannot figure things out on our own, and that we need the sophisticated and knowledgable white folk to enlighten us and bring us out of our ignorance.

This is not only condescending, it borders on insulting. We are not all naïve and stupid natives. Some of us have figured things out on our own without the intervention of the NGOs. Not only that, the debate is often framed as clearly “Us vs Them”, where all the bad guys come from developed countries, while the good guys are the Nice White People and selected allies from the developing world (hopefully singers, artists, and other members of the digerati cultural elites). This helpfully ignores that we have our own share of home-grown bad guys. I know a lot of very well-informed, intelligent people who think that free trade agreements are the best thing that could ever happen to developing countries. I also have met representatives at WIPO who really think that more IP protection is good, not out of ignorance, but out of pragmatism and inner conviction.

I’m not biting the hand that assists developing nations, the assistance and support are greatly apreciated. But please don’t provide assistance and then go gloating to a meeting full of people from developing countries and insult us to our face by implying that we are nothing without the help of the Nice White Person.

If the NGOs really want to help, they should try listening and communicating a bit more, but not only with the cool elites from developing countires. We are rather more diverse than that.

Another perspective on this issue is that as soon as we define the identity of others for them, we limit and distort their true nature.

This, for me, is a problem with the conceptual split between philanthropist and beneficiary within the charitable mindset in general: it simplistically divides people into "rich" and "poor", or "haves" and "have nots", when in reality things like value, knowledge, wisdom and quality of life are far too complex and rich things to be reduced into narrow metrics such as material wealth or formal education.

Technorati Tags: charity, philanthropy, race, value

Blogger: dodgy feed item generation?

Last time I had a problem with a Google product, I blogged about it and a nice engineer came along and helped me in the comments, so here goes... : )

I noticed that the Atom feed for this Blogger-powered blog is generating intermittently problematic output, such as the unformatted appearance of my previous post, "Transparent Jellyfish".

Are you out there and can you help, nice Google people?

Technorati Tags: error, feed, google

Transparent Jellyfish

John Battelle reports:

Jellyfish.com launched its beta today. The model is to get advertisers to bid directly for the attention of the customer by paying them...eliminating the middleman.

Infoweek coverage.

Interesting how services like this are beginning to make the value flows off advertising more transparent to the end user—hence the name, in this case?

Technorati Tags: advertising, jellyfish, shopping, search

Aldo on reputation-system ramifications

Aldo Castaneda ponders the ramifications of "reputation" systems

I wonder whether reputation systems will incent lauditory entries to the point that they result in reputation scores that skew toward expressions of social correctness. I suppose people may express "negative" beliefs about others in such systems but given some level of risk in doing so, will those expressing such views seek anonymity and therefore diminish the assertive power of such statements relative to parties seeking to rely on such reputational information?

Presumably the value of reputation information is a function of the degree to which the parties representing their "opinions" are willing to not only assert those opinions but are also willing to do so unambiguously (w/0 anonymity). Placing myself in the position of one asserting my "opinion" of another in a reputation "system" I would like to see architectures which permit very fine control over how those "opinions" are conveyed. Given the attendant risks I'd probably also reserve expression of those opinions for those limited situations that present fairly predictable risk/reward outcomes.

I agree with this analysis. Indeed, this kind of self-reinforcing positive skew to ratings of people is well known on eBay already. My take-away is that we are likely to get more useful information from much richer and more subtle appraisals of one another's identity which avoid such a blanket value (quite literally!) judgement of character.

In this scenario, we would eschew uni-dimensional "ratings" in favour of much more granularly-contextualised feedback about our online relationships with others. Naturally, this would entail finding ways to converge on shared ways of describing such information—which, inevitably, brings us back to the Ontology Problem once more!

Technorati Tags: identity, identity_society, identity_web, ontology, reputation

Samsung and WiBro—ones to watch?

I have been very impressed by Samsung's brand expression through slick product design (I own a Samsung D600 mobile) and a highly-evocative poster ad campaign. Both seem to position Samsung as a kind of alien mirror for users' identities: the spaceship-smooth lines and black and silver patina of the product mirrors a woman's face in one ad; in another, a scorpion beetle(!) grips the phone menacingly, while the captions merely hint at emotional expression in their muted, near-gray colours.

Samsung seem to me to be beginning to give Apple a run for their money in the product-as-brand stakes. I also noticed they have a decent range of MP3 players...

Hum, that was a tangent—I just meant to report Om Malik's post on Samsung's move to make WiBro a ubiquitous standard in the WiMax space:

South Korean companies have a pretty interesting plan to turn their version of (mobile) WiMAX aka WiBro into a global standard: go after some of the fastest growing emerging markets, and get the necessary scale to compete with rivals, mostly from the US. A few months of making a WiBro play in Brazil, South Korean companies are now targeting India.

Samsung , encouraged by some of the recent spectrum allocations in the 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands in India, is now attempting to sell its gear which would allows 2 megabits download speed, and upload of 1 megabit per second. The company sees huge potential in the rural areas and regions that are off the main grids. Samsung vice-president (global marketing group) Dr Hung Song says the company is in talks with some Indian operators for the possible roll-out of WiBro in the near future.

...which is all the more reason to watch Samsung's progress with much interest.

Technorati Tags: brand, samsung, WiBro, wifi, WiMax

Search sucks

Wow, the limitations of current web search are hitting me between the eyes as I search Google for information about Debussy's works for piano duet, "Petite Suite" and "Epigraphes Antiques" (I'm performing them later today, along with some Mozart and Brahms, at a small recital with a friend, and wanted to flesh out my knowledge of their biographical, musicological and historic context).

A search on "'petite suite' analysis" merely yields acres of sheet music, recordings and assorted other random results. Analysis is nowhere to be seen.

Wherefor art thou, semantic search..?

Technorati Tags: google, search, semantic

Narrative identity

Robin Wilton writes persuasively about "identity as a narrative":

In the terms of someone like Derrida or Foucault, one might see identity as a narrative. That idea fits with a lot of what has been said already: for instance, Peter Dare's comment that 'credentials' are simply encapsulations of specific (and hopefully verifiable) events from the (narrative) 'life arc' of an individual. It also accords with the idea that assertions of identity are always at least two-party 'conversations' - and that the owner of the identity is not necessarily a party in that conversation.

It's a characteristic of narratives that they are often outside the control of the subject. In identity as in other things, people talk about you when you're not there. And that, in turn, brings in the themes of reputation and trust.

What this suggests to me is this: that in our discussions of 'user centricity', 'user control', 'user consent', we are focussing on functions rather than goals. That's fine, but it might also be useful to take a step back and ask why we're interested in user c* in the first place.

... 'Freedom' and 'choice' are desirable design goals because - like user c* - they generate and enhance the user's trust in the system... in what is done with the user's identity. When people talk about you behind your back, you have to trust that they're saying nice things. If there's a difference between what they say then and what they say to your face, it undermines your trust in them. If what they say about you is unfavourable, it undermines other people's trust in you...

So what we are looking for may actually be 'narrative identity' or 'user-trusted identity'; user c* may simply be some of the desirable attributes of such a design.

Another angle on this is that we are all "users"—including the people who run multinational companies and governments. So "user-centricity" in this context could point to the abilty of each individual to express and perceive a given narrative (whether it is about them or not) in their own way.

Technorati Tags: identity, identity_society, narrative, user-centricity

Negotiating morals

Andres writes:

I am becoming rather ambivalent about moral rights, which goes against my Civil Law upbringing. I believe that moral right of attribution is a good thing, but that the moral right of integrity can be difficult to apply, and when it is it may prove more trouble than it's worth.

[...]

Yes—in general, it seems to me that the concept of "moral right" rather obscures the simple process of value negotiation that underlies all information exchange. That negotiation might be partially crystalised within legal frameworks and social morés, but it's still negotiation, albeit with a collective aspect.

Identity Society paper and wiki launch

John Madelin and I recently wrote a paper called "Towards the Identity Society". Now, with the kind help of Jean-Louis Seguineau, we have launched a wiki version of the same at www.identitysociety.org, in the hope of contributing towards the establishment a broad context for the discussion of identity—one that encompasses not only technological, but also psychological, business, legal, social and governmental perspectives on the topic.

Phil Becker was kind enough to read the paper through, and asked the following questions of us about it subsequently. I have reproduced our reply below to Phil to provide a fuller picture of our aims with the paper.

While our original paper is one important starting point for the wiki, we recognise that, to succeed in its mission, the wiki must transcend our necessarily limited perspectives to embody the collective wisdom of stakeholders from across society. To that end, I warmly welcome my readers to input your insights and expertise, in the hope that we can, together, create a valuable intellectual resource for society as a whole.

Phil's questions and our answers:

[What was] your desired mission with this paper?

Our mission was to work through certain ideas about "identity" on the broadest possible conceptual canvas, and to find ways of communicating those ideas in as simple and direct a way possible without compromising the depth or precision of our treatment of each constituent subject area (technology, business, government, community etc.).

That said, it was more a case of the paper writing us than us writing the paper! John and I found we shared many ideas, differed on some others, but had a common conviction that there is a truth that we could work towards (through much discussion and experimentation). Of course, that process is ongoing, and the paper represents just one step along a path. You could say that our deeper mission, then, is to stimulate the already-vibrant "identity" conversation to new levels of integration and breadth.

Who are you targeting (technical/nontechnical, general/academic/political audience, etc.) and what you want them to take away from it?

The paper is a strange beast in that respect: we would anticipate that only a handful of people would easily encompass the entire breadth of the paper without a certain amount of link-clicking or other research.

However, our hope is that very many people will be able to take something from the paper (Aldo suggested we might provide a "route map" through the paper for different readerships), and, more importantly, that once we open the paper up for community editing (imminently) that subject specialists can dive into to the relevant section and improve it in its own right. Small pieces loosely joined, you might say.

As for what we hope people will take away from the paper, I would suggest the following:

Identity cannot be pinned down to neat and objective definitions, but rather is an emergent property of people's perceptions, within relationship with others, of themselves and the world around them. This observation has significant ramifications not only for our approach to evolving technological and legal frameworks for government, business and civic society, but also for the ways in which we may empower the individual human across the diverse contexts of their life: the Identity Society must enshrine an honour and respect for each individual's identity.

In order to meet the challenge of building the Identity Society, and the Identity Web that will facilitate it, it seems likely that we will have to re-evaluate our technological and legal frameworks at a deep level, rather than just attempting to extend legacy architectural approaches. However, given the vast resources that have been invested by business and government in these legacy approaches, we recognise that there is bound to be a great deal of resistance to such radical architectural re-evaluation, and that significant change is likely to occur—as it has with the coming of each new Age of mankind—through disruptive breakthroughs, rather than in a smoothly linear fashion. We hope that the paper will stimulate people to think those breakthrough thoughts!

What do you hope your work on producing this paper will accomplish?

As I mentioned above, we hope primarily to stimulate the conversation, in particular between technologists and stakeholders from each other community (business, government, law, civic society). The "value spectrum" metaphor is conceived as a bridge between tech/law and other sectors, as well as between tech/law and the individual, of course.

Technorati Tags: identity, identity_society, identity_web

Google OPML export bug: conspiracy or cock-up?

I tried to export my blog subscriptions OPML file from Google Reader (which crawls if I have just a few browser tabs open) just now, and merely got a blank screen.

Conspiracy or cock-up? With a lack of any customer support from Google (I tried before with Blogger...), I guess it's kind of hard to find out. Meanwhile, I'm effectively locked in to a sucky product, barring a manual cut and paste of 66 feed addresses into Safari. : |

[UPDATE: Mihai Parparita, Google Reader engineer, kindly informed me that Safari conceals the OPML data (XML format) within the page, hence its blankness; the page source does indeed contain the OPML file. Hope they actually point that out on the Reader site in future, as I think all but the geekish will be bamboozled!

Now I just need to fire up Firefox, install the Sage RSS Reader extension, import the OPML file, close Firefox and Import bookmarks... in Safari. Apparently. Oh sod that for a game of soldiers—I'll cut and paste the URLs manually!]

The Corruptibles: are you one? am I one?

Bang! Pow! Will The Corruptibles subvert the cod super-heroics of Captain Copyright and his arguably-disingenuous moralisings?

[Via Natalie Senst]

Then again, the whole debate around DRM, on both sides, needs to rise to a higher level of sophistication, as Jerry Fishenden points out rather eloquently:

There’s been much debate in the blogosphere about the pros/cons of digital rights management (DRM).

In one corner stands the traditional creative industry, keen to ensure in the digital age that writers, film-makers, musicians, etc can continue to earn an income without digital replication being used to rip-off their work.

In the far corner stands another group, equally convinced that DRM is immoral and that it merely penalises the honest (since those who buy DRM restricted media are those who suffer most from its limitations and restrictions on usage).

And in the middle stand the rest of us, listening to both sides, but not convinced we have yet heard a proposal that balances creator and consumer needs adequately at both the business and technology levels.

[continues interestingly...]

It seems to me that this comes back to negotiation of information vaue, and the evolution of technological and legal structures that mediate that negotiation with optimal transparency...

Technorati Tags: copyright, value

i-together site relaunch

For any readers who have been wondering what the heck i-together has actually been up to these last couple of years, there is a bit more information on the new site. : )

N.B.: Could users of browser/OS combos other than Safari 2.0.3/OS X 10.4.6 let me know if any formatting looks dodgy (screen dumps would be great!), please? The markup is nasty tables and hard-coded font styles, as I didn't have the time or inclination to master the black arts of CSS—anyone interested in re-implementing my design properly, for a small fee?

"The Generative Internet"

Nicholas Carr reports a new article on "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan Zittrain:

Anyone interested in the current debate about the future of the internet would do well to spend an hour reading Jonathan Zittrain's new Harvard Law Review article The Generative Internet, which I found through a reference by Ethan Zuckerman. Zittrain discusses the internet's "generativity," by which he means the way it allows a whole lot of people to create and distribute a whole lot of things (like software programs) which can then be used to create even more things. He provides a particularly illuminating history of the interdependency of the PC and internet, showing how the net's generativity arises as much from the openness of the PC as from the openness of the net itself.

Zittrain goes on to describe how mounting internet security problems threaten to engender a consumer backlash against the openness of the net and hence its generativity. The security problems can - and ultimately will - be addressed either by imposing restrictions on the internet or by "locking down" PCs so that they can run only certain types of software. Under the latter scenario, PCs would come to work more like special-purpose information appliances than the general-purpose machines we're used to. Zittrain believes that the uncompromising stance of "end-to-end" purists - those who fight any attempt to regulate the internet itself - may be self-defeating. The stance may lead frustrated consumers to demand the lockdown of PCs and other internet devices, which could well be more damaging to generativity than modest regulations on the net itself:

According to end-to-end theory, placing control and intelligence at the edges of a network [ie, in PCs and other devices] maximizes network flexibility and user choice. The political implication of this view — that end-to-end design preserves user freedom — depends on an increasingly unreliable presumption: whoever runs a machine at a given network endpoint can readily choose how the machine will work. For example, in response to a network teeming with viruses and spam, network engineers suggest more bandwidth (to make invisible the transmission of “deadweights” like viruses and spam) and better protection at user endpoints, rather than interventions by ISPs closer to the middle of the network. But consumers are not well positioned to maintain their machines painstakingly against attack, leading them to prefer the locked-down PCs ... Those who favor end-to-end principles because they favor generativity must realize that failure to take action at the network level may close some parts of the grid because consumers may demand, and PC manufacturers may provide, locked-down endpoint environments that promise security and stability with minimum user upkeep. Some may embrace a categorical end-to-end approach anyway: even in a world of locked-down PCs, there will no doubt remain non-mainstream generative computing platforms for professional technical audiences. But this view is too narrow. We ought to see the possibilities and benefits of PC generativity made available to everyone, including the millions of people who obtain PCs for current rather than future uses, but who end up delighted at the new uses to which they can put their machines.

Put simply, complete fidelity to end-to-end may cause users to embrace the digital equivalent of gated communities. Gated communities offer safety and stability to residents and a manager to complain to when something goes wrong. But from a generative standpoint, digital gated communities are prisons. Their confinement is less than obvious because what they block is generative possibility: the ability of outsiders to offer code and services to users, giving users and producers an opportunity to influence the future without a regulator’s permission. If digital gated communities become the norm, highly skilled Internet users of the sort who predominated in the mid-1980s will still be able to enjoy generative computing on platforms that are not locked down, but the rest of the public will not be brought along for the ride. For those using locked-down endpoints, the freedom in the middle of the network is meaningless.

Zittrain concludes that the best course is to "try to maintain the fundamental generativity of the existing grid while taking seriously the problems that fuel enemies of the Internet free-for-all. It requires charting an intermediate course to make the grid more secure — and to make some activities to which regulators object more regulable — in order to continue to enable the rapid deployment of the sort of amateur programming that has made the Internet such a stunning success." It's not a question, in other words, of whether there will be limits. There will be. It's a question of where those limits will be imposed and who will impose them.

Sounds like Zittrain needs to catch up on the various developments around "digital identity" to complete an otherwise convincing picture of the landscape...

Technorati Tags: identity, identity_society, identity_web, security

Solving the ontology problem

Johannes asks: "How do we deal with multiple ontologies for identity data?"

My blue skies suggestion: develop tech that both embraces ontological diversity and facilitates ontological convergence.

Technorati Tags: identity, identity_web, ontologies

Pingerati: microformat midwifery

Enter Pingerati: Technorati's play as a midwife for microformatted data exchange.

This microformat stuff is string-and-glue in data model terms, but is probably the way things will go at least until something better comes along.

[Via John Battelle]