Jason Dunn

I’m a big fan of the Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) blog – it’s hilarious, and extremely well-written. Yet since subscribing to the great RSS to Email option from Feedburner, I’ve slowly been turned off of reading it – and today I unsubscribed. Why? Volume. I think every blog, and every Web site, has to remember that people have a finite amount of time in their day. There’s only so much content they can chew through, and if you start to focus more on quantity rather than quality, you’ll lose people. Yesterday FSJ published nine entries. Nine! One was great [language warning], most were not. Dan Lyons, the author of FSJ, seems to have bought into his own hype that “more is better”. It’s unfortunate, because Lyons is clearly a great writer and humourist, but sometimes less is indeed more.

It seems my personal blog is the subject of some sort of school assignment:

“The first blog I went to was a vanity blog about a guy named Jason. He lives in Canada with his wife. He had recently gone to an amusement park and had pictures of him and his friends in go-carts. They were cute! Ironically he is a technology geek so that was funny in the fact that I am just the opposite and know very little. He talked about what he installed on his computer lately, about burning CD’s and his camera.”

The author, a woman named Terry who’s a mother and attending a school called COC (possibly College of the Canyons?), seemed to have an assignment about writing regarding two different types of blogs. “Vanity” blogs and “information” blogs. Her conclusion is that “information blogs” are better because they contain useful information, while vanity blogs are less useful because she has no desire to read about someone else’s life. While I can’t argue with the basic conclusion, the point that Terri is missing is that all blogs, even the so-called “vanity blogs”, contain information that’s useful to someone, somewhere.

[As a side note, I find this whole thing highly amusing because when I was teaching a class about online communications at Mount Royal College for two semesters, I had my students use Blogger to do little assignments like this…and here I am the subject of one!]

While I know there are blogs out there that are 100% pure vanity blogs (“This morning I had orange juice to drink. It was orange.”), most blogs contain more than that. It might be about an experience they had with a certain product that was awful, a band they went to see play that sucked, a CD they bought that they thought that was great, a store they went into that has a great sale…all of those things are information. Are they usable to the general public? No way – most people aren’t going to read a personal blog unless they know the person in some way, or unless they truly find that person fascinating. But that’s where the magic of search engines come in – they slurp up all the information they can, which is why no matter how obscure the information you’re looking for is, odds are good that someone, somewhere, has written something about it. Continue reading Every “Vanity” Blog is Still an “Information” Blog

I live in Calgary, and get my cable TV from Shaw, the local monopoly provider. In general, I’ve been quite pleased with Shaw over the years. I use them for Internet access (a 10 Mbps cable modem), analog cable (for my Media Center) and HDTV (with a Motorola PVR tuner), and both of my phone lines. Every month my bill from Shaw is just shy of $200. Compared to the other 800 pound gorilla in this market, Telus, Shaw is an absolute delight to deal with. Telus is a relic, a ex-government organization that hides behind a Byzantine phone menu system that has disconnected me at random half the times I’ve used it. I’ll do almost anything to avoid dealing with Telus (although I’m considering using their DSL service for a project, more on that later).

Shaw has been shuffling their TV channels around a fair bit lately – I believe twice in the past year – making room for new offerings. Their latest switch was moving all of our HD channels from the 300 block down into the 200 block, and they added around 10 new HD channels – ones that are part of some “enhanced” HD package that we don’t get as part of our regular HD package. Ashley sat down a few weeks ago to program the Motorola PVR to record the TV series we like to watch: all the CSI shows, The Unit, Heroes, etc. The fastest way to find TV shows is to use the guide search function, find the TV show you’re looking for, and tag it to record the whole series. That’s exactly what Ashley did – so imagine her shock when two of the nine or so that she flagged didn’t record.

What recorded instead? Well…something did. When we tried to play back two of those shows, it would start the playback stream, the freeze. It turns out those TV shows were on the HD channels that we don’t receive as part of our package. It seems idiotic that the PVR would let the customer flag shows for recording if the customer didn’t receive those channels as part of their package. I can’t flag a Pay Per View event for recording without first paying for it, so the PVR clearly has some capability to differentiate between what it’s allowed to record and what it’s not.

I decided to call Shaw and give them some feedback about how it would be great if their system didn’t work like this, and instead would tell the customer they couldn’t record that instance of the TV show because their didn’t receive that channel. It would be cool if it found another instance of the TV show on a channel that the customer did receive. Or what about an up-sell right then and there if the customer couldn’t watch the show at all with their current package?

There are many ways to do the right thing for both the customer and for Shaw as a business…so imagine my surprise when the Shaw representative I was speaking with (Jay, ID # 5217) proceeded to argue with me, insisting that their system worked perfectly. He said that as a Shaw customer I should be aware of exactly which channels I have access to, which ones I don’t, and keep that in mind when looking at the guide data. I was incredulous. “But I have access to hundreds of channels – you honestly think it’s reasonable for me to mentally compare what I’m seeing in the guide data to what channels I have in my package?”. Jay thought that was perfectly reasonable. Either Jay has super-human memory, or he’s one of those people who can’t understand something negative until it happens to them – which is not a good trait for anyone in customer service to have.

All I was looking for was a “Wow, that must have been frustrating to miss the season premier of two of your TV shows – let me make a note of this and we’ll see what we can do” type reply. Ultimately Shaw sends this type of customer feedback to Motorola so the next generation box might be just a bit smarter than the current one. That’s all I was looking for, and instead I got someone who insisted that I simply wasn’t using their product in the right way. What happened to the customer always being right? Shaw, you can do better.