Trashing Comcast

An interesting phenomenon is the squeaky wheel getting the oil. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blogged about his Comcast going down.

I've had these problems with Comcast many times this past winter with poor performance or just plain outages in internet connectivity. Many complaints hit brain-deadening muzak or voicemail that never gets returned.

When a person like Michael Arrington complains, we can see that the powers that be at Comcast actually listen and go out to fix his problem. His internet status certainly lets him squeak far louder than I can. I wonder if we can democratize this easily so that us nobodies can collectively squeak too.

There's one option that I know of called Get Satisfaction. You can connect to communities and business to have your customer support needs answered. But sometimes it takes a more heavy-handed approach. I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, after being a customer for 5 years. Large issues with customer service and network performance really prompted that switch. Now, if I had a large bullhorn (or was famous), I could have probably worked out some deal. However, if we can network some people in to shout at the same time, this could have the same effect.

There's a facebook application called Causes that lets you support a particular cause. Perhaps there's enough ire towards companies that this application can be cloned or co-opted to rail against companies that abuse their customers. Especially in monopoly situations such as Comcast cable.

Why won't facebook go away?

Well obviously since there isn't a stronger competitor, but right now we probably have an open slot for some competitor to come in. After all the negative press that Facebook has received at SXSW and and now with it's goofs with what is a country and what isn't.
I can't hate on just FB, Myspace and Hi5 would probably be worse if they were in the enviable position that facebook is in. At least FB isn't pushing porn like the other 2 sites.
After today's news, it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer for facebook to go under. Hong Kong investor Li Ka Shing just put up another $60 mil into the little Palo Alto company. I can see housing prices in San Francisco going up again...

SEM in different languages/countries

I'm sitting around and looking at some Japanese sites and musing about how you can drive people to your site. If you're going to pay Google for a keyword in Japan, do you have to do it 3 times for Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana?
Borrowing from wikipedia as an example, let's say I was advertising Marlboro cigarettes:
Do I pay for the keywords: Marlboro 煙草, Marlboro たばこ, and Marlboro タバコ. So that means paying for 3 ads and using 4 different character sets.
I'm going under the assumption that they'd use English for the word Marlboro from this example.
I guess this will be a pet project.

AIM & G-talk?

Since when was AOL instant messenger compatible with Google Talk? I must be really behind in my techcrunch

Global Gaming (in 7 languages)

I'm always impressed when a game reaches sufficient proportion to address the entire globe. A new game from uber game designer and UC Berkeley PhD student, Jane McGonigal has launched a game called The Lost Ring.

I'm pretty psyched about diving into this alternate reality game and practising my detective skills and probably my language skills too as I try to find out what happened to one of the lost olympic games.

Check it out! The Lost Ring

Another Paris Hilton in the works?

I'm always split between being utterly disgusted by pop culture and fascinated by how it can drive some of the most interesting & strange behaviour in people.

The call girl implicated in the Governor Elliot Spitzer scandal also happens to be a singer/songwriter in the R&B/pop genre. Within days of her being discovered with the now former governor, her music popularity is on the rise. Here's the link on Amie Street.

At least for the next 72 hours, she's going to have more press coverage than Hollywood starlets. If she can capitalize on this, she can end up having as great a music career as the infamous Paris Hilton.

Canadians interfering in US elections

I don't know how I didn't hear of this earlier. News about the democratic candidate's positions on NAFTA are few and far between. I had heard both Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama were both taking an anti-NAFTA position. However, after living here for several years and hearing absolutely no news about it, I figured the issue was more or less pointless. Also I know for most Americans that the fear about NAFTA really means fear of Mexicans.

The scant media from the US is that McCain & Clinton are attacking Obama over statements from his staff re-assuring Canadians that despite his stance on pulling out of NAFTA, Canadians need not worry.

So I finally get to reading CBC today and see an article about the Liberal party wanting the Conservative government to recall the ambassador over a suggestive statement about the US election (CBC.ca article).

Now I see that the CBC is reporting that all of it is wrong and that someone in the Canadian Foreign Ministry implied that the Obama campaign was making secret deals with Canada (CBC report on Youtube).

Personally I think that interfering with another country's election is reprehensible. This smacks of Austria's Heider's rise to power in 2000 (CNN special). Heider was able to leverage news that the EU was sanctioning Austria to reinforce his position as being a sovereigntist and defying the European Union and their actions to meddle in the internal business of their country. Maybe there's some secret handshake between McCain and Harper to discredit the Democratic party. Who knows, but this is not a place that I want my government to go.