My Kingdom for a Cellular Provider that WORKS

With the exception of Cingular, I've had wireless accounts with almost every cellular provider that services the New York Metro Area. Why? Because I can't find one that provides services that actually work as advertised.

My partners know that poor cellular service makes me go positively bonkers. I've been known to throw phones out windows when they don't work. (I once through my Motorola i1000+ out the window of a moving cab on the FDR Drive when Nextel dropped an important client call.)

Anyway, I thought I had found a reliable partner in Verizon Wireless, until recently. They seem to have great coverage everywhere I travel (within the U.S.) and reasonable rates. But I'm running into all sorts of problems with voice mail.

Apparently, Verizon Wireless' concept of voice mail service involves not notifying users when they have important voice mail waiting. When I hear the chime on my phone that notifies me I have voice mail, I never know what's going to confront me when I log in. Could be a message from five minutes ago, could be something from a week ago.

Based on recent experience, a message can sit in Verizon's system for up to five days without my phone being aware of it. It happened again today. I got up this morning, took a shower and heard the voice mail chime while I was getting dressed. I dialed *86 just like I'm supposed to, put in my voice mail password and was greeted by a voice mail left for me by fellow blogger Rick Bruner. Problem was, the voice mail was a day late. If it had been something terribly urgent, like a relative calling me about something family-related, I would have thrown a fit.

It seems like the only way to combat this half-ass service is through class action lawsuits and the like. A subscriber will notice how crappy voice mail service is through Verizon Wireless, mention it to some opportunistic lawyer type and then there will be some sort of settlement of $0.86 per user (if you remembered to respond to an e-mail, piece of junk mail or some other such notification to join in the class action.)

Isn't there another way? Maybe that 142-page contract I signed when I opened up my account with Verizon Wireless says otherwise, but I think I should be able to exit my contract pronto if services don't work as advertised. Or maybe I should bite the bullet, throw my phone out the window again and see if I can try Cingular out. I wonder if they support the Handspring Treo 600? Hmmm...

Turbosurf

For a while now, I've been surfing the web with Firefox 0.8, the new Mozilla browser. It's amazing how cool this browser is, and if you pick things up quickly, Firefox's features can help you get around more quickly and easily. One of the features I've been using quite often is tabbed browsing. You know how whenever you want to open a new browser window in IE, it adds another IE instance to your taskbar? Well, that sucks if you're one of these people (like me) who likes to have a bunch of web pages open on their desktop at any given time.

Firefox deals with this problem in a nice way. Control-T opens a new browser tab, which opens up on a toolbar just below the address bar. So you can have a kajillion different tabs while seeing only the one instance of Firefox in your taskbar.

Another cool feature is the ability to click on links without the mouse. Simply type in the first couple letters of a link you want to activate and go.

There's a popup blocker, auto-downloader - even a version of the Google Toolbar. Firefox is quickly supplanting IE as my browser of choice. Not only is it easy and intuitive to use, but it helps make web browsing faster.

Another thing that's speeding me up is Privoxy. It's essentially a web proxy that runs off your machine and helps you do things like strip out extraneous graphics, ads and such. It also helps with managing cookies.

Before you freak out and call me a hypocrite for being in the online advertising business and wanting to strip out ads, let me say that I continue to use IE when I'm casually surfing. However, when I need to get to a page fast and I can't wait for someone's piggish 2-ton streaming Flash-a-ma-jig to load, I use Firefox with Privoxy.

What's amazing is how fast pages load when not encumbered by extraneous graphics. I still can't believe how fast one can browse with this combo of tools. If you're web browser is starting to get sluggish, I highly recommend it.

Clear Channel Yanks Stern

As if Bubba the Love Sponge wasn't enough...

Looks like Clear Channel is on a crusade to clean up its act, responding to fines and pressure from the FCC. Now Howard Stern has been yanked from six Clear Channel stations simultaneously. Gee, it's really easy for the federal government to force its will on the country's radio stations, considering they're all owned by, what, four companies?

And thank you, Chairman Powell, for interpreting "community standards" to mean that the entire country constitutes one homogeneous community.

Ideas Without Borders

The blogging phenomenon is something I’ve been following for a while and have written a few columns about. The reason why I haven’t (until recently) thought that blogging would play a big role in how Internet users consume content is simple: Unless someone makes your blog a daily destination, you’re talking to a small universe of people. Take this blog, for instance. I don’t get a huge number of people coming here consistently, so most of the ideas and commentary I post here will never see the desktops of significant numbers of marketing executives.

People have the bandwidth for only a few daily stops in the time they spend surfing. (I’m using the word “bandwidth” here to refer to the amount of time people can spend on the web.) Unless you write the best marketing commentary out there, and people know how to find it, your audience base will end up being extremely limited in size.

But all of that is changing. We’re seeing advances in technology that make it unnecessary to visit scores of blogs every day. We’re also seeing technology that allows an idea or a discussion to exist in a manner that is not necessarily married to a particular web destination. So it’s becoming less necessary to drive traffic to your particular blog. Instead, it’s becoming critical that your ideas as a blogger are syndicated and aggregated in ways that will make those ideas more visible.

Some of the technologies that are enabling this “ideas without borders” concept are:

• Feedster – This is a major aggregator of blog content. It’s searchable, it’s growing and it’s becoming more and more important to participate in if you blog. Also, Feedster is putting tools out there that make it easy for web surfers to aggregate and consume content that deals with a particular subject matter. As this Forbes article demonstrates, you can get opinions on the news of the day, as provided by bloggers, very quickly once a news event has taken place.
• Trackback – This technology, or at least the concept behind it, makes it easy to share an idea across multiple blogs. If I like something that another blogger has posted, I can post comments in my blog and use Trackback to make sure the other blogger knows I’ve posted my own comments on the subject. In this way, ideas can be linked across multiple destinations.
• RSS – This technology makes it easy to syndicate content. It also makes it possible for web users to create pages of feeds from their favorite content sources and read them all in one place. Feedster allows for the creation of “Feedpapers,” which are simply collections of RSS feeds from different syndicators. Recently, My Yahoo introduced a beta product that allows users of the service to add headlines to their personal My Yahoo page. And Microsoft will be integrating an RSS reader into Outlook soon. I can easily imagine a day (perhaps a year or two from now) when marketers have a single stop they go to for their marketing and advertising news every day. And it’s a customizable personal page that pulls in headlines from AdAge, AdWeek, Mediapost, MarketingWonk, AdRants, DMNews, iMediaConnection and any other sites that might consider syndicating with RSS.

These concepts, pooled together, make me even more optimistic about the blog movement and what it will mean to how we consume content on the web in the near future. As these technologies gain penetration and usage, and as we incorporate them into tools we’re already using during our business day, ideas and concepts will no longer be married to web destinations. They’ll flow freely through syndication channels and be found easily, in part due to aggregators like Feedster and in part due to their popularity within the blogging community. Then, the emphasis will be less on the destination and more on the idea itself.

And then, how are content providers going to build out a new revenue model to support themselves? (Eek!)