that canadian girl

Buying home appliances is hardly a rivetting experience, but a few companies are succeeding at making it friendlier, easier and… almost enjoyable!

Zanussi-Electrolux takes a relaxed and friendly tone in presenting the different customer-related options on their Customer Service page.

Zanussi also have a stellar approach to product search. Picking an appliance based on name is impossible - you mean, you don’t know your ZSF2440S from your ZWF1631W? - and the specs all look the same after a while.

Their product search allows you to choose how important certain factors are to you on a scale of 0 to 4, to help narrow down the search to the most useful items. For example, looking at washing machines, it’ll ask you to rate five criteria:

Each choice narrows the selection down by greying out the items that don’t meet the criteria you’ve marked as highly important, leaving you with a smaller selection.

Matt from 37signals writes on the positive impact of limiting the consumer’s choice, as opposed to leaving them with too wide a selection.

Washing machines, dishwashers and other home appliances are inevitably going to come in a wide range of shapes, sizes, features and colours, so Zanussi’s useful product search is probably as close as one can get to avoiding paralysis and chronic indecision.

How can you make decisions easier when it comes to your product? Less choice? Better support towards decision?

[Note: This blog post isn’t entirely new, and was written last year for another blog project I never formally launched. If you come across it elsewhere, it isn’t because I stole it from another author ]

Today, Biz Stone confirmed that Twitter has acquired Summize, which used to crawl online reviews and blog discussions to create summarized reviews of music, movies, books and more. Or so says CrunchBase.

To be perfectly honest, I’d never heard to Summize until Twitter kept crapping out, and Summize was the best option to find out @replies and snooping on what people are saying on any given topic. And now, it’s joined that big happy Twitter family - or at least, 5 out of 6 Summize staff have.

I’m wondering what purpose Summize will serve in the future, other than an improved search and replies tab. Imagine if PR companies turned their megaphone the other way, using Summize as a way to get genuine, candid feedback from the community? Odds are Twitter could find a way to monetise that while keeping the end-consumer service free and accessible.

The web is rife with shouty public relations, it’d be a refreshing change to see companies use honest, simple tools to communicate with their users.

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic at Pepperrell Mansion, and I realise personal updates have been few and far between (as my mom regularly reminds me).

About three weeks ago, we had Tommy, Trisha and little nearly-3-year-old Emma over for a week from deepest darkest Scotland (not really, somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh. They even have electricity there.) We went to Colchester Zoo, Andrew’s parents’ house in Kent, and had numerous BBQs to take advantage of the good weather.

Somewhere during that week, I attended Fuel Conference, organised by the fab team at Carsonified where I met a whole new bunch of new people, saw some great friends and got many new ideas I need to start acting upon.

Then last weekend, we popped down to the inlaws’ house to see our adorable new niece Evie, who’s a few weeks old yet kicks like Beckham in his prime.

On Wednesday night, I hastily packed my suitcase for a whirlwind visit to Amsterdam on Thursday and Friday, attending the Mobile Social Networks & UGC Conference with a few work colleagues. And yes, we walked by the red light districts and saw “coffee shops”, and no, it’s not really much to see so don’t get over-excited.

On Friday night, I dropped my suitcase and swapped my stuff around to head off to London early on Saturday morning (by which point Andrew has started greeting me with “hi, do I know you?”) I attended MediaCamp London, an event organised by Chris Hambly at the SAE Institute.

If you’re wondering what happens at BarCamp-style unconferences, Nic Butler aka Loudmouthman (and yes, he lives up to his name) Qik’ed a few videos (including Steve Lamb’s presentation on social media in the entreprise) so have a look. Here are all the photos taken by Chris as well.

Met some great people there, Ben, Vicky, Jof, Judith, Melinda, Nic (and many more, I need to dig out the biz cards we swapped).

SpinVox sponsored the event, and made quite an impression, with many people asking existing users (such as myself) to show off the rather awesome service.

So today has been a braindead, chill out and tidy up spend time with Andrew day. A simple BBQ for dinner, and now, time to watch Juno on the Apple TV while sipping a mandarin and mango cocktail.

Ciao!

Natalie Dee draws really cute stuff.

Talios: “I wonder if Scoble could be used as a scalability term. “This application support five 9’s and is fully scobalable.”

Earlier today, I saw Jim Louderback, CEO at Revision3, tweeting that there had been an outage at Rev3 this weekend and he could now shed light on the issue. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed the downtime. I’ve got Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show and Web Drifter being drip-fed into my iPhone (via iTunes sync) and watch the shows when I’m on the train/tube looking for something to do. I’ve also got a total school-girl crush on Alex Albrecht, which makes the show all too easy to watch, but I digress…

I expected the downtime to be Twitteresque in its incapacity to deal with our adulation and traffic. However, Jim’s story shows the issue they faced this weekend was a whole more serious.

In a nutshell, Revision3 exploits the fantastic peer-to-peer system that is BitTorrent to distribute its shows. Rev3 hosts the tracker, but doesn’t have to take the weight of every single download. It makes technical sense - the Rev3 crowd are technologically up to date and love BitTorrent. It makes business sense - Jim doesn’t have to put quite so much of his revenue towards more servers just to cope with the peaks of traffic, he can count on the distributed network. And it fits right in with the attitude of the Rev3 shows, irreverently addicted and up to date to the latest technology.

MediaDefender was the one hitting Revision3 servers with a Denial of Service attack. (Read Jim’s post for details on who MediaDefender is and what denial of service attacks are. I’ll skim over that bit.)

According to my eye witnesses, MediaDefender received a less-than-warm reception at South by SouthWest when Randy Saaf, CEO at MD, took part in a panel on “How Piracy Will Safe the Music Industry”, where the legitimacy of such a service was questioned by the audience and fellow panelists.

Revision3 is out there, showing off BitTorrent in a good light, using it for legal and completely legitimate purposes, and in comes MediaDefender, like a bull in a china shop, crushing their servers. It’s naive on Revision3’s part to fail to keep a closer eye on their trackers and letting MediaDefender inject their torrents unauthorised for such a long time, but it doesn’t justify MD’s backhanded and disgusting behaviour.

Jim chose his words carefully and expressed the issue very clearly - For this, I’m very grateful, as it exposes MD as a total fraud blindly attacking legal and illegal services.

It’s hard enough being at the cutting edge of any technology without needing twisted organisations like the RIAA, MPAA and Sony hiring online hitmen to destroy perfectly legitimate of technology! I’m not personally a very active BitTorrent user these days, but I’m livid about this.

I hope that Jim, the Revision3 crew and all other technophiles making legitimate use of geekery like BitTorrent see this as a rallying call and an opportunity to educate people. There’s too much good technology out there to let old technophobes in their ivory towers dictate where we can go with it.

South by SouthWest, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel Conference, Mobile World Congress… Yes, I love conferences and, most of all, I love meeting new people.

Coming up soon is Being-Digital, a conference organised by the Mashup* events crowd, and I’m going along with Bob Last, from Taptu, who’s going to be speaking alongside with some other great speakers and entrepreneurs.

Being cheeky as I am, I asked the organisers whether I could extend the invitation to attend the conference to the Taptu blog readers. I now hold one precious ticket, worth £325, and I can’t wait to give it out!

So take part in the competition to win the ticket by creating a video, showing off some pics or leaving a blog comment telling us about the most unputdownable gadget ever.

I’ve got a goooooooolden ticket, come and get it! And see you at Being-Digital on the 10th of June, right?

Last week, I suggested on The Blog Medic that finding out what were the top keywords leading readers to your blog could give some very interesting results. Some of us probably look at our stats daily (ahem, hourly?) but I’d be curious to see what your top 10 is, if you’re willing to share it!

Here’s my top 10 keywords list

Now I can’t believe I come up as the 4th result for “Canadian” in Google - when searching from a UK IP address, granted - but still!

So, go on, little Friday afternoon meme. What are your top 10 search terms?

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

Whatever, Google. Big Table isn’t all that, I had that idea a year ago, launched it, got the tshirt and moved on.

Want proof? Here’s me and my Big Table hanging out together last summer.

Gary Vaynerchuk, for those who don’t yet know him, is the guy behind, in front and all around Wine Library TV. He’s a raving looney, a totally loveable geek but most of all, a rough diamond of community relations amongst the world of overly polished marketing bullshit. He says things as they are and has marked me enough during SXSWi this year that I’ve got a couple of things he’s said up on my board of inspirational quotes in the office. (Thank you Gary, genuinely!)

He also agreed with me that making your own wine is a bad idea, mmmkay dad?

PS - I want my own WLTV sweatband bracelet thinger!

These aren’t the tidiest notes, and I even failed on jotting down exactly who was speaking but there are a few useful points in there… Thanks to Lionel for the insight on how Dell dealt with feedback in the early days.

The Future of Corporate Blogs
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I wasn’t so hot on this panel, found there was a lot of navel-gazing and not enough direction. Also, I don’t know what world these guys live in but do they not also have to contend with marketing, business dev, crazy bosses with wild ideas? There was no discussion about how to integrate the real-life demands into collaborative processes. Nice people, but rubbish panel.

Creative Collaboration: Designers and Developers working together
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For this panel, I ditched the laptop and only used pen and paper so my notes are less than clear. In fact, I’m lucky if I can read my own handwriting, but the highlights for me were finally meeting the lovely Tara Hunt, a fellow Canadian expat and inspirational blogger.

My notes might be a bit garbled but sue me, I was too busy listening.

“Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet
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The notes from this panel are pretty thorough - it was one of the first panels I attended and I was pretty enthusiastic with the typing. Interesting findings, but the main takeaway for me is that these kids are clever and pretty discerning, we need to give them a whole lot more credit than we (or I) currently do!

“What teens like online and on their phones”
Panel of teens from age 11-17, based in the Austin area and of different levels of interest in technology, music, etc…
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Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

For this panel, I’ll admit my notes were a bit patchy and I relied on a few other ppl’s notes to improve them. I was too mesmerised by Kathy’s talk to worry so much about notes. But read on anyways…

I’ve also borrowed a few of Kathy’s images to illustrate for those who weren’t so lucky as to attend. They’re completely her copyright, ownership and what not. (They rock!)
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Since I attended SXSW last week, I thought it’d be the right thing to do to share my notes from panels. They’re incomplete, I’ve probably interpreted some statements wrongly, there are probably plenty of typos. But I felt I’d be a complete shmuck if I didn’t do the community thang and shared my notes.

So if you’re not interested, apologies about the next few posts, which will each summarise a panel. At the end, I’ll try to add links to other (better) coverage of the same panels to give the bigger picture. If you’ve taken notes or have something to add (like videos!), just leave a comment and I’ll include it in my post.

First off, the “A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe?” panel notes…
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South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]

This evening, looking at the activity on Twitter, I was fascinated to see how quickly the usual Jaiku crowd had migrated. For those who haven’t noticed, Jaiku was showing a big fat 502 Bad Gateway error for a number of hours before it was replaced by the Jaiku birdie telling us that busted hard drives were to blame for the downtime.

Now, Twitter is notoriously flaky and known for going up and down more than a kid’s see-saw in a busy park in midsummer. Yet, everyone flocked over as the default alternative to Jaiku. If it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been something else. Pownce? Facebook? Seesmic?

In a magpie-like fashion, the web 2.0 crowd will look for the next shiny thing. I know. I’m one of them, and I sure as hell am guilty for chronically creating accounts on every new service, just to promptly ditch it and move on.

So what makes a service people come back to? A site that makes it past the 12-18 months “best before” date? Or are all new web 2.0′ish services destined to peak quickly then die just as fast? Lots more thoughts to add on this, but first, I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks.

I’ll leave you on this thought… What if Twitter and Jaiku were down at the same time? Would the world collapse? Or would everyone’s productivity increase by 200%?

For now, I must go tweet about how sick I am of packing boxes. It’s more bearable than it was some years ago but it still bites.

In the past few days, I’ve read some genuinely interesting articles which I’ve been meaning to blog, but to avoid stale blog entries in my drafts, I’ll just share the links and let you read on.

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