The MacAlba

[These thoughts are made from the viewpoint of a bystander, rather than as a participant - coComment is still ramping up and membership is currently by invitation only. I'm not a member.]

Comments pertaining to articles or items within a specific blog are normally kept as a collection of comments attached, directly or indirectly, to that article. Comments can maintain flow of conversation between blogger and reader and are an integral part of the blogosphere.

If an individual is a frequent commenter, across tens or even hundreds of blogs, then there’s no way of accessing their entire contribution as a whole. A conversation generally usually only takes place within a specific blog (usually, but not always).

That’s where coComment comes in.

CoComment will collect all related comments from coComment members into the one conversation, and publish that conversation. But I wonder how much this will split the blogosphere into the “coCommenters� and the “non-coCommenters�. The haves, and the have-nots. A conversation could become two conversations. Each hidden from the other.

Another feature of coComment is to permit a member to list their comments centrally on their own blog, say. So as well as having a blogroll, a blogger can also have their own “comment-roll� or “conversation-roll�.

Thanks to the wonders of RSS feeds, the latter “comment-roll� can also be accessed via a news aggregator. I suspect that in the case of some individuals their conversation-roll could be as, or more, interesting than their blog.

The current blogosphere has multiple, duplicate, “ping� servers. These servers collect “pings� from bloggers when a new blog article has been published. These pings are collected and used for various purposes including search engines collecting and indexing the newly published content.

Will we see multiple coComment-like services at some point in the near future? Will they interoperate, or will the comment-sphere be further fragmented? A conversation on server-X, a different conversation on server-Y.

… and how will coComment differentiate themselves from looking something like an up-market chat-room or bulletin board?

It will be very interesting to see if they can convert the high’ish level of blogosphere chatter into something sustainable.

[Update: within hours of me writing the above, coComment opened for business. Anybody can now sign up].

Technorati Tags: cocomment, Internet

“Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venusâ€?, and there’s cooking for them, and cooking for us.

Having been a computer programmer in an earlier incarnation of my professional life, I cook by working from recipes (programs) and convert the workflow to flowcharts and timelines in my head, and am quite happy with the (usually) good quality results, and with the repeatability attained by applying such methods. (It makes sense to me at least).

It will come as no surprise, then, that others cook in the same manner as I. One excellent blog for like-minded people is Michael Chu’s Cooking for Engineers.

Is there any other way?

After hearing that a neighbour was about to take delivery of Bordernet equipment (where that neighbour ordered the service about a week AFTER I did), I was annoyed enough to immediately phone Bordernet to find out what on earth was taking so long.

After two phone calls and about 23 minutes of being “on holdâ€? I eventually spoke to somebody. Their service-desk person hadn’t listened to the detail of the message I had left on their answering service so I had to repeat that information.

I was eventually given the name and phone number of the installers in Melbourne. Likewise, the person I spoke to didn’t listen to the information being given to him and made some assumptions which caused the process to take some minutes longer than necessary. Is “listeningâ€? a lost art?

The installer explained that someone had called me a week ago, on February 7 to be precise, but hadn’t been able to leave a message. What!! They couldn’t leave a message because they have my home phone number not the work number. Bordernet’s application process only asks for the phone number of the location at which the service is to be installed - not a contact phone number. I mentioned this (the fact that they only had the home number) to the person taking my order at the time but that snippet of data was not of interest to them.

Regardless, I had updated my contact details on the Bordernet web site but they obviously didn’t pass that information on to the installer though.

… and what exactly were the installers going to do? They had let a week pass without trying to contact me - Bordernet does have an email address for me - they managed to use it to send me an invoice.

I now have another two weeks to wait for the equipment to be delivered - then, presumably, some additional time after that before the technician pays a visit to install the equipment.

Bordernet needs to remember that I have high expectations of quality customer service (I, being me, advised them of this when I ordered the service). They haven’t met those expectations so far.

Bordernet needs to improve some of their business processes before I could recommend them to the several hundred potential remote-area users that I want to find a service provider for. I’ve already discounted one HiBIS service provider due to their lack of being able to provide a service in a timely manner.

Another week has passed since I last posted an update. It’s now two weeks since I ordered the two-way 512/64 satellite service from Bordernet. At that time I was told that I’d have the service installed in about four weeks. I haven’t heard anything from the installers as yet. I have, however, received my first invoice. Given that they’ve given me a months rental in credit (that was part of the deal), I can’t complain (yet).

As described last week, I expected to hear from the installers, before they arrive, in order to discuss any local obstacles (hill and trees) that I mentioned when I ordered the service.

They’ve now only got 2 weeks left to meet their own deadline.

Having upgraded to, or installed afresh, Wordpress v2.0.1, a personal publishing platform, on four blogs over the past few days, I’m now settling back to acquaint myself with ecto (again). Ecto is a software application for writing and managing blog entries. Once an entry is ready to be published, ecto will upload the article to the blog. Ecto can also be used to edit existing blog entries, then upload changes to the published article.

Although I purchased ecto some time ago, previous versions of Wordpress were buggy enough to prevent my being able to use it (ecto) to upload to blogs. Wordpress v2.0.1 is the first version that works “out of the boxâ€?, as advertised. Indeed, it’s now a pleasure to use.

A particular strength of Wordpress is the “plugin� architecture. “hooks� are available within Wordpress to permit independent software developers to add their own specialised functionality. Of special note is the Semiologic plugin suite which can transform Wordpress from a personal publishing platform into an “easy to use Content Management System�.

Resources: ecto, wordpress, semiologic plugins and theme

Living in rural Australia has many benefits over town dwelling. I use my photoblog to illustrate what I see around me on a daily basis. I couldn’t go back to living with neighbours again. I fully understand that some town/city residents can make an equal statement and not understand why somebody would want to live so far from “amenitiesâ€? such as shopping centres, cinemas, night clubs, etc. Each to their own.

One of the real disadvantages of rural living, though, is the lack of the level of telecommunications connectivity that many in the western world now take for granted. We have no copper-based telco services to, or near, the house. Mobile phone coverage doesn’t extend to the house.

The telephone connection that we do have is connected via a microwave link. It gives good dial up modem connectivity, but that’s its limit. With three computers on the home wireless network, all sharing the dial-up gateway, bandwidth can be hard to come by at times.

So, I’ve taken a step forward and ordered a two-way satellite network connection. I mentioned this in an entry on my ham radio blog last week, but I now propose to document the move to two-way satellite on this blog in case others are interested.

Being mindful of my higher than average monthly download needs, and my desire for a static IP address to permit me to connect to a home server from afar or make a VPN connection to work via the corporate firewall, I ordered a 512/64 service with a 5 gigabyte monthly quota from Bordernet. This particular class of service permits me to burst up to a monthly cap of 8 gigabytes at little extra cost before the more prohibitive per-megabyte charges apply.

I was told that I could expect the service to be installed within four weeks. A week has now passed and I haven’t heard anything (I’m just impatient). I had expected, though, to hear from the installer to determine how much of an impediment the nearby small hill and trees, that I had mentioned when ordering the service, might be, and how large a dish mount might be required given that it can get pretty windy around here at certain times of the year.

So I’ll just have to sit back and wait. Being somebody who has strong views on customer service, or the lack thereof, it’s more likely that they’ll hear from me by the end of next week if I haven’t heard from them.

Technorati Tags: Internet