Picking up on my post from a few days back, eMarketer published some summary level information on a study done by the Society for New Communications Research. Essentially what the study revealed is that social media is becoming a pretty significant source of information on product quality and on the level of customer service provided for specific products and services

Or in other words, social media and the ease at which it facilitates individual publishing lets people complain globally as opposed to over the backyard fence. An Google facilitates the communication of those complaints to others…forever.

There is a huge lesson here that brand managers are only starting to learn. Customer service = brand when a online blog posting complaining about your service gets more traffic than your online advertising efforts.

Well, perhaps it sort of works. There was a interesting post on TechCrunch over the weekend which does a great job of summarizing some of the emerging thoughts on what will emerge after keyword searches (i.e. what every major search engine does).

One option that seems to have the best chance, at least in the short term of radically reworking how we search is the Semantic Web. At its core, the concept of a semantic web is nothing more than a focus on coding some intelligence into those billions of pages out there.

Right now when you design a web page, pretty much everything you do is about making it look good. There is nothing in the underlying code of the page that describes the actual content of the page. This makes it really difficult for search engines to figure out what is actually on the page so that it can be presented to someone who is looking for similar information. In semantic webs, the type of content on the page is also coded along with the visual components so that computers reading the content know what they are looking at.

This visually centric approach also gives rise to a whole industry of search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who employ “white hat” and “black hat” techniques to trick the search engines into either recognizing the content correctly, or in the case of black hatters, incorrectly.

As someone who has attempted to deploy various SEO strategies over at TravelGator, and for the most part has been completely confused at the results, I personally cannot wait for something like the semantic web to come along. As a publisher, I’d prefer to spend my time creating great content, not tweaking that content in an attempt to get the rather stupid Google robot to read it correctly.

In other words, I cannot wait.

For more details on semantic webs, check out the first chapter of Nova Spivak’s new book.

I stumbled upon an interesting article written by Robert Cringely at PBS in January of last year. It is a decent presentation of the argument about why Google will eventually power most of the Internet based on an analysis of the dark fiber that they have under contract.

I read the article, thought for a moment and concluded that the argument was plausible if a little 1984. Google is pretty dominate in a lot of areas, although they’ve failed pretty miserably in others like social networking. They have also bought a lot of their capability (e.g. YouTube) when their own efforts came up short. In other words, they are acting a lot like a well run large company - spin out something cool every so often from internal R&D and buy the rest using the cash flow from their mainstream operations. Microsoft is the same, as are most large, growth oriented corporations.

So maybe we will all be running our lives on Google infrastructure a decade from now. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Big growth companies have a habit of turning into… big slow growth companies. And big companies have a hard time attracting innovative, risk takers who start new trends. Google is no different.

For those who couldn’t attend the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco (myself included), many of the presentations have been posted on SlideShare.

My favorite of the bunch so far is Customer Service is the New Marketing which talks about the damage or value you can create to your brand based on the customer service you offer online and off (but these days more online than off). It also has great pictures.

The presentation references one of my all time favorite posts on TechCrunch called Comcast, Twitter and the Chicken which makes the point about how customer service is changing in the online world better than any diatribe on the topic from me.

The funny thing is that just this week I finally got an email back from customer service at Bosch in regard to a complaint I had about a dishwasher that I bought. Ignoring the nature of my complaint (a cheap plastic part on my high end dishwasher wore out almost immediately), the time line of their response is rather interesting.

Using a form on their website we requested help on April 12. They responded with a form letter that really didn’t help on April 16 and we immediately responded back re-iterating the issue again. The latest response showed up in my mailbox on April 21 and suggested I call them to order (and pay for I assume) a new part.

So here we have a company that spends a fortune advertising in magazines in an attempt to create a high end, exclusive brand who cannot find the time to respond to an email in under four days. Yet I bet if I call them I’ll get someone on the phone in under 5 minutes.

As more and more consumers move their entire lives online, companies that want to maintain their brands are going to have to examine whether the online experience they are offering their customers is really where it needs to be. Comcast responding to a Twitter post from a major blogger is one of the best examples of a company that at least, in theory, understands the changes that are underway. Bosch, an example of one that doesn’t.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with Internet strategy but this issue has caused me so much grief in the last 18 months I want to make sure anyone else out there who runs into it can try this solution.

When I’m on the road I carry a MacBook Pro running Leopard and Windows XP via Parallels and I use a Verizon EVDO card for network access. After years of being a road warrior and using laptops from pretty much every manufacturer (they pretty much all sucked except for a ThinkPad T42 which was acceptable) I can safely say this is the best setup I’ve every had. It is light, powerful and I can run all my favorite Mac and Windows programs pretty much seamlessly. Plus I get to use Final Cut Express HD to edit video when I’m on vacation.

I use a Cisco 1811 router on my home network which gives me access to everything I need remotely via the tried and true Cisco VPN client. I like the Cisco gear as very few (none?) of the other router manufacturers that have price points for a small office or home network properly support the Mac OS.

My issue has been that no matter what I tried, I could never get the Cisco Mac VPN client to connect to the router. The Cisco Windows VPN client always worked from within Parallels but not on the Mac side of the computer. It drove me nuts and Cisco engineering support could never figure it out. They ultimately just said they don’t support any Macs that are also running Parallels (very lame) and tossed it back in my lap.

The developers over at Parallels support finally gave me the missing pieces of information today and I am now back in VPN connectivity heaven. So here is what I did to fix the situation:

1. Uninstall Parallels (you’ll get your VM back so this is pretty safe but backup everything just in case). I downloaded the latest build and used the uninstaller that comes as part of the disk image. Just dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.

2. Uninstall the Mac Cisco VPN client if you’ve got it on your machine. Use sudo /usr/local/bin/vpn_uninstall in Terminal to do it. Again, dragging it to the trash doesn’t work.

3. Reboot

4. Reinstall the Mac Cisco VPN client

5. Execute the following commands in Terminal:

sudo /sbin/ipfw flush

sudo /sbin/ipfw disable firewall

6. Try to connect. It should work at this point.

7. Reinstall Parallels

8. Go to System Preferences / Security and re-enable your firewall. I use the option to control access and permit the VPN client access to the Network.

There is another good post on this issue on Chris Barber’s blog but I could never get his solution to work as the Verizon EVDO client changes the network configuration on the machine somehow and things didn’t match up.

Incidentally, if you’ve recently upgraded to version 4 of the Verizon EVDO Access Manager and it stopped Parallels from connecting to the network via shared networking, you need to uninstall and reinstall Parallels to fix it. The Verizon Access Manager install hammers the Parallels settings somehow and kills the Parallels NAT drivers. Don’t call Verizon support…they are clueless on this issue (I tried). Even Parallels support doesn’t seem to know about it yet.

I love my Mac but Apple has got to work on their networking support layer. Every issue I’ve had with Leopard has been a result of it not playing nice with either Parallels, EVDO or Cisco. It is just way to complex…even when you know what you are doing.

UPDATE:

Some further testing has determined that the firewall disable command isn’t required. It is the flush that solves the problem. I’ve also figured out that if you are using the current version of the VPN client (4.9.0.1.0100) over an EVDO connection it will drop after 5 seconds if wifi is enabled. If wifi is not enabled it will work. According to Cisco, they have fixed this issue in the next release of the client.

Techcrunch did a little digging into the Amazon earnings call and has come to the conclusion that a large percentage of the computing power being deployed by Amazon web services is being used by large corporations, not startups.

While I didn’t validate this analysis, I’m willing to take it at face value. That being said, it is really surprising. The banks I’ve consulted for over the last decade or so would rather cut off their left arm than expose their data externally. So this situation has me really curious…what exactly are they doing on the Amazon web services platform and how did they get permission from IT Security, IT Risk, Compliance, and Legal to do it? (Seriously, that is what would be required.)

I’m looking forward to more information becoming public on the types of analysis that is being performed. Call me puzzled.

I’ve always known usability was important, but I didn’t realize that it could lead to a class action lawsuit. Google is being sued because of how a specific Adwords bidding page is designed. Or more specifically how an opt-out condition is  implied based on how the screen is designed but actually doesn’t occur.

“You might get sued” is something I’ve never seen in a usability audit!

You know a trend is about to go mainstream when Microsoft announces an initiative to support it. This morning’s NYT article reminded me of Bill Gates’ mid-’90s epiphany that the Internet was going to be important. Better late than never, I guess, and you have to give Microsoft credit for elbowing their way into significant (if not leading) market shares after arriving late to the party.

Cloud computing is a particularly interesting reversal for Microsoft, and one that makes me feel somewhat ambivalent. The company’s leadership has always been PC-centric, and while this made them look archaic when they resisted the Internet wave, there was always a “power to the little people” aspect of their approach that I found appealing. Keep in mind that these are people who grew up in an era when nobody owned their own computer, if you wanted to use one you had to go to your nearest mainframe and get in line for your share of its precious processing cycles.

Of course in most ways the Internet actually increased the power of individuals. By giving anyone with a cheap PC the ability to not only consume but produce content across nearly any physical boundaries, it’s hard not to argue we’ve been liberated by it. And while the worries about electronic privacy have moved beyond the curmudgeons and into a small (though vocal) concerned minority, nobody seriously argues that the risks outweigh the benefits.

Cloud computing somehow feels different, and carries many echoes of our time-sharing mainframe past. While most consumers have no idea what a mainframe is (and to an ordinary user, a “grid” or “cloud” is just a new kind of mainframe), I wonder whether its implications will mesh well with basic human nature, or at least the Western materialistic version of it that I’m familiar with.

Why is iTunes so much more successful than Rhapsody or Pandora? Why is the adoption of Google Apps so slow despite its many advantages? Why do people buy vacation homes that they only visit for one or two weeks a year, when it would be far more economical (never mind convenient) to rent them? When I moved to Manhattan in 2001, it didn’t take long to realize I could rent a car as often as I wanted and it would cost me less than insurance and garage fees if I kept my own. But even though I sold my car, I have many friends who kept theirs, and I often envy them.

Why do we like to own things when there are clear financial and logistical advantages to using shared resources? There are plenty of possible answers, many of them emotional ones like control, security, or pride of possession. I don’t mean to delve into the human psyche too deeply, I only wonder how this quirk of our natures will affect, or be affected by the apparent swing of the computing pendulum back to large communal computing resources. If we’re lucky, we can even have the “thin client” debates of the ’90s all over again.

Lately I’ve been taking a closer look at the open source application space as part of a business plan I’m thinking about. Now, I’m no a stranger to this space as I’d spent a good six months looking at different ideas in 2004 and we built TravelGator almost 100% on open source technology, but back in 2004 I decided that there needed to be a lot more adoption by large corporations before open source software - especially business applications - had a shot of really making a solid business model.

Having done another deep dive recently I think that time has now come. The advantages of open source over proprietary software are just too significant to ignore and in my consulting activities I see the pain that closed systems are causing my clients. Excessive expense, lack of flexibility and huge adoption costs are almost guaranteed whenever you try and integrate a large proprietary system into the enterprise.

Given how fast software changes and how much modification is required to fit it to a specific company’s IT environment, the inherent openness and flexibility of open source products just make sense. The argument becomes even more convincing in the areas of the enterprise where competitive advantage is not necessarily derived through IT solutions and cost savings are a bigger driver. For example, CRM systems like SugarCRM, accounting systems, etc.

We’ve already seen the advantages that open source can bring to the OS via Linux, the database via MySQL and the application stack via JBOSS. Not to mention all the frameworks out there that facilitate rapid development like Ruby on Rails and Python. Furthermore, open source has certainly proven it can scale given that Google runs their entire operation on it along with many other high volume online companies.

The other big change is that conferences like the Open Source Business Conference are giving the space the credibility and visibility necessary to encourage enterprise adoption of these products.

So is the time now for open source to step out of the OS and application stack and into the application? I’m thinking it is.

Ok, this post has nothing to do with the Internet but is suitably geeky enough that I couldn’t resist. Those who know me know that my home is continually under renovation. The main reason is that I tend to buy dumps and then slowly rip them apart and put them back together but also because I enjoy working on something physical as an alternative to the virtual stuff I do for a living. Nothing like a little drywall sanding or plumbing to push the brain in a new direction.

I’ve been adding electronics to my house lately - specifically built in speakers and mini-split air conditioners as I don’t have central air - and was surprised to find solutions in both spaces that you can hide behind artwork.

The speakers I figured were out there as there has been so much buzz lately about flat panel audio solutions. The ones from Decor Audio look seriously cool and I plan on coming up with a way to use them. I was also amazed to find an air conditioner that you can hide behind pretty much any artwork you like as well. That one is already ordered for a new room I built.

I do love house tech. Now if I can only get the air conditioner to talk to the house server…