NO WONDER STELIOS is selling his web cafés. Broadband home internet is about to boom as a new price war makes today’s expensive luxury a mainstream commodity. The impact will be felt on industries ranging from TV (which will lose viewers) to traditional phone companies (whose profits will be hit by internet-based voice calls). Meanwhile, the wild land-grab among internet service providers is leaving consumers in dire need of protection. Hundreds of ISPs now offer thousands of differently priced packages, and not all of today’s “bargains” are what they seem. Many new under-£20 deals have a catch — in usage or speed limitations — and some set-up fees are simply greedy.
So here’s a plea for the telecoms regulator, Ofcom: why not launch an easy-to-use, authoritative but judgmental website that holds every ISP to account? Private sites such as www.adslguide.org.uk will show you how it’s done.
IF YOU WANT to judge how much taste a celebrity has, flick through their CD collection. More realistically, nose around their personal iPod track listings. One of the most enlightening features of Apple’s iTunes Music Store is a facility for perusing celebrity playlists — enlightening not because it helps to guide your own choices but for what it reveals about a star’s inner lack of cool.
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Though it is no surprise, for instance, that Barry Manilow is listening to Pavarotti and that Burt Bacharach taps along to Toni Braxton’s Unbreak My Heart, fans of Bebel Gilberto might wonder why she is still listening to You Are the Sunshine of My Life, and why the rap impresario Damon Dash is stuck on the 1981 Hall & Oates hit I Can’t Go for That. But it is Beyoncé’s playlist, centred mainly on Beyoncé and her sister Solange, that is most revealing. No wonder the webzine Slate calls the celeb playlist “a unique form of public humiliation”.
MATTEL USES a weblog to promote Barbie among young girls; Dell’s imparts mind-numbingly detailed technical data regarding its Linux “enterprise solutions”. The regularly updated weblog, once dismissed as a depository of teenage ramblings, is emerging as a cheap, effective way for companies to promote their services. If your business does not yet blog, you should consider the facility’s advantages.
As Bill Gates explained at his annual CEO summit last month, the weblog is a remarkably effective means of talking to customers and partners alike.
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You do not have to decide who should receive your latest messages, as you must with e-mail; nor do you have to wait for surfers to chance upon your lumbering static website. Microsoft even gives away the occasional insider tip on its own Channel 9 weblog (http://channel9.msdn.com). It might not be the world’s most riveting news source (with entries such as “How the Longhorn graphics team works with the Usability team”), but Channel 9 at least gives the company’s take on the day’s corporate news. That’s probably why Google, too, has recently started to blog (at www.google.com/googleblog) — where, because it promote its Blogger weblogging software, it solicits technical feedback that could save the company time and money.
A word of warning, though: make sure that your corporate blog is rigorously pre-edited. Once exposed, your trade secrets — or embarrassing mistakes — will be preserved online for ever.