Posts from December 18, 2010

Theres a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of:

It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible.

Now I occasionally claim that I am writing this blog purely for me, myself and I. What I mean by that is that I tend to write what I want when I want and don't feel pressured to produce content on a regular ongoing basis. However, that's not entirely true; if it was I could equally well write this stream of consciousness into a A5 notebook locked in my top drawer where no-one would ever see it.

Let's be honest - people are blogging to get noticed and everyone likes feedback (even if it's negative feedback) and it's fantastic if, just occasionally, someone says 'God - that post about LinkedIn and pole dancing made me laugh'.

A recent comment by Bill (which I will reproduce here) rather took me by surprise and made me pause for thought

I like your blog, but just one thing about it frustrates me - you “tag” posts, but I can't seem to find an index of these tags. (?) For example, I like to read your comments on emacs - but without such an index, I am forced to use Google to search your site.

Now here was a potential customer (an interested like-minded reader or even hopefully, that rare animal, a brand new subscriber) for my business (my humble blog) and what was I doing to welcome him, to encourage him, to help him find his way around my blog ? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

After giving this some thought, I decided to take prompt and decisive action:

Many thanks for popping by and bothering to leave some constructive criticism about the lack of decent navigation options on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for this:

1. I recently moved this blog to Drupal 7 and I didn't actually know how to add tag clouds, archive pages, previous/next post, related posts or search functionality.

2. In the past, I have played with all of the above on both WordPress and Habari in an effort to keep casual readers lingering for longer and my gut feeling was that none of these additions made a blind bit of difference to Pages/Visit and merely cluttered up the blog.

However, prompted by your comment, I have now added 'Tags' together with a search box on the sidebar and an 'Archives' tab allowing you to browse by year or month.

Unfortunately, I never heard from the mysterious Bill ever again. A cautionary tale and a valuable lesson in CRM for all small-time bloggers.

Shamefully, I dont read many books so an eBook reader has never been high on my list of priorities as it would probably become a moderately expensive white elephant and yet another gadget to carry around.

However, Amazon's high profile marketing campaign for the Kindle eBook reader sparked my interest sufficiently to download the free Kindle Reader application for Android to sample the experience of reading an eBook on a mobile device.

In addition, I've just purchased a higher capacity (16GB) SD card for the Android phone which means it could replace my iPod Touch as I can now store all my music on the Android phone and start to consolidate two of my mobile devices. If the Android Kindle Reader application is usable, could the HTC Legend also fulfill the role of an eBook Reader ?

I downloaded Tom Reynold's 'Blood Sweat and Tea' mainly because it was free and I had previously enjoyed Reynolds' blog about his experiences as a paramedic working for the London Ambulance Service.

I have had (courtesy of my employer) an HTC Legend for 3 months and I have been staggered at the razor sharp quality and resilence of the screen. Even without a screen protector, the display is pristine and crystal clear despite moderate use during that period.

Reading text on the Android is pretty easy on the eye. The font is large enough and clear enough for me to read easily and the contrast is excellent. Also, I am only reading for short periods (up to half an hour on my commute into the city) and the fact that 'Blood Sweat and Tea' is merely a compilation of blog posts means each story is a very short and manageable chunk. This light, casual reading may be slightly easier on the eyes than ploughing through 'War and Peace' for prolonged periods.

The larger screen on the Kindle does look great and I have heard great things about the screen technology but there's one reason I would currently not even contemplate buying a Kindle.

I selected a popular book being advertised for Christmas - 'The Fry Chronicles' by Stephen Fry. The paper edition of this book costs £8.20 at Amazon (UK). To my amazement, the Kindle version of the same book costs a staggering £12.99.

Yes - you read that correctly. £8.20 for the hardback book and £12.99 for the electronic version of the same book for the Kindle.

Now let's think about this. For the paper edition, the publisher has to print a book on 448 pages of paper. The book also has to be bound and this is the hardback edition. For the Kindle edition, the publisher has to, err, well, create an electronic copy of the book.

How in God's name can the publisher/Amazon justify charging an additional, extortionate, staggering premium of 58% for the Kindle edition ?

Now this may be a one-off rare example and it's true that some books are cheaper on Kindle than for the paper book. For example, the popular 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is slightly cheaper on Kindle (£2.68) versus £3.89 for the paperback edition. Now I don't have the time or inclination to exhaustively check the comparative prices of paper versus Kindle editions for the remainder of the best seller lists and it is true that some classic texts (e.g. Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes) are freely available for eBooks.

However, in a sense that's irrelevant - the Kindle edition should always, always be cheaper than the paper book - guaranteed, 100%, every time for every book regardless. Until that is the case, I won't be buying a Kindle or any other eBook reader.