Creating this blog was an experiment and, somewhat to my surprise, I quite like the concept. So I have decided to host my blog on my Web space over at blueyonder. This isn’t because I think Telewest’s hosting service is any more reliable than blogger (never had any issues at all with blogger) but so I can peruse the Web server logs and referrer statistics that Blueyonder kindly gather for me. The transfer of the blog went surprisingly smoothly and I created a placeholder blog to grab the old namespace on blogger.

Google have launched an online RSS Reader. Like most developments from Google, this looks very professional and fits in with their rapidly growing suite of software products. Although I currently use Thunderbird for reading (a very limited number of) RSS sources and blogs, the use of a Web based service to manage all my information sources, accessible from anywhere, is appealing. I experimented by setting up one source (BBC News) and one thing about the interface immediately struck me like a thunderbolt ! ...

I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks which maintains a list of Web sites that I could access from any computer. This was a nice idea but I found I didn’t use (or maintain) the bookmarks regularly and the links gradually fell into a state of disrepair. For my most frequently accessed Web sites, I would simply type the start of the address into the browser and simply let auto-complete do its work which was quicker. ...

I use Telewest Broadband and today I received an email informing me that my broadband service had been upgraded to from 1MB to 4Mb free of charge. As I am currently paying 25 GBP per month for the broadband connection, it is really a case of Telewest trying to keep up with the competition to avoid customers switching provider rather than a spontaneous act of goodwill. And as if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, I then noticed that ‘Teleport’ (TV and video on demand) had appeared on my digital TV service as well. This promised me the chance to pause/rewind any of my favourite TV programs I had missed on the first showing. However, when I scanned the list, the choice was quite limited and fairly uninspiring ...

A lot of people make a lot of money out of customer relationship management (CRM) but here is a real-life example of how customer service affects the relationship with the customer. A few weeks ago I ordered a wireless USB card and a CD (Antics by Interpol) from Amazon. I received the normal ‘Your order has been dispatched’ email within 24 hours. I waited for 10 days but nothing turned up which was unusual because normally Amazon deliver pretty promptly (even with the SuperSaver option). ...