So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

While browsing the bootstrap economist archive this evening, I revisited my favorite post. With my freedom from credit card debt I gained the confidence to take risks that allowed me to exponentially improve my foothold in life. Since making that last payment, I have learned to use credit wisely, leased a car that I have always wanted and left Philadelphia to further my career. Despite the euphoric memories that return when I remember celebrating my debt repayment, it’s what I didn’t do that caught my attention.

Three years ago my goals were to repay old debt and build a small amount of savings. Today my goals are to buy a house, save for retirement, and build bootstrap | economist into a viable business.

My efforts to turn bootstrap economist into a viable business have been disappointing. I won’t make any excuses, it is 100% attributed to my intermitted writing spurts. When I started bootstrap economist, I was in a dead-end job with plenty of free time. I had grandiose dreams of building a personal finance powerhouse, but they were dashed by several name changes and too much off topic content. But I wrote dilligently until my responsibilities grew and my availability for blogging dropped dramatically. Therefore, bootstrap economist sat collecting virtual dust in a dark corner of the internet for the past year.

Due to the aforementioned, I’ve decided to wrap up bootstrap economist for good. I have been weighing the decision for some time — looking for a clean slate. A new idea untouched by the web’s copycats. A project whose blatent simplicity will have webophiles smacking their heads in frustration for not thinking of it first. One lesson learned from bootstrap economist, is the importance of knowing your customer. And my next project will be built to keep customers coming back day after day. I have a number of ideas and a good network of friends to help me execute them, but won’t act without having a solid plan in place.

But before I sign off one last time, I’d like to take a moment to talk about an upcoming conference whose ideology is on point with my future endeavors. The Audience Conference is a uniquie affair hosted by Loren Feldman of 1938media. For those unfamiliar, Loren Feldman is a videographer who speaks frankly about the web. His Audience Conference is different because its format forgoes dreadful amateur panels in favor of candid conversations with social media savvy business leaders. The Audience Conference features an impressive list of speakers covering journalism, advertising, marketing, public relations, web-based business and the arts. (See below for a video of Feldman explaining The Audience Conference in his own words). In my humble opinion, the caliber of participants mixed with an intimate setting will make this an unforgettable event. I am unable to attend, but it would have been an excellent opportunity to bend Jason Calacanis’ ear about Mahalo and continue a previous discussion with Loren about video production.

I will keep bootstrap economist online for the occasional websurfer that finds my older content helpful. However; I will no longer be adding new content. Thank you again for all of your support.

- bootstrap economist

Mahalo (Part I)

Jason McCabe Calacanis: I want your attention!

With my blatently transparent plea out of the way, I considered bombarding you with e-mails, tweets and phone calls. However, mine would barely distinguish themselves from the herd of messages aimed in your direction on any given day producing a limited return on my efforts. Instead, I am telling Mahalo’s story in two parts: objectively with information I’ve compiled from TechCrunch (60%), various tech blogs (30%) and other websites (10%); and skewed based on a conversation with yourself. In addition, I am not trying to linkbait - a simple DM to my twitter account (@economist) would be appreciated to start a dialogue.

And now, on to the featured presentation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Misconceptions in 140 Characters or Less

I have been a fan of twitter since I begun using the service two years ago. Twitter is a a mini blogging tool that asks one question: What are you doing? Posts are short; up to 140 characters to be exact, and can be sent or received through the web, standalone programs like TweetDeck, and text message. Twitter has been used in a number of manners including posting articles, documenting trips, planning events, and letting your friends in the area know where you are. Twitter allows you to become a fan of the service’s users and allow those users to follow you in return. When the service was primarily populated by internet technophiles and web geeks, users typically followed each other to help build the community.

But as twitter has gained momentum and become populated by celebrities, musicians, and business leaders, these power users are unable to follow their hundreds of thousands of fans. This has turned the service from a two-way communication medium into one where power users broadcast messages and get real time feedback from their many fans. This has sparked what is commonly called the attention economy, where opinions have become the currency of social networks like twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and etcetera. The thought is that comments from everyday internet users provide more insight into the quality of a company’s product or the integrity of an individual than bulk spending on public relations. Tara Hunt, who has recently written a book on how to use social networks to build your business called The Whuffie Factor, recently blogged about the importance of the attention economy in promoting her new book.

However, of those that answered my tweet and asked for a book are actually looking forward to the book. This group is busy, too. Career and lives get in the way, so I probably will see about half of them able to actually get to reading the book in the near future. And, as blog posts fall off from reading, Maybe 5 of them will actually get around to posting something. Say, their collective readers are somewhere around 500 - and that number is really conservative, since most blog posts will see long term hits, even those with a low readership (I will also do my best to drive people to those posts). Adding this column up, I see a sum total of possible ‘eyeballs’ reading about the book being 500.

And from the test earlier, 500 is greater than 0. Therefore, I’m sending books to people who want them and are more likely to read them. Not to mention that the people who are just starting out on their blogging/tweeting/online community adventure today very possibly could be the ‘influencers’ of tomorrow. I started as a nobody. Kathy started from zero. Cory and Shel both came from being unknown to being well-known. I totally remember when Michael (TechCrunch) was just starting to write about startups - it was about 5 years ago. He went from 0 to over 1 million in less than 2 years. Like I said, today EVERYONE is an influencer.
Whuffie Math

I personally use twitter in a bubble, taking advantage of the service’s continuous flow of posts. To me, twitter offers an information buffet where I can pick and choose snippets that are important to both my career in banking and personal interests outside of work. Most recently, I have learned about XBRL; a financial markup language that promises to make financial reporting more transparent, short term investment strategies in the stockmarket through the users of StockTwits, and what promises to be an excellent Philadelphia meetup hosted by Mashable. In addition, I use the service to meet new friends in the same way I used IRC, BBS systems, IRC, mailing lists, and web forums while growing up.

But thursday morning, I had a very different experience on twitter. I was responding to Colin Ong an Economist out of Singapore who posed a question on leveraging your twitter fanbase to improve ROI.

Colin, who uses cost-benefit analysis to determine effective use of his time, limits how much of that time is spent building his twitter fan base. Based on coversations that we have had, Colin believes that time is expensive based on the formal training that he has and limited (to 168 hours per week). Colin has 2,340 followers which is substantially fewer than internet self-promoters iJustine (436,584), Gary Vaynerchuk (231,828), Robert Scoble (81,410), and Jason Calacanis (65,685). These are users who primarily do business on the internet, and do not have mainstream celebrity status such as Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, or Jimmy Fallon. However, iJustine and Gary Vaynerchuk benefit from being featured users by twitter itself.

Intrigued by Colin’s tweet, I brought the case of Gary Vaynerchuk to his attention.

Gary is an iconoclastic wine retailer and entrepreneur motivator who has leveraged his strong twitter fan base into a seven-figure, ten-book deal. Per TechCrunch:

The wine retailer-turned-video-blogger is cashing in his Internet fame for a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio. That comes to at least $100,000 per book, which is decent for first-time an unproven author, but he is going to have to hustle to keep up the interest for ten books. His first one comes out in September, and is called: Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World.

One thing Vay•ner•chuck has going for him is a built-in audience he cultivated one e-mail at a time, starting with his his popular video wine blog, Wine Library TV. Then he started branching out beyond wine into marketing, motivational speaking, other Web video shows, wine-review site Corkd, and even T-shirt search (because everyone is always looking for a good T-shirt).

What sets Gary apart from other internet business people who receive book deals (including Tara Hunt who was earlier cited), is that he does not maintain a traditional blog. He maintains a video blog with brief synopsises of each video’s content and has over 5,000 twitter updates. Both take inordinate amounts of time and work to maintain, but neither highlight Gary’s ability to pen a series of books. Which is what made his deal a positive outlier in my mind.

However, I didn’t proofread the tweet and said Gary didn’t “read books” instead of Gary didn’t “write books”. If this were any other day, I likely wouldn’t have noticed and the internet would have continued to churn along with no ill effects. But soon my BlackBerry began vibrating to no end. Gary had posted a part-defensive, part-sarcastic response to his followers.

And their responses reminded me that despite the age of the internet, users are quick to flame — or send messages filled with fervor.

I have been using the internet long enough, that electronic barrages such as the one demonstrated above roll off my back with ease. Especially when they are mild and stem from a minor misunderstanding. But with the internet becoming mainstream and users posting under their real names instead of pseudonyms, what happens when someone takes their threats to the next level? If I had engaged in a heated discussion with Gary’s fans, the situation could have escallated into a real-world disaster. In this hypothetical example, a disgruntled fan could attempt to track me down via phone or in person and make physical threats against me. This would generate a huge personal relations disaster for Gary if blogs and mainstream media outlets caught wind of what happened. And because information is readily available on the internet it would be when, and not if, the story was picked up. And I am certain this would have a negative impact on Gary’s self-proclaimed $60 million business.

Keeping Facebook Locked Down

I am a fan of Facebook. This is part nostalgia for the service I joined within hours of it arriving at my alma mater’s campus, and part appreciation for foresight turning it into one of the World’s largest social networks. The strategy was simple; build buzz for a new social network by restricting access, and slowly release those restrictions as the service evolves. In September 2006, Facebook announced two changes that altered the scope of its service.

On September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced two products; the news feed which highlights events within a user’s entire social circle, and the mini-feed which highlights events focusing on any specific user. These two products were created to help users stay current on their friends lives, but have also created a voyeuristic aspect because they automatically post social actions within the service to a users’ profile. These actions include public messages between friends, newly formed social connections, plans to attend events, and the addition of new photos and videos to the service. And on September 26, 2006, Facebook opened its doors to everyone allowing students, parents, grandparents, cousins, and colleagues to connect with each other. This altered Facebook from a niche social network for students to a multifaceted website serving over 120 million global users.

Driving Facebook’s changes was the Company’s long-term monetization plan, using the news feed and mini-feed to push targeted advertising to its users. But broadcasting profile changes and personal actions to unanticipated audiences proved to be problematic. Nearly two months after the launch of news feed and mini-feed, North by Northwestern; an online publication of Northwestern University, wrote an article discussing how the products were changing interpersonal relationships.

One thing I absolutely adore about Facebook is how it has championed subtlety.

It begins nudging your friends two days in advance to wish you a happy birthday. It shows you just how many of your friends are attending that party you weren’t invited to. And when you break up with the love of your college life in the middle of exam week while all your friends are out of town and your beloved dog, Mr. Waggles, just died, Facebook showcases your heartbreak via 37 mini-feed alerts, 26 of which are attached to a broken-heart icon. I believe the other 11 feature Nelson from The Simpsons pointing and laughing.
North by Northwestern - Why you should break up with your Facebook relationship status

The article continues on to cite the Facebook relationship status, and how it muddles the obscure world of collegiate dating. But the concerns outlined in the article transcend to users of all ages. My first lesson when joining the workforce, was the essentiality of protecting my personal brand. In corporate America, the light that your managers, peers and suborniates view you weighs equally in importance with your performance. An errantly posted comment meant to vent frustration with your friends, could generate serious complications in your professional life. A teacher in Charlotte, NC was fired after she commented about the poor economic condition of her school, on what she thought was a private Facebook profile.

A teacher at Thomasboro Elementary School also could face termination after writing on her Facebook page that she was “teaching in the most ghetto school in Charlotte.” The teacher met Monday with Superintendent Peter Gorman, who recommended she be fired.
news-record.com - Charlotte school employee fired over Facebook post

But personal responsibility is only half of the battle. Your friends have the ability to post social actions independent of your own, which may portray you infavorably. One of Facebook’s most popular features is its Photos application, which allows users to upload pictures and connect them to friends who have been photographed. An unsuspecting user may not use the Photos application themself, but a friend may post a candid photo involving alcohol that all those user’s friends see. And as this picture circulates throughout the network, it may be inadvertantly delivered to that user’s boss. A police officer in Washington State was dismissed after images of him dressed in uniform, were intermixed with images of him under the influence of alcohol.

“Everybody’s got their right to privacy, but when there’s an intermixing of images of the state patrol and state patrol cars … with less than professional-type comments, images of drinking or conversations surrounding things that might not be moral, it doesn’t present a good image for the state patrol,” said state patrol Capt. Jeff DeVere.
PoliceOne.com - Two Wash. officers fired over Facebook indiscretions

Examples such as those cited above highlight how important it is for young professionals to be cognizant of their actions and responsibly use Facebook in a post-collegiate environment. To mitigate the risk of Facebook interfering with my professional life, I use the following tools and procedures to limit how the information it shares with my friends.

Friend Lists:
Settings>Privacy Settings>Profile>

Facebook offers its users the ability to assign friends to specific lists, which can be used to limit what information is displayed to your friends. I personally use three lists; a list for family members, a list for friends with whom I am comfortable sharing my social actions with, and a list for my remaining friends with whom I want to minimize my visibility to. The preceding picture shows a sample of my Profile Privacy settings and how I limit what people can see. Low-impact actions are open for everyone including the existence of my profile, basic information and my status updates. While status updates pose the potential to create problems, that can be managed by responsible use. High-impact actions including the display of pictures linked to me that were not taken by me, have been limited to my friends and family.

News Feed and Mini-Feed Actions:
Settings>Privacy Settings>News Feed and Wall

To limit the impact of profile changes, comments made on mine or my friends profiles, and new connections forged on the news feed and mini-feed, I restrict what information Facebook publishes. In my post-collegiate years, the necessity of displaying these actions has waned. Plus, I do not want loose Facebook acquaintences to know if I ended a relationship, commented on pictures of a close-friend’s child or became friends with someone new.

Application Settings:
Settings>Application Settings

Changing the settings for individual Facebook applications combines friend lists and news feed and mini-feed settings, to further tweak how users see your profile. In the preceding picture, I set my preference for how I want Facebook to share newly published notes to my news feed and mini-feed. Because many of my posts on Facebook are imported from this blog, I like having the option to share the action with my friends.

Furthermore, I can limit the number of users that can actively find my posted notes. In the preceding picture, I set my preference to exclude the notes application from my profile and limit viewing of all my notes to my the members of my friends and family.

View Mode:
Settings>Privacy Settings>Profile>See how a friend sees your profile

To ensure that your privacy settings have been properly tweaked, Facebook offers a view mode that allows you to see your profile through another user’s eyes.

In the preceding photo, I show my profile through the eyes of a user who is on my general friend list. The information that this user sees is limited to what I would feel comfortable being broadcast on the general internet.

But above all else, there is no substitute for using prudent judgment when posting to the internet. If you are concerned that what you put on the internet may be misconstrued or used inappropriately, it is best keep it offline.

Microsoft Advertising Campain Evokes Nostalgia; Apple Still Catering to Consumers

Thursday night an old friend and NFC East football foe were watching the Washington Redskins and the New York Giants kick off the 2008 NFL season. We watched the contest at my neighborhood pub, St. Stephen’s Green, where the background conversation overshadowed the match’s in-game commentary. During one of the commercial interruptions I glanced at the screen and noticed comedian Jerry Seinfeld and philanthropist Bill Gates eating churros and trying on shoes. Unable to hear their conversation, the purpose of the commercial puzzled me until the Windows logo briefly flashed at the end of the commercial. Intrigued by two icons I envied during the nineties, I sifted through the internet to discover where Microsoft was heading with their commercials. After watching the advertisement online later that night, I found a conversation started by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch about the advertising campaign in an article titled Microsoft Ads: First Phase To “Engage Consumers, Spark Conversation”. Arrington, and other vocal leaders of the tech web, feel that the commercial was confusing and not funny. Arrington continues to say that the advertisement is“[...]mostly content free, with just one mention of Microsoft near the end. It’s a far cry from the brilliant Microsoft v. mac ads that Apple has run over the years.”

It was the mission for “a computer on every desktop and in every home” that allowed Windows to take its stake as the dominant operating system on home computers. Most of us, including the Apple-biased Michael Arrington, have spent considerable time using Microsoft’s operating systems on IBM-cloned personal computers over the past twenty five years. The new Microsoft campaign will not pit Windows versus OSX, but will nostalgicly remind its customers how Windows has changed their lives over the past two and a half decades. As Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group at Microsoft states, “The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity.”

I personally found the commercial to be filled with Jerry Seinfeld’s signature observational comedy with a hint of subtle humor. I find it particularly humorus that Bill Gates; one of the world’s wealthiest men, is shopping in a discount shoe store. It goes against our perception of the world elite who have staffs to handle such menial tasks, but here is Bill Gates being fit for new shoes in a store where he has been a long-time loyal customer. In addition, the use of Gates’ signature mugshot as the picture for his Shoe Circus Clown Club membership card is absolutely priceless. This demonstrates the humility that is Bill Gates.

On the contrary, I feel that Apple’s advertising campaign showcases their consumer-focused products and encourages their loyal fanbase to purchase each new-generation iPod, iPhone and iMac as they are updated. These commercials cater to a distinct subset of the American consumer that watch frequent Steve Jobs keynote addresses and read the weblog of a self-proclaimed “member of the cult of iPhone”. It is Arrington’s right to be biased towards one product over another, but it impedes his objective judgment on Apple’s advertising campaign. As one of Arrington’s readers, @TCCritic states;

The Apple ads are funny but they don’t appeal to the masses. They create lots of noise but they by now alienate people more than anything else. They’re about being sophisticated and “better” than someone else. But the average person in Ohio or Texas doesn’t necessarily want to be walking around with a hip iPhone. He or she is probably closer to the PC boy and hates the fact that like in high-school, they’re referred to as nerds. Most people don’t want to feel that they’re better than other people but that’s all that the Apple ads are about. Funny enough, Apple Macs are primarily used by geeks who want to think they’re not geeks. So Apple comes around and tells them, you’re not geeks, you’re cool. And then they buy a Mac or an iPhone.

Apple’s advertising campaign works tremendously well when the economy is booming because there are a higher percentage of consumers with disposable income to buy new hardware every six months. But rising energy costs and an economic hangover from last year’s subprime mortgage fallout, has lead to unemplyment exceeding 6.1% and the percentage of consumers who have disposable income to spend on flashy Apple hardware is diminishing. Those hardest hit by our current economic state are suburban and rural Americans who fled dense urban areas in the 1970s because of rising crime rates, desegregation, and the near-completion of an interstate highway system that funneled homeowners to cheap and abundant housing. Left without the benefit of dense housing patterns, high concentration of jobs and well-developed public transportation systems, these Americans are at an exponentially higher risk of limited disposable income due to rising energy prices than their fellow Americans living on the East and West coasts. And when these Americans have to stretch already limited funds to feed and furnish their families, it is unlikely that he will rush to purchased the Apple-du-jour.

Only time will tell if the new Windows advertising campaign will succeed or fail but I am enouraged to see how well Bill Gates has mind-melded his magnum Jupiter brain into those other Saturn-ring brains at Microsoft.

Mint Misses on Data Privacy Protection

My marketing and technology infrastructure advisor, Roman, recently sent me an e-mail inviting me to try Mint. For those who may be unfamiliar, Mint is a personal finance management application available free on the internet. Mint allows its customers to centralize their banking, savings, credit card, and brokerage accounts to get a snapshot of where and how they are spending their money. And one of Mint’s most discussed features is that the application will search those transactions, and provide its customers with opportunities to reduce credit card interest rates and improve savings account interest rates.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Mint goes way beyond just reporting and budget tracking. Using a patent-pending search algorithm, Mint constantly searches through thousands of offers from hundreds of providers to find the best deals on everything from bank accounts to credit cards; cable, phone and Internet plans; and more. Mint’s suggestions are “unique to you” based on your individual spending patterns. For example, if you have $20,000 in a bank account that’s earning no interest, Mint might recommend a high interest rate savings account from ING or HSBC. Acting on that suggestion would give you an extra $900 in interest income over a year.
Mint.com - About Us

I originally tested Mint while it was in private beta, and while I liked its sleek interface, I was concerned about identity fraud risk from how it calculates opportunities to improve its customers’ interest rates. The application searches its customers’ financial transactions and uses that data to offer services from its partner organizations. To address these concerns, CEO Aaron Patzer states:

I’ll make a bold statement: You’re safer on Mint then with online banking. On Mint, you’re completely anonymous. We never ask for a name, address, or SSN - just an email. We know about your finances…but not about you. We’re also independently verified by Verisign, TrustE, and several outside agencies.
Aaron Patzer
Founder & CEO, Mint.com

What Patzer has not addressed is how a company operating for less than three years; Mint was founded in November 2005, can provide its customers with more security than long-standing financial institutions that have substantial risk management procedures in place. Personal financial data is extremely sensitive which is why financial institutions go to great lengths to keep it protected. Data security within a financial institution starts with website encryption, continues with intricate password management, and finishes with barring employees from accessing personal e-mail websites and social networking websites from behind the corporate firewall. This mitigates the risk that employees will inadvertantly disclose sensitive customer data. Additionally, financial institutions are regulated by a number of Federal and State regulatory agencies to ensure that they are maintaining sound data privacy procedures.

The U.S also has one of the most highly regulated banking environments in the world; however, many of the regulations are not safety and soundness related, but are instead focused on privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, anti-usury lending, and promoting lending to lower-income segments. Even individual cities enact their own financial regulation laws (for example, for usury lending).
Wikipedia - Bank Regulation

In my humble opinion, it would be irresponsible to trust personal financial data to a company that does not follow the same data privacy precautions.

Facebook denies Google access to its customers’ identities.

Article courtesy of my friend Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

More details on Facebook’s banning of Google Friend Connect from the Facebook API earlier today. I spoke with Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer about the banning to get a fuller picture of the conflict.

Here’s an example of how Friend Connect (more details) works in practice. A third party site may want to add social elements to their service. They can integrate with Friend connect and allow users to sign in. Those users choose a social network where they keep their profile (Orkut, Hi5, GTalk and, until today, Facebook) and log in via the social network’s API. They then become “members” of the site, using Google’s terminology. If any of their friends from their social network also become members of that site, those friends are shown on the site and you can interact with them. To see it for yourself, click “log in” at the top of this sample site, IngridMichaelson.

Facebook has taken the proper stance to maintain its $15 billion valuation by limiting access to its customers’ identities on third-party websites. Facebook aspires to be the social network where customers can broadcast their true identity, and that requires a level of trust between Facebook and its customers. To gain this trust, Facebook allows its customers excellent control over which other users can view their Facebook profile, and how much of the Facebook profile is visible to those users. Facebook continues to earn the trust of its customers; evidenced by its heavy usage, and it would be irresponsible of the Company to allow third-party websites access to its customers’ identities.

Bankbook

Just more than one (1) year ago I joined Cambrian House, an idea-sharing web community based in Calgary Canada. Today I read on TechCrunch that Cambrian House has been purchased by established venture capital firm Spencer Trask, who will undoubtedly attempt to develop several of Cambrian Houses seven thousand (7,000) ideas. I only had the gall to post one (1) idea to the community, and want to share it with my readers prior to Spencer Trask dimming the lights at Cambrian House.

My idea is to come up with a marketplace where customers can submit their proposals, budget for the project, income statements / balance sheets, tax returns and personal financial statements of the borrower, and other pertinent information; then put the project out to bid. My thought is that a risk rating can be developed from this data.

The bidders on the projects can be individuals or financial institutions and would work similar to Prosper. Revenue can be generated by advertising as well as charging a fee to the financial institutions for using the service.

As always, comments are encouraged.

twitter + netvibes

Twitter is a a mini blogging tool that asks one question: What are you doing? The service allows you to follow users or be followed. Posts are short; 140 characters to be exact, and can be sent or received through the web, standalone programs such as Twitterific, text message, or the AIM instant messaging client. The service has been used in a number of manners including posting articles, documenting trips / events, and letting your friends in the area know where you are.

Netvibes was introduced to me one weekend by my friend Brad Levinson, and offers its users the ability to cater the web to their needs through RSS feeds. Content pages are organized by tabs and the pages are customizable from one to four columns.

And here are three (3) examples of how I use the two web applications together.

Customer Service in the Information Age

In his post, Why I say I’m a Blogger, Dave Winer follows up his Comcast diatribe from a few days earlier, with a subdued explanation of how he expects blogs to change how corporations interact with their customers. In the former post Winer states:

One of the reasons I believe in blogging is that it can reform business, giving power to the users, where we were powerless before. If I didn’t have a blog what could I have done to get Comcast to pay attention? Tell my friends and relatives? Sure, they know that isn’t very powerful. But when any customer could also be a publisher, well that does change things. This new power to publish can help us all get a better deal.

Most companies have left the sheltered view that business needs to be done on their terms, and will adapt certain policies and procedures to ease customers’ concerns. Companies whose framework depends on customer feedback to alter their future strategies will certainly take into account what is being discussed on the blogs, but they will also scour other online sources known for their customer feedback including but not limited to feedback forms at their official website, discussion threads within the webforum community, and product reviews at online retailing giant Amazon.com. Additionally, these companies will continue to take advantage of offline sources of feedback such as letters, phone calls, and faxes. Regardless of the medium that the feedback is generated, customers should understand that the process can be reversed when Companies feel that the limits of their product(s) and/or service(s) are intentionally being challenged.

When Winer’s original complaint about Comcast was circulating throughout twitter, I asked him if bandwidth could possibly be a scarce resource and his response alluded to him not necessarily knowing the answer. But Winer is not alone. Over the past six (6) months I have discussed the subject of bandwidth limitations with a number of my undergraduate colleagues from Drexel University, a Philadelphia University that favors science, technology, and innovation. My colleagues; whose concentrations varied from computer science to information systems, could explain in great detail the technicalities of how the internet works but were unable to provide me with a concrete answer on whether or not bandwidth is a scarce resource. According to Green Living Online’s article Greening the Internet, bandwidth is a scarce resource due to the sheer energy usage required to keep it running. The article states:

The Internet keeps us connected, helps us share information and reduces travel time. But it also has a big carbon footprint. It is estimated that globally it takes about 868 billion kWh of electricity per year to power. That’s a whopping 14 power plants worth of energy and about three percent of all the energy consumption in the USA, which adds up to a lot of energy and a lot of CO2 emissions.

Winer’s topic is just one conversation in this tangled web of how customers and companies are interacting with each other. On what feels to be a separate planet from the blogs and twitter, are the automotive webforums which is where I was introduced to the concept of blogging nearly ten (10) years ago. One of the hot topics from when I owned a car that is still discussed today, is automotive dealerships and insurance companies going to drag strips to catch pictures of their customers’ cars being used for non-street purposes. In a recent post at automotive webforum Myspecv.com, Moderator Kevin (RedDragonV09) puts out a WARNING To Warranty and Insurance Policy Holders Going to the Track!

A few weeks went by and my friend calls me all pissed off. He says to me, “Dude, you were right! The [CENSORED] dealership sent me a letter telling my that they are voiding my entire drivetrain’s [CENSORED] warranty! And they got [CENSORED] pictures too man! My car is going down the track in this one!” I know that this happens, but honestly I was surprised that it actually happened. I was kind of sickened to hear this news. But no where near as sickened as my friend was. He was so [CENSORED] furious.

And to think that was the end of it. 2 days later, he got another letter from his insurance company, which was Geico, the same insurance company I used back then. They canceled his policy. He had to go to another company and get another policy almost immediatly because the next day his bank that financed his car called him and said that they were notified that the car did not currently have insurance and that they needed him to insure it and to have a copy of the policy faxed to them as soon as its insured or they will repossess the car if he doesnt comply in 30 days.

So, as a warning to all of you that go to the drag strip. If you have a warranty and would like to keep it, or if you just have an insurance policy and dont want to be caught on the track, take the 5 minutes to remove them before you go down the track and the 5 minutes to put them back on. And cover your VIN while youre at it.

And just because youve been to the track many times and youve never gotten the letter, doesnt mean it cant happen to you. I found this out on a local Nissan forum in Washington where a guy had went to Pacific Raceways in his new 350Z and they voided his warranty this way. His insurance didnt get canceled, but he warranty was GONE!

Personally, I feel that drag strips provide a regulated environment for drivers to test their vehicles off of public roads, but understand that it is the right of the automotive dealerships to cancel warranty coverage on vehicles that have been used outside of the scope of normal use. Tying back to Dave Winer’s issue with Comcast, it can be debated that he was using Comcast outside of its intended use. As he states in this post, Winer uses more bandwidth than the average internet user:

I figured out why I use so much more bandwidth than the average Internet user. I have five computers, all Macs, all sucking down FlickrFan pictures once an hour. That adds up to quite a few gigs. It would be easy to cut back. Not sure I will though, cause I hate to be lectured and threatened by companies I pay $180 per month to.

which is further backed up by this photo:

In one corner, you have a customer knowingly using a great amount of bandwidth and in the other corner a company that is sensitive about how customers use its bandwidth due to the regulatory and environmental risks they face from such usage. I will digress the question of who is “right” in this case to the myriad of conversations floating around on twitter. But to those individuals that are looking for more open and honest communication with companies, caveat emptor.