Articles

By Stefan Sojka

Lately I have become fascinated with three things:

1. The recent discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting stars in our galaxy ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet )

2. Advances in understanding of life on the microscopic scale.  Watch this ( multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife.html ) and prepare to freak out when you realise this is going on inside you in 100 trillion different locations

3. Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project – an attempt to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain                        ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3wMC2BpxU )

I guess I am quite fortunate to be a member of the only species on earth capable of even beginning to comprehend the nature of the universe and to wonder about my place in it.

Here we sit, on the wafer thin surface of a tiny planet, after 4 billion years of evolution, where cellular life forms have tried and tried again to self-organise into the best co-operative self-perpetuating civilizations they can – without a brain between them.  Now our planet owns trillions of brains, including 6 billion big enough to organise the civilization we live in today.  Great apes, aping the same net­working capacity on a global scale that our cells have been using microscopically for eons.

Yet sometimes we seem so dumb.  We struggle in relationships, battle with each other and worry ourselves sick.  When are we going to ‘get it’?

If you ask me, it is when we finally surrender to the process.  Life got us to where we are, so it’s time we started living.  Whatever I am doing, wherever I find myself within society’s matrix, I really have no other choice but to try to be the best ‘me’ I can be.

As I take stock of the year that was and get set for the next orbit around the sun, it’s time for this revolution’s resolutions.  I am going to honour and obey my cellular civilization and I am going to maximise my contribution to human civilization.  In other words, I am going to be healthy and do good work.

And if you aren’t going to do the same, then get out of the way.  I am going to start choosing my clients, rather than letting them choose me.  If they aren’t operating at least on the same level as I do, ethically, I’m not going to let them drag me down.  I’m pursuing perpetual promotion.  Onwards and upwards.  Evolution and creation.  I’m stepping up and stepping out.  I’m not going to let evolution’s efforts to get me here be in vain and I sure don’t want to find out that there are civilizations living on those exoplanets more advanced than ours.  Aren’t we supposed to be a competitive race?

We’d better start working as a team.  In 2010, let’s all lift our game, raise our standards and spend each day on our human scale, using our microscopic inheritance to fulfill our cosmic calling.

In a galaxy, 4 billion light years from here, beings just like us might be observing an exoplanet we call ‘Earth’ preparing to come alive.  Closer to home, inside my own head, I can imagine this scenario …and feel pretty glad to be here.

By Stefan Sojka

As much as we can’t imagine life without computers now, for the entire history of humankind, up until the computer, one could hardly imagine life with one.  Everyone just got on with it.  Sydney Harbour Bridge was constructed with pencils and paper, slide rules and the occasional abacus.  The entire workforce was managed with ledgers, index cards and rubber stamps.  Workers were paid by cash and perhaps some of the bigger transactions were done with hand-written promissory notes.  Though typewriters and telephones were in use, most communication was surely face-to-face, or scrawled with fountain pens.

What’s my point?  That somehow everything still worked.  Huge projects, like hydro-electric schemes, subway systems and even the Opera House, with all its curvy complexity, were completed well before anyone “needed” a computer to get anything done.  Systems and networks existed, such as information and project management.  Most importantly; humans interacted with other humans, agreed, shook hands, signed contracts and made it happen.

We are being mesmerised into thinking that somehow it is only since the birth of ‘Web 2.0’ that we have had the ability to socially network.  We forget that before FaceBook, we had a little black book.  While computers and the Internet have certainly facilitated and amplified net­working to unfathomable scales, most real business is done in person.  Politicians might all use Blackberries and iPhones, but they haven’t moth-balled the two houses of parliament just yet.  Most offices still have board rooms.  Trade shows and Expos seem to be experiencing a boom right now.  Computers do make them far more efficient to organise, while at the same time, people are realising how awesome they are at generating new business and engaging with our peers.

Off-line net­working is one of my most valuable assets as a business.  Sure, I want to tip all my contacts into my email list, and refer people to my Website at any available opportunity, but I would be missing out on a huge opportunity if I didn’t work my real-world life as much as possible.

I joined my local Chamber of Commerce and my local Rotary Club.  I attend many business events, Expos, functions and launches.  Recently I joined a chapter of BNI, a hugely successful global network of business owners existing for the sole purpose of promoting word-of-mouth marketing.  Even though my business is very much focused on the Internet, I still like to meet my clients in person and work predominantly with in-house staff.  I am a people person.  Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to engage face-to-face – at least until virtual reality evolves sufficiently into fooling my senses that I am in the same room as you – and that is still quite a long way off.

If I can work the world just like our forefathers did, then enhance all those engagements with Web technology, like collaboration tools, Web-based communication and marketing, I’ll be unstoppable.

By Stefan Sojka

I’m trying to work out exactly when the amount of information in my life permanently exceeded my capacity to ever realistically deal with it  It was probably some time in the 80s, when my discipline for cataloguing my cassette tapes slipped.  Not long after, I got my first computer and the 3.5” floppy discs started filling up shoeboxes.  Now, I have 9 computers, 12 terabytes of internal hard drives, thumb drives, pocket drives, Memory sticks, iPods, MiniDVs, SD cards, MiniDiscs, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs – not to mention the filing cabinets stuffed with printed, flattened wood pulp and shelves full of half-read books, magazines and newsletters.

In January, I thought I would take two weeks to re-organise and re-name everything in “My Documents” in a New Year resolution attempt to stem the relentless eruption of data enveloping my rapidly unraveling existence.  I found 200,000 files!  I got through the first three folders (all beginning with ‘A’) before my two weeks was up.  I hadn’t even started on my email file, with 20,000 email addresses submerged within, the 3,000-plus Websites I bookmarked, hoping to visit them again or the instruction manuals for all the software I told myself I was going to master.

Biological evolution didn’t really see this coming – otherwise we would have evolved brains that could instantly expand and re-format in response to this information explosion, an elastic skull and cells that can retain our lifestyle data as efficiently and accurately as they retain our DNA.  The reality is we are only marginally smarter than orangutans.  While we haven’t changed much biologically for many thousands of years, our networks, civilizations, institutions and technologies have overpowered our individual mind’s capacity to cope.  We are drowning in our own life-stream.

All this social net­working hasn’t helped.  No Flickr account is going to store every photograph I own.  No YouTube channel could ever collate, manage and stream the thousands of hours of video in my possession.  No FaceBook page is going to organise and manage every person I have ever had anything to do with.  All these sites have done is added to my password collection and created more folders on my computer full of the files I wish I had the bandwidth to upload.  If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would deduce that social net­working sites have been promoted precisely so as to increase my inability to do anything about anything, snowed under as I already was before I signed up.  How can I affect change in the world when I can’t even get around to re-naming DSC128769.jpg to something meaningful?

Maybe it’s time to evolve in a different way – to a state of acceptance.  Give up hope of ever sorting it out.  Get ruthless and start deleting.  Reduce the torrent to a gentle stream, make a nice little list of the things to sort out that will truly make a difference in my life and work on that.  Let the rest just float on by.  It’s cassette cataloguing time!

By Stefan Sojka

I might be giving away my age here, but my very first record (that’s the 33 R.P.M., 12-inch, black vinyl kind, with a hole punched in the middle, then inserted into a plastic sheath and a printed cardboard sleeve, that you listen to by scraping a diamond across it) was Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s “Monster Mash” – a devilishly funny (to a 10-year-old) combination of old horror movie themes and 50s rock and roll.  It was my first encounter with a ‘mash’.

It seems we are predisposed to enjoying serendipitous contradiction – from the early baroque musical concepts of counterpoint and fugue to the hip-hop sampling of collections of sounds into new musical forms – our brains love to be stimulated by the unexpected, anachronistic, counter-intuitive, oxymoronic, incongruous outpourings of those among us who see the world differently.  It’s an analogy to life itself – take two sets of genetic code, twist them together in a unique new combination and out pops the next generation.  What is the act of procreation, if not the ultimate mash-up?

I’ve spent the past week giggling uncontrollably over www.stsanders.com catalogue of ‘shreds’, where the masher finds musicians who take themselves way too seriously and over-dubs horrendously bad playing that fits perfectly to the original clips.  If I type “mash-ups” into YouTube search, the next couple of decades could disappear before I get through the results.

The mash-up has grown up.  It is the future of human creative expression, but it is also – when applied to science, politics, medicine, or any other discipline – the future of everything.  Biologists are mashing with physicists, cosmologists with chemists.  The universe is our chemistry set and when we mix the right elements, things explode.

Perhaps the big bang was a result of some 9th dimensional mash-up artist collective combining a few random theories to ‘see what would happen’.  “Oops!  Oh look, a universe! …Damn, we can’t touch it now – let’s just watch what happens for the next 13.7 billion years...”

The more you think about it, the more mashed-up this world is.  Dog breeds, drive-throughs, Velcro, sporks, camera-phones, Hapkido, English… we are the result of a few millennia of mashes and it can’t stop now.  So, what can we do?  Like any good mash-up artist, we have to see everything as potential mash material.  Thai food in pocket bread.  Hotel rooms on trains.  Pool cleaners with marriage counseling qualifications.  Retirement village pre-school daycare facilities.  What can you think of?  Perhaps there is a brilliant business idea one mash away from you and one of your clients.

If your ambitions are more humble, how about organising a karaoke party for your friends where everyone has to sing different lyrics to the backing track?  If nothing else, you’ll have a few laughs.  In a world that seems to be taking itself a little too seriously, this could be the perfect remedy.

For a broad history and catalogue of mash-ups, try the ultimate knowledge mash, Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (video), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (music), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (web_application_hybrid).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-disciplinary

By Stefan Sojka

I sometimes wonder exactly what happens when I perform a single mouse click.  The camera in my optical mouse snaps 1,000 frames-a-second of my desk surface, the integrated circuit algorithm translates the difference between each frame into ones and zeros, specifying the mouse’s position and detecting the click on the injection-moulded button, triggered by pressure from my DNA-moulded finger.  The blue-tooth wireless communication protocol transmits that information to the USB receiver, and heaven knows how many processes and protocols are involved inside my computer, the pixel rendering in the graphics card and the execution of the code inside my browser to perform the action – in this case, a ‘one-click’ online purchase.

A binary burst zips from chip to chip, back out into the air and into my wireless modem, down the copper wire of my phone line, and on its way via an incalculable number of routers, switches and servers.  At every stage, the electronic Morse-code triggers the creation of system administration log files, registers bandwidth usage onto ISP accounts and careers on its way to the Web server upon which the page I clicked is hosted.  Then the fun starts!  My click executes the server-side script to send off my encrypted credit card details to a payment gateway, which in turn talks to my bank and the merchant bank’s computers.  A whole bunch more logs are created, accounts topped up and depleted, receipts and confirmation emails ‘automagically’ written and triggered, orders confirmed, processed and goods dispatched.

One click!

My digital life exists on the sea spray atop the crests of waves, surfing an unfathomable ocean of highly evolved science and technology I never see and barely comprehend.  Yet I expect it all to work perfectly.  If that click doesn’t do what it is supposed to, I react like a two-year-old who has let go of my helium balloon and watched helplessly as it ascends to the heavens.

Technology is phenomenally awesome, but it is a rather tenuous proposition.  As it matures, I need to mature as well and begin to comprehend both the complexity – and the limitations.  When my Website has a glitch, when an email doesn’t get through, when I can’t log on somewhere, when a file won’t open… before I begin pouting and stomping my feet, I need to count to a trillion, chill out and find forgiveness in my heart for all the poor tech-heads who run all this stuff.

From the Web developer to the hosting provider, ISP, computer technician and who knows who else is roped into the supply chain (the submarine cable maintenance crew?), everyone is under pressure to keep this thing switched on and humming.  They are also expected to improve it exponentially every two to three weeks.  Faster!  Easier!  More colour!  More movement!  More bells!  Louder whistles!  This month I pause and reflect on how fortunate I am to live in these times.  I marvel at the sheer magnificence of the ‘click’ and cut anyone involved in delivering that click a truckload of slack. :-)

By Stefan Sojka

It’s not as difficult as you might think to become an Internet superstar.  The Web is engineered precisely to facilitate such phenomena as FaceBook, YouTube and the ‘Evolution of Dance’ dude.  In this simple how-to guide, I’ll show you how it’s done.  The key is to be everywhere and do everything.  In a networked world, the one with the most nodes wins!

Remember Neo, in the Matrix?  Remember how he/you felt when he/you realised he/you were the one?  “That’s right”, grinned Morpheus.  This is your ‘I know Kung Fu’ moment.  You are the Internet, and the Internet is you.  Your DNA is the meme.  You’re unique, just like everybody else.

Have Geek Will Travel
You will need your own personal nerd.  The Web, for all its point-and-click convenience, is a ridiculously complex environment.  He/she will configure your server cloud, sync your mobile devices with your laptop and ensure your Websites are cross-browser compatible, fluid, elastic and WC3 compliant.

Arsenal
Rule-of-thumb:  If it was reviewed on Wired, TechCrunch or EnGadget, buy it.  Essentials include an HD video camera, podcasting microphone, iPhone, digital pen, electric car, pocket laser projector, Adobe Everything and a DJ console, so you can guest DJ at all your own launches and seminars.

Go Viral
The best way to permeate cyberspace is by infecting it.  I don’t care whether you wipe out on a skateboard or David Hassel-scoff a hamburger, what’s important is that the video is a calculated strategic element in your self-replicating pandemic.

Blog
Blog long.  Blog often.  With 112 million blogs, you do have to work hard.  Strategy is everything.  Post comments on the top 100 blogs with witty retorts and demoralising put-downs, always linking back to your own Blog.  Fear not, once the momentum of all your other activities kicks in, your archived ramblings will re-surface like the creature from the black lagoon.

Social Butterfly
Two mantras:  1. “Add Me” 2. “Thanks for the Add”.  Set targets – say 5,000 per day, per site.  Here is your starting point:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_net­working_websites.  Nurture every friendship, acknowledge everyone’s feelings and compliment their every photo upload.  This is your fan-base.  You are a one of their's.  It’s a 200-million-way street.  Drive it.

Authority
You are now an Internet marketing genius.  It’s time to share your knowledge.  www.squidoo.com makes it easy to build a soapbox and begin proselytising.  When you have posted enough material, go to www.lulu.com and self-publish your how-to book.

Life Stream
Upload your entire life to the Internet – and tag everything.  Quantity, not quality.  If you upload enough old photos, school reports, love letters and phone disconnection notices, you will come up on page one in Google for everything.

We live in a paradoxical universe.  Ubiquity is singularity.  If you are everywhere, you will be in one place – at the top!  ‘X’ marks the spot and you have the X-factor.  ‘Me, Star Wars Kid’, you ‘FailWhale’.  See you at the end – and on the cover – of 'Time'.

By Stefan Sojka

We all know the Internet is an excellent place to promote our business, read the news, do our banking, trade shares, make travel arrangements, upload baby photos, catch up with old school friends, steal music, watch porn and laugh at kittens — but how often do we stop and wonder whether the Web might actually be useful for something a little more beneficial to everyone, not just ourselves?

I have to admit that after a lifetime of being marketed to, I am as self-absorbed and hedonistic as anyone else in this post-modern, super-capitalistic world we live in.  But something lurking in the deeper recesses of my conscience had me yearning for a higher purpose, seeking to contribute to the common good, not just my primal urges.  Perhaps an even deeper primal urge had begun to surface – an urge to share, to co-operate, to work towards the improvement of this poor planet’s well-being and the well-being of every living thing on it.

I can hear the cynics among you saying “How selfish is that?  Of course, if you help the world, you are really benefiting yourself in the end.”  Marketing people take note of this elegant paradox.  Working toward the common good is, well, good.  Enter the new networked world of ideas.

The Internet is the perfect place to spread ideas.  Whether it is an opinion, a way of seeing things or some highly complex scientific breakthrough, the idea explodes through the Web like it does in our own mind.  Right now we need ideas more than ever – so praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster that memes, movements and methodologies are permeating every corner of cyberspace.

www.globalideasbank.org – pre-dates the Internet, but since launching on-line in 1995 has collected over 4,000 ideas.  Anything from ‘seed embedded fertilizer paper’ to ‘training barbers in the early detection of melanomas’, GIB is our planet’s suggestion box, and you are invited to pitch in.  Social enterprise is on the rise – get in on the ground floor.

www.openarchitecturenetwork.org – taking file sharing to the next level, architects are now uploading and making building plans available to the third world.  With a focus on affordability, sustainability and helping local communities, this excellent resource provides direct access to the world’s best architects to the world's remotest villages.  Ideas are literally popping up everywhere in the form of houses, schools, hospitals and community centres.

www.worldchanging.com – the domain name says it all really.  From political ideas to alternative power generation, this site is devoted to making a real difference.  Their philosophy is that most of the ideas already exist, it is just a matter of getting them going.  Sign up, print out a few pages, and march down to your local council right now.

www.bigthink.com – ‘We are what you think’ – This is like YouTube with a brain.  No 'LonelyGirl15' around here.  Experts and opinion leaders expound their viewpoints on all manner of topics.

www.longnow.org – 10,000 years is a long time…or is it?  Some of the Internet’s big guns – Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and a bunch of others are building a 10,000-year clock, and re-configuring our human time-scale.  After all, we are all going to be someone’s ancestors, we may as well get used to it and start thinking about how we might be remembered.  Were we the ones who consumed ourselves into oblivion, or created ourselves into utopia?

www.ted.com – This famed festival of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ provides an endless stream of amazing ideas, breakthroughs, perspectives and inspiration.  There is a huge library of past presentations, from bio-mimicry to cosmology, computer origami to alternative energy, with a few comedy and musical presentations thrown in.  This is one of my favourite sites, and I am desperately squeezing my creative juices to come up with my own TED talk.  So far all I can come up with is a rather droll exploration of the delicate interplay between magazine deadlines, writing quality and editor wrath.

Any better ideas?

‘til next month…

By Stefan Sojka

The on-line diary, or ‘Weblog’ was once a quaint little means of posting musings and opinions onto the Internet.  Now look what has happened – the burgeoning ‘blogosphere’ is bloated with well over 100 million blogs, with some of them worth millions of dollars.  Blogging has become serious business.

It is nothing short of a media explosion, with some blogs trumping mainstream media as the go-to source for news, information, entertainment and opinion.  With an entry level of zero dollars, immediacy hitherto impossible and a potential global audience of billions, blog sites are perfect launch pads for anyone wanting to participate in the global conversation.

In reality, the Super Blogs are more like traditional media outlets – with teams of contributors, marketing departments, researchers and technical staff bringing it all together.  One needs an HR army to keep the content flowing at such a torrential rate to hold the oh-so-fickle and easily distracted Web surfer.  The world’s biggest current affairs blog, www.huffingtonpost.com even calls itself an ‘on-line newspaper’.

That doesn’t mean you can’t start from humble beginnings and go a long way on the power of one.  www.joelonsoftware.com is essentially a one-man-show, banging out an endless stream of articles to a large and dedicated following of tech-heads.  www.freelanceswitch.com began as a spin-off from local entrepreneur Collis Ta’eed’s personal blog, and has now spawned a veritable suite of blogs, tutorials and on-line marketplaces.  His e-book “How To Be A Rockstar Wordpress Designer” is an excellent primer, if you feel the urge to follow in his footsteps and blog your way to fame and fortune.

To get a complete overview of the super blog megascape, start with technorati.com.  It keeps a regular tab on the biggest and most popular blogs, as well as providing profiles, reports, reviews and instruction in the art of blogging.

Everything under the sun is being blogged.  It’s a surfer’s paradise.  Technology?  www.arstechnica.com, www.engadget.com, www.techcrunch.com.  Business?  sethgodin.typepad.com, www.bloggingstocks.com.  Humour?  www.icanhascheezburger.com

The best thing about any blog, large or small, is the two-way conversation it facilitates – readers get to post their own comments right there on the page.  Sure, it might seem a little futile, trying to be heard amongst such a cacophony of ‘buzz’, but somehow our opinions and ideas begin resonating and harmonising into a chorus.  The best ideas win out.  The dubious ones are decimated with wit and brute force.

If I can give any advice about blogs and super blogs this month, it is to get amongst them.  Participate.  Put a blog on your own Website – or find someone to help you.  Express whatever thoughts you might have until you get really good at it.  Find like-minded people and support them.  In the end the entire Internet is one Brobdingnagian blog.  In these rather volatile times, such a massive exchange of ideas could be our only hope.  Blog on!

By Stefan Sojka

We humans have relatively big brains, but in an age of information overload they are proving to be rather inadequate.  In fact, they’ve probably been inadequate since we left our jungle enclaves and moved to the city.  The infrastructures, their effects and the means of changing those effects has, since the birth of ‘democracy’ and the creation of the viaduct, been completely out of the general public’s realm of understanding.  We let politicians and their tycoon buddies kid us that if we put a tick on a piece of paper and stuff it into a box once every three or four years, they would take care of everything.  Our minds simply couldn’t grasp the enormity of national and global systems, so we gave up.

Now it’s time to wake up.  Our overlords are as incapable as anyone else to fathom the machinations of our reality – after all, they are only human too.  Enter data visualisation!

Finally (and not a moment too soon), we have a new way of seeing.  Amidst the explosion of information, little people with tiny minds, about the size of our own, have created the tools to understand it.  We can now see information – and we can ‘get’ it.  This new perspective is at first stunning, a little mind blowing, and ultimately empowering.  Once we can visualise what is going on, we can change it.  No longer is anything out of sight and out of mind.
www.visualcomplexity.com proves that perhaps we have actually evolved to grasp information in such a way – since it truly is beautiful.  These images connect the dots of our understanding.  I keep returning here to gaze upon these amazing images that help form my version of reality.
You can’t go past Google Earth and in particular Google Earth Outreach – earth.google.com/outreach/showcase.html – to get a grip on what is happening on this ‘pale blue dot’ we call home. It’s sobering – and impossible to ignore, once you’ve seen it.
Much has been done to map the Internet itself, the ultimate beast of complexity.  Go to images.google.com and search “internet map” – cool…
www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches is a large and well-chosen collection of awesome data visualisation samples and resources.  Just following the links on this page will open up your Pandora’s box of wonder.
www.wefeelfine.org focuses on human emotion on a global scale.  Empathy abounds.  Co-creator, Jonathan Harris – www.number27.org – has a seemingly limitless imagination for ways to portray information – single-handedly creating a new art form which mashes up computer science, anthropology, visual art and story-telling.

Now we can see what is going on with our ‘global eyes’, it’s time to engineer the next logical step – real-time data visualisation activism.  Watch it, click it, and watch it change.  A Web 3.0 upgrade, perhaps?  We’ll see…

Hack College
http://www.hackcollege.com/

An interesting initiative to orient students to the new world of open source computing, communication and learning… From their website:

'Lectures are boring and inefficient. Long hours spent studying hand-written notes is very 1994. Anyone graduating today needs to know not how to operate a computer, but when. The fault is both with the students and the teachers. HackCollege is changing education. HackCollege is educating the students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of “Students 2.0.” If we can change the way 1 percent of college students and faculty in the world view education and technology, we’ve done our job.'

By Stefan Sojka

As business owners and consumers, we’ve all been on both sides of the complaints discourse – the complainer and the complained about.  While I shudder at the thought of receiving a complaint, I know it’s the most valuable thing my business can receive.  Bring it on.  When it comes to making complaints, I’m not exactly in the ‘grumpy old man’ category – yet – but I certainly don’t hesitate to provide feedback if I think it will lead to my service provider making real improvements.

Thanks to the Web, the whole customer feedback loop is now in hyperdrive.  Word of mouse.  Disgruntled customers don’t just tell their friends, they tell the whole world.  Get used to it.  Be proactive and ask your customers for complaints so you can address them before one of them has a chance to set up www.yourbusinesssucks.com .  The Net is no place to hide from your shortcomings.

What started about 10 years ago with a few enterprising netizens using Web pages to get even with companies who did them wrong, is now a global consumer activist movement.  Consumers are empowered, businesses are held to account.  www.thesqueakywheel.com has a proven strategy of listing complaints and automatically emailing the company every time someone views the complaints page.  Naturally they have a very high success rate!  www.ripoffreport.com is another great site, as is www.complaints.com.

www.notgoodenough.org is home-grown and has a 54,000-strong membership base, actively discussing, reviewing and advising business and consumers on customer service.  If you end up on the ‘gripes’ list, all is not lost – just be sure to do something about it.

Choice www.choice.com.au has evolved fabulously from its print roots to become a formidable force.  A founding member of Consumers International way back in 1960 – www.consumersinternational.org – Choice is involved at every level, sitting on an incredible selection of boards and committees, promoting best practice, standards compliance, service and quality.  Of course the Choice Website has plenty of scope for user interaction, including nominating yourself for election to the board.

Customer complaints and comments can show up anywhere online, it’s scary.  You never know who is saying what and how deep any feelings run until you take a good hard Google at yourself.  Deep in a discussion board about ISPs and broadband has sprung up a thread about the pros and cons of BarterCard – forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/731669.html with a couple of hundred posts and many thousands of views.  This kind of stuff is happening everywhere about every business.  All the corporate marketing in the world can’t erase these opinions – it pays to find them and heed them.

Another Aussie site www.complaintline.com.au has a cool motto – “To complain is human… to get results is divine.”  One could complain that the site needs a graphic design once-over, but the content is excellent – covering 125 categories, suggestions on how to resolve issues amicably and support for businesses to better manage their complaints.

On the government front we are very fortunate in this country – The ACCC www.accc.gov.au and the Ombudsman www.comb.gov.au provide well funded top-level support, while every states’ Fair Trading department inform and encourage good complaints management and outcomes for all parties.  Just Google your state for more.

It’s a bit of a serious column this month, but I’m in the middle of some major business improvements myself, and my customers’ feedback was the major impetus for change.  With the silly season well and truly upon us, we all want that glow of satisfaction that business is good, and everybody loves us.  Any complaints?  Write to me!