|
Posted on 04.13.09 by Widge @ 9:52 pm
Comments on this: just one. Add your own.  Hey, look on the bright side: I bet you got Super Saver Shipping on that. So my previous rant regarding #AmazonFail garnered a lot of traffic. This appears to be the hot topic of the day as I figured it would be. I did state I would wait for official word from Amazon and to their credit, I did receive it--the same canned message they sent The New York Times: Hello, Thank you for contacting Amazon.com. This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future. Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon. Categorized as: Rants
|
|
Posted on 04.12.09 by Widge @ 11:34 pm
Comments on this: 11 so far. Add your own.  So I'm not going to write directly about the running debacle that is #AmazonFail yet (get your primers here and here). For two reasons. One, because I submitted a request to Amazon for a response and I said I would give them until end of day tomorrow before I did a write-up. And I think we'll get a better answer than "glitch" for this mess. Or we'd better. And two because somebody's put forward a very interesting theory that "glitch" could be a euphemism for. Right now, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about what every company in the world needs to learn from #AmazonFail, whatever the reason turns out to be. I'm sure this will be a topic of great interest in business blogs, but you don't have to be a business expert or strategist or whatnot to know what happened here. The guy with the English degree can tell you. That's how plain it is. Categorized as: Rants
|
|
Posted on 01.19.09 by Widge @ 3:21 am
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own.  At Needcoffee, politics really isn't our bag. First up, because we are read all over the world, and it gets a little silly if we're trying to talk about stuff that affects America all the time--the people in Brazil or Canada, while amused, probably don't care beyond that. And secondly, even though I think that 80% of people in America are not as blisteringly either left wing or right wing and I bet if you talked to them you'd see they were reasonable people who might differ in opinion on the finer points, but for the most part just want to be left alone to enjoy life. And we don't want anybody to get their coffee filters in a twist. But sometimes...sometimes the government does something so incredibly dumb that we think the only people who will be backing the government's play is...the government. And then we have to say something. Especially when you've got legislation that could wind up banning kids from libraries, putting Etsy stores who make stuff for kids out of business (search for "CPSIA sale"), and forcing anybody who makes anything for kids spend craploads of money testing everything they have for lead. Because anything that goes to kids under the age of 12 is fair game. And what I want to know is this: when was the last kid who was hospitalized because they had a book with lead in it? How many children's books have been shown to have lead in them...at all? There might be answers for both of those that go above the number zero--I'm honestly, seriously, asking. How many diapers have been shown to have lead in them? Categorized as: Rants
|
|
Posted on 12.27.08 by Widge @ 10:52 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Okay, here it comes. UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham wants to work with the Obama administration to apply "new standards of decency" to the Web. Read this next paragraph carefully. For the full context, here's the article. "There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it."
How can you tell somebody is against free speech? Because they say that there should be stuff that you shouldn't get to see in the same breath that they claim they're not attacking free speech. Categorized as: Rants
|
|
Posted on 12.27.08 by Widge @ 5:58 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  You know, there are few people who start talking and I automatically sit up and pay attention. Ask my parents, for example. I paid attention to them as a kid but only after the beatings. But seriously, there are lots of people who I find interesting, lots of people I think are brilliant--and there are a few who are both and when they speak, they speak gobs of truth. So when Larry Lessig, papa of the Creative Commons movement (the method by which I've chosen to release my books into the world), starts talking about how the new American Presidential administration should abolish the FCC--then you get me all excited. Read the whole article here. For our readers outside the U.S., the FCC is that brilliant organization that fakes information when it feels like it, admits that that's just the way they do things, and spend their free time freaking out about Janet Jackson's nipple. Yes--you remember the useless org we're talking about now, don't you? Categorized as: Rants
|
|
|
