BlogAllAlong

I spoke before about how I am starting to feel Amazon are overlooking their customers and the quality of customer support is deteriorating. They have not resolved or even replied to my last call on the previously reported problem at all. Their last reply was from someone who did not read, or does not want to read my email. Because he knows it will make sense. This was followed by other several scenarios where I noticed their customer support does not seem to answer your email, but rather pick from a library of templates which suits you most, polish it and send it. Like when I had my Shipping Address modified for just visiting the edit page and clicking back. I contacted them and explained it, I made it clear I did not modify the Address. But they come back and say “Are you sure you didn’t add some characters by mistake?” I already said no. There is something wrong with your application. Least you can do is send it to your technical team.

There is also their shipping speed, which seems to be coming slower for some reason. My brother sent me an email yesterday confirming Amazon awkward shipping behavior. He was buying 4 books with expedited international shipping to Kuwait, which it says to be 8-14 business days. After placing the order however he got the estimated delivery date to be 10th October! He wanted to cancel the shipment but the items were already being prepared for shipping and he cannot cancel the order anymore. This means that the delivery it self takes up to 40 days!. He did another very interesting test. Added new items t his cart and went to checkout. There, he compared the estimated shipping date for standard and expedited. Guess what? For Standard the expected date was 18th Sept - 3rd Oct, while for Expedited (Faster method) it was expected on 10th Oct! How on earth could that happen? He emailed them about the unexpected delay and the case he tried.

Amazon did reply to him, and as I expected, they do not answer your email. I will take snippets from it as it’s too long. But in summary they said “As stated in our help pages it takes “9 to 27 business days”!. But we saw the expedited shipping time to be 8-14 business days. And I have snapshot from it right here.

Why is that? Go to this URL and see. It turns out Amazon has different international shipping estimates for different regions, and for Kuwait which is in Middle-east, it does take 9-27 business days. This means there is a serious bug also with shipping estimate at checkout. When you select a country outside US, it is giving the default shipping estimate and not taking into consideration your country region, thus misleading the customer. I could be in serious need of the item, and 14 compared to 27 business days is a hell lot of a difference. This is a bug that was ought to be also communicated to the technical team rather than replying to the customer with “I apologize if this information was not clear at the time you placed  your order.”. This apology does not help a bit does it? It also does not give any indication of error correction.

So now we all agree, regardless right or wrong, the estimated  delivery date could be 10th Oct. Why does the Amazon employee says this later on? “I also suggest you to please check with your local postal services since it is possible that they have already tried to deliver your package but were unable to deliver due to following common scenarios…”. For God’s sake you just said it is expected to arrive on 10th Oct. How could you suggest now in the same email that the postal service was not able to deliver it and we were not in Sept yet at time of writing the email!. Another solid proof it’s a cut-and-paste support.

The example of expedited shipping being than standard also was not address. The case does not happen always, but I also saw it yesterday when I tried it with 1 day slower shipping. Now this is something serious that they they should check and resolve rather than juts ignore it from the customer email. How annoying do you think it is when you, the customer, take the time to write long detailed email explaining the problem and giving them hints, while they send you general template email with just little polishing, and ignoring the facts and bugs you’ve put? You don’t expect that from Amazon do you? Well, recently I expect a lot of this kind from Amazon. They have literally lost my faith in them.

Popularity: 30% [?]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I don’t know about you but I just found 4 out of 7 emails in my Gmail Spam folder as false-positive legitimate emails, 2 of them from trusted persons in my contact list that I receive emails form regularly! This funny kind of behavior used to happen with Hotmail but now it seems to have come to Gmail as well. Is anyone else experiencing it?

Popularity: 25% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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So I was shopping in Carrefour in Avenues with the family and I saw 300 the movie. I bought the original copy from there, like a good American … arr I mean Kuwaiti. Taking it home, opening it when there is no one else at home, excited to play it in the home theatre and see what it’s like after so much great review about the movie graphics and direction. I was surprised to see the bonus CD looking like this:

That looks like Indian or some other language. And to be honest, I’m not really going to be able to follow up with Indian 300 movie. Lucky it was only the cover and the movie it self is English. So I watched and enjoyed it. But I felt there is something missing. Like some scenes from the trailer were not there “Instead ask yourself what should a free man do?”. When I watched the bonus I saw parts of the missing scenes. So now even the original copies are censored in Kuwait, at least in Carrefour and Virgin as I heard before. I have to say, the censoring is the kind of clean one. Meaning you don’t see the movie jumping from one scene to the other. They try to remove scenes that are offensive in a way that won’t annoy the person watching it. Still however, I was able to feel missing scenes, and the fact that the cover does not mention that this is a censored version makes it worse. There should be a sign about it.

But that’s not the most surprising thing. What really caught my eyes is the end of movie warning you see below. There was a message at the bottom clearly saying:

“FOR SALE OR RENTAL FOR HOME USE IN INDIA, BANGLADESH, AND SRI LANKA ONLY.”

Doesn’t need to consult your lawyer to tell this is an illegal distribution of the copy! I read this and say to my self “Why did I want to be the good American?” I could get the CD for less, uncensored and I chose when to skip, and they are both illegal at the end of the day. I also remembered when I bought a DVD from Virgin that was for US region only. So that was a lesson for me. I have bought my last DVD from Kuwait. From now on, it’s all from outside.

Popularity: 70% [?]

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index” (Wikipedia)

So much explains it self. The attribute is part of Google’s efforts to fight blog comment spam which was implemented back in 2005. Ever since then many blog communities have started to adapt this parameter to make it less of use for spammers to gain backlink from the comments. Without ruling out it’s advantages, I have disabled it on my blog as I am filtering out all spam and thus killing the motive behind the attribute it self.

Google’s idea and efforts haven’t been adapted however by other search engines. The least not the big ones. Yahoo for example does not take that parameter into consideration. The net result is huge difference in site results and ranking, for blogs specifically, between Google and Yahoo. Let’s do a small test and see. Say we want to see all pages that link to my blog. This would be accomplished by searching for link:blogallalong.com. See the query applied on Google. 12 results only at the time of writing. Not much hah? I should note however that there are other sites linking in to my blog but for some reason they are not included in the results. Now let’s see the same query on Yahoo. At the time of writing, that’s 1,777 results! BIG DIFFERENCE RIGHT? I should consider defaulting to Yahoo they admire my blog more :).

So what’s that supposed to mean? More links means theoretically higher ranking. Means that when you search for example for Google Checkout Review, which is a post I wrote sometime back and got some good hits, if you search it on Yahoo you should get my post in the results much higher than Google. Initially the post was one of the top on both. When more and more Google Checkout reviews started to come out, mine got pushed back naturally. Surprisingly, even with so many backlinks in Yahoo, if I search the Google Checkout Review as keywords (not phrase) on Google & Yahoo, you will see that Google lists my post at end of 2nd page while I was not able to find my post on Yahoo for the first 6 or 7 pages! Search Engine world is a mystery not meant to be solved. Search the whole phrase and the post will be #6 at Yahoo and #10 at Google at the time of writing. This is because much of the results will be ruled out as we are looking for exact phrase ofcourse.

Now, the two options are available. NoFollow, and the so called DoFollow. Here comes the fun part. Wanna see what you can make with them? Do a link:blogallalong.com again on Google, and you will get mostly the blogs that do not use the NoFollow. You will see that SearchEngineJournal and the legendary Ron Gilbert both don’t use it. HINT: I comment on Ron Gilbert blog! See, you got me there. This won’t work for popular sites like Cnet however, as they have mostly non blog-comment inlinks and the NoFollow effect here is minimal. But what would the same query on Yahoo reveal? It would show you the blogs that I visit and comment on. That’s right. You can track me and see what I’ve been doing. So in a way, Google’s NoFollow respects your privacy more. That’s one more unintended advantage. So maybe we should have a WP plugin to give user option to have NoFollow on his comment or not :).

Popularity: 38% [?]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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It was really sad for the whole world when technology took two different paths with HD DVD and Blu-Ray technology. Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. The two tried to set down before and reach a resolution, but NO. They agreed on No Deal terms. It was too difficult to reach agreement the two sides said. So each went on his own path, trying to prove with time he is the superior. Time went on and studios were releasing DVDs in both formats. People had the choice to make. Some were hesitating of making a move, and waited for things to get more clear.

Just recently, and when the heat was starting to cool down, Paramount and Dreamworks struck Blu-Ray manufacturers and the whole world when they announced they will exclusively support and produce HD DVD formats only! This means big titles will not be available to Blu-Ray users at all. But why that decision? Why now? Why HD DVD and not Blu-ray? Things were unclear until New York Times revealed information that the two studios will be receiving around $150 million of value in financial incentives. So in a way, Paramount and DreamWorks sold their Blu-ray customers for money.

That’s not all news however, there is still a bit of good news on the blu-ray side as well, surprisingly happening at the same time. Both Fox and MGM studios have announced their plans of major aggressive Blu-Ray Disk release strategies, after reporting that Blu-ray disks were outperforming HD DVDs 2-1. This campaign however seems to support Blu-Ray first, but is not exclusive at the end. It is really sad to see this happening. Studios making critical technical and  customers affecting decisions for money. So what will happen in the end is most likely as the Mr. David Carnoy from CNET said:

” The problem right now is that you’re almost going to have to pick your format by the studios you like,” I said. “The impact may ultimately be that people just don’t buy any of the next-gen players. ‘Shrek’ is going to look pretty good on DVD, so you just buy the DVD and call it a day.”

For me, I already got PS3 as my Blu-Ray player, and yes I will be just fine with normal DVD if I have to make a choice. I already got Blu-Ray player and studios should support something that is outselling HD DVD two-to-one.

Popularity: 28% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Since Google Mars maps and moon one came out, and as Google had already been in collaboration with NASA, it was no wonder it was only a matter of time and the Google Earth will not be a valid name anymore. Google Earth already launches with top view of earth. And while Microsoft is still struggling to get people to use it’s own clone of it, Google Earth now allows you to fly away into space with Google Sky. Just download the latest version of Google earth and you are out there on your own. Enjoy the video on the same page also while downloading.

Original source here.

Popularity: 28% [?]

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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I’ve noticed this today on Q8Ba7th site. Google Sponsored Ads are showing extra links at the bottom. But what are they? I thought first I have screwed up somewhere but figured no. This seems like new type of ads by Google with extra links at bottom. You click on one of the links, say Photo Blog and the ads will change accordingly to that type. It does not really look compelling to me, but what it gives is broader exposure of ads to the publisher and end user. End of the line, t could streamline some more income. How do we measure it? I need to make sure first this thing is permanent as I only saw it once up till now. Then we need to examine the revenue growth if there is any.

Have any of you noticed this kind of ads as well?

Popularity: 50% [?]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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