It’s true what they say about taking things for granted till it comes a time when it’s taken away. Video after the jump

Resurrection: Rob Bell from The Work of Rob Bell on Vimeo.

I’ve gone through the 1st Module and I find he breaks down the basics of IM pretty well. It’s definitely simple enough for newbies to understand. Here are the topics he covers:

Week 1 – The Beginner’s Guide To Internet Marketing
Week 2 – Affiliate Marketing 101: Everything You Need To Know To Start Promoting Products
Week 3 – Market Research: How To Crush Your Competitors And Discover Hot Niches
Week 4 – Introduction to Pay Per Click
Week 5 – Advanced Pay Per Click
Week 6 – SEO Tips, Tricks, and Tactics
Week 7 – Content Creation: How To Create Articles That Attract Users And Increase Sales
Week 8 – Marketing: How To Use Social Media To Spread Your Brand
Week 9 – Make That Cash: 10 Ways To Monetize Your Site And Increase Profitability
Week 10 – Testing & Tracking: How To Optimize Your Site & Make Sense Of The Figures
Week 11 – Building Your Team: How To Network With Others And Find Long Term Partners
Week 12 – Launch Day: How To Kick Start Your Business And Manage Your Projects

The course is totally free although I think registration is open for a limited time. Those of you interesting in learning more about Internet Marketing can go here: www.shoemoneyx.com to check it out. So far I can say there are no strings attached except for the fact that it requires you giving your email. Let me just warn you first though that THIS IS NOT A GET RICH QUICK SCHEME. If that’s what you’re looking for then this isn’t for you. Building long term sustainable income always requires hard work and consistency.

Hope this is as helpful to you as it is to me. Btw, just so you know, I posted a referral link (so now you know I have ulterior motives). Sign up and you’ll know why.

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For those who don’t know what is UniFi, it’s basically Telekom’s newest initiative to implement high speed broadband. Lowest speed packages will be at 5Mbps *salivates*.

Anyway, first thought is “Wow! They actually listen!”

When the packages were unveiled yesterday, the first and loudest complaint was the issue of usage caps. I’m sure advocates of Twitter will now be chiming in to say what an effective and wonderful tool for customer service and feedback it is. Well, in this case I guess it play it’s part. Either that or TM really really needs this to work and is desperate. Lol.

I wrote a post on here about bad customer service. On the flip side, if you want to sell your product, listening to customer feedback is a key thing. Take this case for example. Even though the service is not available in my area, my impression of TM has improved and made me more receptive of other packages they have to offer. Of course, you can’t please everyone. But changing details of a package just ONE day after unveiling the package takes guts, shows they are willing to listen and shows they respond quickly to customer needs. Now, if they would just improve their counter staff quality too… :p

Another thought is that usage caps are a silly idea. It’s punishing the masses for the transgressions of a few. A few such transgressors immediately come to mind. But seriously, if i pay for a high speed broadband service, I expect to get that service right? If someone else is abusing the network bandwidth I shouldn’t get punished for it. Filtering would probably make more sense.

For now, TM is playing the wait-and-see card. What do you think they should do? Do you think it’s reasonable for them to have usage caps to counter bandwidth abuse? What better alternatives are there?

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I guess that with a company of Google’s size, it’s inevitable that when it releases a major application, just about everyone notices. But Google made it even more noticeable by making everyone who uses Gmail a candidate to participate in it’s fabulous new product. That’s a whole LOT of people.

As an idea, Google Buzz doesn’t represent anything new. Google Buzz attempts to simplify your social networking habits through consolidation. This means that Buzz pulls in status updates, photos, videos from different service providers into a single location. It also makes it easy for you to share your items with other people.

That’s cool and everything, but I’ve got one major problem with Buzz.

It’s still a MESS.

Consolidating all my feeds into one location does NOT help me simplify my social networks if it does not allow me to manage it well. Reading Facebook status updates from heaps of people is already such a headache. Throw that all in with Twitter, Google Reader, etc and what do you get? ROJAK (Malaysian term meaning chaotic mixture of different elements).

There are two features I would want from Buzz that would truly make my life simpler in the ever expanding world of social networks.

1. Ability to choose which service I want to follow from any one person

Nowadays, people have Twitter, Facebook, blogs (often each blog is about different things), etc and more often than not, I don’t want to follow everything a person posts. Being able to pick and choose which service I want to follow a person on cuts down a LOT of noise.

2. Ability to continue a conversation outside of Buzz

I’m sure there a nice term for this sort of thing but basically what I mean is that any conversations you have are contained within Buzz (I think). So any comments I make on say, a friend’s blog post will only appear within Buzz and not in the blog’s actual comments section. Same issue vice versa. I feel this is a common problem for most people. Often you post something on your blog (or any other platform), which then gets propagated to the other social network platforms you use; but then you have the huge headache of responding to people’s feedback because its all over the place. If Google can solve this either through a plug-in you can use in all the rest of your services or other means, that would really rock. Otherwise, Buzz just becomes another service I need to maintain (seemingly for no good reason).

Well, that’s it. Ranting done. How do you find Google Buzz?

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1. The customer is ALWAYS wrong.

When meeting a customer, immediately go on defensive. You know what they say, best defense is offense, so fire away! Shoot them with defensive statements and treat them all like idiots who don’t have a brain. Go ahead, they deserve it!

2. Time is valuable, so do everything you can to get rid of your customer in the SHORTEST time possible.

If it can’t be solved in 3 mins, it’s not worth your time. Give short, curt answers. Keep looking anywhere but the customer to indicate they are boring you and that they should get lost. Give them a stupid, dead pan look when they present you a problem. Shrug your shoulders and give a condescending but sympathetic smile saying there’s nothing you can do. You get the idea. If all else fails, throw the rule book at them and tell them they either do it your way or the high way!

3. NEVER follow up on your customer/client.

Out of sight, out of mind they say. The moment they leave, just forget about them. If it’s important, they’ll holler and breath down your neck. In the meantime, no worries, be happy.

Don’t worry if at first no one seems to be complaining about your bad service. In an asian culture it might take a while before complaints rise to the surface. Maybe you need to go at it more aggresively. In the meantime, keep at it and rest assured, I guarantee you’ll have a steady stream of complaints which may eventually get you fired or bankrupt.

So there you go folks. Feel free to comment if you think I missed something.

Scheduled posts have stopped working for me since I upgraded to WordPress 2.9 (I hope that’s the only problem!). After procrastinating for the longest time, I’m finally trying a few things to fix it. Since this involves playing around with a few files, there might be unintended consequences so do bear with me if this blog starts to act funny. But just in case it’s a problem that I don’t yet know about, do leave a comment telling me what you think is broken. Thanks!

ps. if you’ve encountered a similar problem and have a fix do let me know too!

Updated: it’s fixed! This worked for me.

From this chart I guess we know now how it’s only natural that one company sees the other as a threat especially when they go after each others’ ‘bread and butter’ market. For example, Microsoft going after the search market (Google‘s thing); Google going after mobile hardware (Apple‘s thing), Apple going after Desktop OS (Microsoft’s thing). It’s no wonder they hate each other. Oh well, competition is good for the consumer right?

Anyone find the direction Google is headed interesting? So much for “don’t be evil” motto huh? I don’t see much difference between them and Microsoft and Apple at the end of the day.

Paranoia about security is a very real thing in an age where the emphasis is all about being connected. Sure, we’ve all seen movies (like the one shown in the poster above) about how secret government agencies could find out everything about you from just a card swipe or a phone call but until recently, generally people dismissed it as fiction or just didn’t care.

Well, if you didn’t believe it before, believe it now. There’s a ton of data out there and all it takes is for someone with the right tools to harvest information about you. “But isn’t that like finding a needle in a haystack?” Maybe, but it might not be as difficult as you might think. In fact, finding that needle in a haystack may even prove to be a very lucrative business. Look at Google.

If you’d like to know how track-able you are on the Internet, head here to take a simple anonymous test set up by Panoticlick. They’ve set up the test as an experiment to see how effective it is to use common information provided by your browser to tag you right down to the computer you are using. Here’s an excerpt from their website:

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. Some companies are already using technology to try to identify individual computers. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

My result says I’m unique (not a good thing in this case) among the 600,000 odd people who’ve taken the survey and I’ve got 19 identifying information. Hmmm.