Forget Starbucks. You deserve a better experience.
It’s official: I am done with Starbucks. Until now, I occasionally visited Starbucks because they are easy to find, have a consistent quality, and you know what to expect. Is this enough to make the Starbucks experience a good customer experience?
One of the reasons people go to Stabucks is that they offer wireless internet. Are Starbucks cybercafes? In theory most of them are hotspots but in practices one has to pay for wireless. A lot. Unless you want to get a monthly and automatically renewed annual subscription with T-Mobile, you’ll have to pay $10 dollars for a day pass or $7 for the first hour of wireless connection. Most cybercafes offer unlimited wireless access for $2 and the fee is often waived if you purchase something.
At Starbucks, drinks and food are good, but they are also so pricey that you would expect your espresso to walk on water, tell you funny jokes, and take your calls when you are out. They only provide paper cups, even when you want to drink your cappuccino on the premises (so much for the flavor and the sustainability). The Starbucks experience seems to assume that you are always on the run, rushing in and out in a cloud of dust (perhaps accurate for most of their customers, but so far from my idea of coffee shop experience).
Blogline ate my blog: The Dangers of Feed Aggregators
Once upon a time, blogs were conversational hubs. Posts were written to be commented, trackbacked, circulated, debated. Blogs were places you would go to. Strolling through cyberspace, you would visit A, follow a link to B, and engage in a conversation with C. Along the way, communities were created, friends were made, important discussion happened. Blogging required traveling and social interaction.
Then blogs became too many to be visited daily. RSS aggregators were developed. Blog posts were now coming to you when a blog was updated. It was easy to add another blog to the list. We found ourselves reading hundreds of posts a day. There was no time to visit blogs, leaving comments, think about what we had read. Gradually, the conversational aspect of blogging was lost.
How to be creative
I’ve just finished reading Hugh MacLeod’s How to be creative [PDF] (available at Changethis.com together with other interesting stuff). It felt like the first a ray of light after the eclipse. It made me happy after going to the gym, playing sudoku for hours, and eating dark chocolate failed.
Hugh MacLeod is the author of the popular blog Gaping Void, creates cartoons on the back of business cards, and in his spare time plays a microbrand consultant. When I grow up, I want to become like him.
Tags: gapingvoid, macleod, creativity
Almost going to the IA Summit (Web 2.0 style)
Talking about not going to conferences, it’s really amazing how much good information one can find online without moving from her chair. So, you would have liked to attend the 7th IA Summit in Vancouver, but didn’t have the money or the time? The Summit is not even finished yet and the debate on the talks is already in full swing. In addition to the Summit’s own blog, there are hundreds of posting (for example, search Technorati or Google Blog Search). Local Philadelphian David Sturtz has a nice summary of the the first day (one of the link is to Luke Wroblewski, who has a few good summaries of the talks). Online PDFs of the thoughts behind the talks are an interesting in depth look of what people are thinking (look at David’s post for several links).
I know, it’s not the same thing. We miss our friends, the off-line discussions, the full immersion, and the fancy meals at Vancouver’s restaurants, and the 9-hour flight (each way). Let’s see, should I go for a bike ride or watch a Netflix movie to get over my disappointment?
Update: Andrew’s talk at the Summit is featured at David Weinberger’s blog. How cool!
Tags: IAsummit resources conferences
Wondering where everbody is? Look in Austin
After starting to panic because nobody was visiting or commenting my blog (except for my few loyal friends and the usual spammers), I realized why the blogosphere has been so quiet lately. This week all the cool kids are in Austin, TX, at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (also known as SXSW Interactive).
An important aspect of being uncool is being systematic in missing the coolest events, and SXSW is no doubt one of those. I wish somebody had launched a Web 2.0 slick app for cool-events-impaired people to alert us that it was time time to register for SXSW Interactive. I don’t remember anybody writing months ago, when one could still find a hotel room in downtown Austin, that registration for the most fashionable new media conference of the year was open.
[Note to self: Next year, remember to write a post alerting all the clueless people out there that is time to register for SXSW Interactive and to reserve the hotel room.]
The bad part of hanging out in the blogosphere is that it’s impossible not to notice that everybody except me is having fun in Austin. Because people write, podcast, podcast some more, and perhaps even videocast about it .
The good part of hanging out in the blogosphere is that with all these live bloggers you can actually know in real time what happened. Which means that, if you can’t have the fun, you can at least show off the knowledge.
A number of BlogHers are in Austin and making waves. Lisa Stone observes that 100 out of the 300 speakers at SXSW Interactive are women (so much for the excuse "there are no qualified women speakers" of so many high testosterone Technology and Web 2.0 conferences). BlogHer attendees are contributing to five panels. Two Blogher @ SXSW panels have already been liveblogged (check the Blogher site for updates):
- We got naked, now what?, liveblogged by Lisa Stone
- Public square or private club?, liveblogged by Elisa Camahort
[Several SXSW Interactive panels have been liveblogged at Auscillate.com; great SXSW posts at Social Customer by Chris Carfi; or you can spend all your waking life reading thousands of posts on SXSW Interactive on Technorati]
When shopping online becomes a personal experience
Shopping online is usually a solitary experience. It’s all between us and our computer. Electronic payments, automated messages, automated delivery, and the goods show up magically at our door (usually when we are not home) without any apparent human intervention. It’s convenient, efficient, anonymous, sterilized, and creepy.
But in the world of The Long Tail, small and tiny businesses flourish online. Via Caterina, I discovered Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade stuff where I bought a birthday present for my husband. It was a sushi candle making kit. As soon as I ordered the kit, Nikola Davidson from Sticky Wicket Crafts wrote me an e-mail. She actually wrote it. A real, personal, kind e-mail.
Antonella - thank you for your order! It shipped out today. Thanks for supporting Sticky Wicket Crafts!
Nikola
The e-mail did not say: "This is an automatically generated message. Do not reply to this message." So I wrote her back, like you do with a real person, thanking her and explaining why I bought the sushi candles.
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