You know what I really hate?

Googling for “product X review” and finding bazillions of web sites that purport to be reviews of product X, but which in fact are just shopping web sites which have manufacturer’s information, or possibly a “story” written word-for-word from a press release, and nothing else.

Oh sure, some of them might have space for a product review, if some hapless customer wants to donate their time and effort into writing one. But if it’s [obscure shopping site] then why would anybody bother?

And some might have comparative price listings from various retail and online shops. With reviews… of the shops.

No wonder I end up looking on amazon.com (where there’s enough customers who actually care about writing reviews to make it worthwhile) or epinions.com, but both being US-based means they don’t cover some models available in other countries.

Can we get Google to somehow sort the wheat from the chaff here? Or will some non-US sites rise from the rest and get a critical mass of reviewers?

Oh, and can anybody tell me if the Epson C59 printer offered today on Zazz is a cheap and cheerful (if ugly) bargain, or a foul demon waste of my hard-earned $50?

eBay.com.au doesn’t accept PayPal as a way of making a one-off payment for eBay fees.

eBay owns PayPal.

I think they too have figured out PayPal dollars aren’t good for much.

The problem I have with eBay feedback is the positive ones are usually so over the top. “A1++++++++++++++ great ebayer!!!!!” is really too much when usually it just means the person in question sent the parcel/money on time, and answered emails. I prefer to put a little more actual information in the feedback I leave.

Amazon has lost historic data. Sales data. Data for profiling customers.

I know. They lost mine.

I found out because it wouldn’t let me look inside The Complete Far Side because I don’t have an account that’s bought stuff - according to their records.

Except now I can look at the excerpt, but still they reckon I haven’t bought anything.

Weird.

Don’t be an eBay buyer, or you could turn into this crazy eBay woman. Be a seller. Perhaps you’re going to make a killing on PS3s. Or you’ve just cornered the world market in a particular Lego set. Just don’t pick some dud product. While you’re not going to become an eBay millionare, often the question is “What’s the trick to make the most money”?

Everyone with an opinion disagrees.

Shipping
Research shows that people are relatively insensitive to shipping costs, even though honour and the eBay rules say you can’t charge much beyond what it actually costs to ship. But perhaps the research was flawed, it only sampled 80 purchases.
Duration
The PS3 guy reckons 3 day auctions are the way to go. Roth reckons ten day ones are best, because they cover two weekends. Smith says 10 day auctions suck, but gives no reason.
Finish time
Sunday evening might work well, and in my sample of one it worked great, but:

Sunday evening may well be a peak time for ebay but bear in mind that there will be both an increase in buyers AND of auctions/competition so it’s not clear it’s the best time to end an auction. I’ve found Sunday, Monday, Thursday evenings to be good.

People are home on the weekends. Are they home, bored? I guess you want your auction to finish at such a time that when people see it, they’re willing to bid on it.
Body copy
Sean Blanda at College v2 says ‘don’t waste time on narrative‘. J.D. Roth thinks just the opposite. My anecdotal evidence says that amusing, engaging and informative copy makes for higher realised prices; the time investment in this, however, can be a killer. So you’d want to be selling multiples of whatever it is. Perhaps because I included a story of the item’s provenance it helped.
Starting price
Low starting bids are universally suggested, but often the following caveat is normally ignored:

It’s also not true that a 0.99 starting price is always the best policy. This is only true if your item has a lot of demand. Many times if there are only a few buyers interested and you list the item at near retail you will eventually get a buyer willing to pay that price - you may need to relist a few times. If you had starting it at 0.99 it may be that only one buyer happens to be interested at the time of the auction.

Moreover, if you have more than one item that will generally have few buyers and you list at 0.99 and it sells at that price, you’ve then set a precedence. People who search for completed listings will now perceive the item to be worth 0.99 - not good.

Myself, I’m going to use a buy-it-now price. I’m in no rush to sell, and really want the super premium I can capture.
Pictures
Everyone says put in a picture, but here’s a money-saving tip:

You can embed lots of pictures in your html rather than pay ebay to upload them - ebay gives one free & charges for the rest. It takes a little bit to learn this, but is NOT difficult.

Geeks aren’t afraid of HTML. And we love optimizing things, such as cost.

Feeback
Early or late? I think you’ve done unilateral disarmament if you’ve left feedback before the buyer has. But some people think you ought to leave feedback as soon as you’ve got the money. But a buyer can screw you over in so many ways after giving you the money. Bad move.

Unclear
I don’t know what the right Finish Time is. Any suggestions, with reasoning or, better yet, evidence?

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an astonishing idea - an Artificial AI marketplace. Basically, there’s an API you can call to get humans to do tasks (oddly enough, they want to be paid). Currently, a big favourite for the tasks is transcribing podcasts. I can see that it would be a cheap way to truth a set of training data for AI systems, like number plate detection / recognition.

An artist has used the Mechanical Turk to acquire 10,000 hand drawn left-facing sheep and put them on a site for your viewing pleasure - plus, there was an exhibition of the collectable stamp sheets etc (you can buy the as stamp-sheets for only $20 a sheet). Given the images cost less than a cent each to acquire, he may be a bullshit artist.

The Turk is an example of what Wired calls Rise of Crowdsourcing - Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. It’s about the markets, people. These are markets for micro-transactions - micro in their repeatability, or micro in their value.

Running a web-site/service? About 1% of your clients will give you any money at all - most will be happy with your free offering. But of those that do give you money, some what to give you a lot. So segment your customers.

Coffee drinkers are easier to persuade.

Fermi’s Paradox is explained by aliens getting adicited to computer gaming.

Strom reckons he knows how to make money with a website: ads! Plus a little other stuff.

An Irishman has a rather good summery of how to negotiate an intial salary.

Cross-platform rounded corners without images, extra markup nor CSS. The holy grail of web-design dweebs.

Walking to the train station from work, saw this big red ad - and I must admit, I think my vision is going - I think it’s degenerated to the point where it’s as good as most people’s. And perhaps I’m slightly dyslexic, but I read the ad as “Australia’s first web chicken”. Perhaps I spent too much time in NZ as a child. In fact, in looking critically at it, and recalling a UI design subject I didn’t do (but damn it, should have, it would have been one of the few subjects I would still be using), humans are crap at reading uppercase letters.

Ha! So, I’m going to claim it’s not my fault I misread it, and I’m going to do a geekrant about it, because now it’s a geek issue - look, it’s got web on it. And the fun part is, a few months after the ad went up I noticed it, but just as soon as I blog about it they pull it down. So you’re just going to have to take my word for it - the ad was up there. There’s a beer ad now.

What’s with that logo in the bottom-right corner? How does that add to the ad’s message? Why isn’t the VirginBlue in a more prominant location? Why did they change colours midway through the web address, and what’s with that aeroplane tail - are they intentionally making this hard to read? Or perhaps they’re making the name look like a plane - so why haven’t they added wings? And what does “me-time” have to do with the smirking idiot on the left hand side?

If you join the mile-high club after doing a web chicken, is that kinky?

So I was checking out copper (as you do), and followed the wikipedia copper entry link to EnvironmentalChemistry.com’s copper data, and I discovered that ad blockers are beginning to change the economics of the web. The web site whinged that they had detected ad blocking, and if I wanted to get the content I’d have to turn it off (and provided directions - which I followed, but it just turned out to be a bunch of atomic numbers and covalent bonds and useless crap like that).

The economics of a lot of the web are not dissimilar to those of free-to-air television; there’s a covenant between the producers (broadcasters/webauthors) and the consumers - we will let this stuff out to anyone, and you will consume our advertising. Advertisers give the producers cash to cover the costs of publishing. There’s a profit in it, and everyone’s happy.

Except that consumers have decided they don’t like the deal anymore. People are taping TV shows, and skipping the ads. People are using ad blockers in their browsers. The economics of the model are breaking down. I personally am behaving this way because I find the advertising increasingly intrusive and irrelevant, and thus annoying. The ads suck, for products that suck, and they’re shoved down my throat. So I avoid them. This is how a character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact became the richest man on earth - by selling TV ad blockers.

The three outcomes I can forecast from this are:

1. increased relevance of advertising (unlikely, the reason advertising is necessary is because of an inherent suckiness of the products, otherwise they’d be compelling)

2. decreased expenditure on content provision (on TV, cheaper nastier shows - if that’s possible; on the web, uneconomic sites being pulled or at least not updated)
3. product placement, which is a bit like 1, ‘cept different because it’s more about appropriate products in appropriate places

I for one have no idea how this will play out, but I’m sure advertising will get more subtle. It’s done that over the last century, and will continue to in response to increasing consumer sophistication. Perhaps advertisers will find a way to back off, and only offer their products to customers who want them; they certainly want to act that way, because it’s a waste of money advertising women’s sanitary napkins to the gay male viewers of Friends — unless they’re planning to fix their car’s leaky roof with one.

BTW, how did they figure out I was blocking their ads?

The company I work for is called eVision, and their main product is called MessageXchange. (See what happens to your spelling when you’re looking to find a good .com address?)

It’s basically a B2B message broker… messages go in, messages go out, and in the middle they get conditionally routed and transformed. The upshot is you can set up to hook up a bunch of systems that use completely different types of message… one system’s PurchaseOrderCreate in a fixed-length FTP’d batch file can happily go along as another system’s PurchOrdReq XML HTTP message.

The clever bit is in the monitoring, letting you see what’s pumping through the system at any time. And the fact that the whole shebang is configurable through a web interface.

It started out as a software package… well, not exactly a package, not in the MS Office sense, but a system you’d plonk on a Windows server or two and away you go. I haven’t been directly involved, but over the past year they’ve rejigged it as an ASP… a paid hosted service, that is, so that if you don’t want to run it on your own boxes, you pay to access it on fully maintained servers instead.

At the same time they’ve expanded its reportoire to cover a lot of the new and emerging XML standards such as ebXML and RosettaNet. As well as some of the more ancient, creaking standards like EDI.

Handy stuff. The whole B2B area must surely grow, it’s a no-brainer for reducing the cost of commerce. Will be an interesting area to watch. In fact I might get one of the guys to expand a bit on some of these topics…

The disk

Got myself a new hard disk for one of my computers, which was suffering from eternally insufficient space. The installation itself was pretty straight forward. Figure out the whole primary/secondary master/slave situation, and you’re away. Easy. Mind you, the manual did recommend moving the jumper with pliers… which broke it. Oh well, it was going in as a slave, for which I didn’t need a jumper in place.

Booted up, plonked in the Maxtor CD that came with the drive and it formatted in a jiffy, one sparkly new drive ready for business. (What, you thought this was going to be a doom and gloom blog?)

Then I pondered fiddling with the partitions on the old drive. When I had set it all up several years ago, I had decided that separate partitions were a good idea. The idea was you could have a C: for Windows and your programs, and a D: for all your data, making it much easier to backup.

That’s okay in theory, but in practice, three things can go wrong:

• Windows and applications chuck stuff you need to back-up all over the shop. There’s “Documents And Settings” (which can be moved) but some stuff also creeps into various other nooks and crannies around the file system
• Whatever space you decide to partition off may well turn out to be wrong, as your programs and/or your data grow out of all proportion.
• Thirdly, and this was the killer on this particular machine, I already had C: cordoned off for trying out Linux (and even Beos at one point, believe it or not). D: ended up for Windows. Somehow the CD grabbed E:. Data ended up on F:. Did it matter? I suppose not, but it was pretty messy.

Re-partitioning

So after installing the new drive (G: of course) I pondered re-partitioning to at least get the space from F: glomped in with C:. I won’t bother fiddling D: until Windows gets re-installed.

Partition Magic has a reputation as being the defacto/best-of-breed partition management app. (If anybody knows of anything better, I’d be interested to hear about it. I do recall hearing about a good freeware one, but can’t remember what it was called…)

PowerQuest, who make Partition Magic (and whom suffered through credit card fraud using my card once) got bought out by Symantec recently. You can buy and download it from Symantec AU for A$109.05. Meanwhile their US operation will charge you US$49.95 (AU$65.48) for the same thing… grrrr.

It seems to retail at places like Harris Technology for about A$90. (HT is my benchmark for retail prices, since they’re generally reasonably competitive — moreso than their Officeworks stablemate — have a good range of products, and a web site that’s easy to use.)

The dodgy etailer

I happened to glance around the web and found a few other companies purporting to sell download versions of Partition Magic. The most intriguing of these was a mob called ibackups.net, who have a variety of software at what one might argue are “too good to be true” prices. A little Googling on this mob led me to their T+Cs, where hidden away down near the bottom in dot point 9.1 is this:

9.1 You understand that in order for iBackups.net to make you a copy of any software, you acknowledge that you are the legal owner of this same software, and are looking to just make a new copy for archival (backup) purposes only. You also agree to destroy all copies of the software in the event it is ever no longer voluntarily in your possession. You understand that only the licensed owner (with a valid serial number, where applicable) of the various software found on iBackups.net may use the services located here. You also acknowledge that the software you have was obtained legally and that you have the legal right to request this backup copy to be made. If you obtained your version though any other means, including any pirated versions, or if you do not already legally own the same version of the software requested, then you may not use this service.

They’re not selling software, they’re not selling a license to use software. They’re selling you a backup of software you’re already supposed to own. And indemnifying themselves if you don’t:

Furthermore, you agree to hold iBackups.net harmless for any damages that may occur for your failure to follow the U.S. Copyright and other laws as they pertain to the backup you are requesting. When you purchase any backup copy of software through iBackups.net, you agree to assume full liability in the event your actions are deemed illegal. iBackups.net does not condone software piracy and has every intention of complying with the laws pertaining to the duplication of software.

One could very well ask if they’re just selling backups, why do the prices vary so much? US$49.95 for Acrobat 5, but US$119.95 for Acrobat 6 Pro? And why do their product listings compare their price to the “retail price”, if what they’re selling is in no way comparable to the retail product?

No doubt there’s legitimate people who would be in need of such a service, but this sounds very close to the line, and they certainly give the impression they’re just selling software, not backups. They must have good lawyers.

I think I’ll keep shopping. Maybe I’ll just mosey around the city and find it the next time I’m there.

Actually, I don’t see anything on the Symantec US web site saying they won’t let me download to Australia…

Update at Noon. In fact Symantec US will happily sell to just about anywhere, judging from their web form, which includes Australia in the country dropdown. They will let you download for a year if you pay an extra US$6.99, which I chose to take, though on reflection I probably shouldn’t have… maybe worthwhile if that includes upgrades though. (Default is downloads allowed for 60 days). Oh well, US$56.94 = A$74.51 beats any AU retail price I might be able to find, even after I spend an extra 50 cents burning it to a CD.