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I hereby pledge that I, Our Man in Newcastle, will never post to my blog/Twitter/Facebook etc from an airport/coffeehouse/conference to comment on the availability, or quality of, WIFI.
I understand that the rest of the world does not care about the WIFI. Nor does it care what machine I am using to access the WIFI – however shiny, new, or expensive it may be.
If you’re reading this – please take the pledge too.
It’s time we put a stop to this.
* Sidenote: The words “wifi” and “airport” in Tweetscan. Here.
(click for larger, more readable version)
It seems that I am not the only one to notice Guardian hack Louise Taylor’s crush on Sunderland boss Roy Keane.
Okay, so the mock up above is fake. But, then again, these little love notes aren’t.
Oh Louise. He only has time and eyes for his Labrador. Sad but true.
Image found here.
…is having to pretend that things aren’t getting worse because if you say they are then you sound like the worst kind of anicent old gimmer. Not to mention a miserable, dreary old cynic.
But some times they are getting worse. That’s not just because I’m no longer 21. It’s because, well, they ARE getting worse.
We’ve had 30 years now of under investment in everything in this country and it’s hardly surprising that all isn’t what we’d like it to be. Also there’s been 30 years of the gap between rich and poor widening.
The worst of it all is that those driven by hate are blaming the cracks in our services and societies on those least able to defend themselves.
That’s what’s wrong here. Isn’t it? Not just me getting old? Right?
I’ve been having an ongoing email conversation/row with Stagecoach about Heaton’s Number One bus.
To cut a long story very short, the bus which is supposed to come every 7-9 minutes was cut drastically without announcement. In fact, during correspondance they have admitted that they simply did not have enough buses to meet their advertised service.
I don’t know exactly how drastically it was cut but I waited 35 minutes for a bus – which would mean they were running a service at around only a quarter of its promised capacity. To compound this, they chose this time to put up bus fares yet again. They did this without prior warning or explanation.
Those of us who try to do the decent thing and leave our cars at home, are not being helped by woeful service. It took me an hour to get from Heaton to the City Centre yesterday. It takes ten minutes to drive it myself and 40 minutes to walk.
The Chronicle recently reported a Number One bus gone mad. I feel for the poor driver. Stagecoach make me go nuts too. I can imagine the crap the poor guy has to take from irate customers.
Anyway, therir Operations Director has offered to meet me to talk through my concerns. I know from friends living in Heaton how much the Number One bus annoys them all.
Is anyone reading this on the Number One bus route and uses it (or doesn’t use it for reasons you can relate)? Anyway want to add anything that I could bring up?
*Sidenote I’m actually moving out of Heaton in just over a month. I’ve always had something of a tie to this suburb so I am feeling quite nostalgic about it. It was the first place I lived in Newcastle 17 years ago (I’m from up the Tyne Valley originally). Anyway, good to see the Flickr Heaton photoset is swimmingly healthy at a very nearly impressive 101 photos.
* Update: I received this note which will also be added to the”moan list”
Its entirely shabby that a private company can get away with such a dismal service in what is essentially a pulic service. For what its worth xxx and I both wrote letters of complaint in around mid October, xxx’s concerned some quite wreckless driving, mine was for having to wait for over 40 minutes when they should be running at 8 an hour. We received letters saying how these issues would be looked at. Clearly nothing was done.
As I suggested then, it’s not knowing when they’re coming that is the biggest problem if they can’t maintain a regular timetable stops should be fitted with displays to let passengers know where the buses are.
Okay just one quick grump.
I am hopefully going to attend Thinking Digital at the Sage Gateshead. It looks quite interesting.
But why, whenever I come across events that are all a bit web2.0, are their event blogs so awful? Okay, so do they look nice and the writing and content is fine.
But virtually no comments. Isn’t that the whole point of web2.0? I have commented here but, as I write, the day after I posted it, my comment is yet to be moderated. Crap by even the most average blogging standards.
Surely it would be worthwhile for an event like this, that charges several hundred pounds a ticket, to have a full time blogger. They should be getting local bloggers on board and be building a community around this event. If you had done all the work to get these pages up, wouldn’t you be twisting arms to get the interaction happening?
Right now the host is passing out the drinks and things on sticks and none of the guests are saying a word. This place is dead anyway.
Likewise their Flickr page is just going through the motions and ticking boxes. Look, they’ll be saying, we have a Flickr page! I’m not sure why the bothered.
If you’re going to tell us about blogging then, at the very least, can you learn to do it yourselves first. I know these sites are set up by techies and it all looks just lovely. But can’t someone actually just give the whole “conversation” thing a kick start?
Web2.0 is conversation – it isn’t just pretty stuff. If you don’t understand this then what is it you can teach me?
Or put it another way, how come your average one-man-and-a-laptop-blog is nearly always vastly superior to corporate effort? A quick hint – it’s not what it looks like, it’s what you do with it.
Side note: My comment was a quick protest at the advertised Mac Humour of the Fake Steve Jobs who is to appear (he makes jokes about Microsoft..ooh no stop it). Further Mac grumblings here.
Update: I signed up. Hope it’s worth it. In my sign-up email I got the link to the Facebook group. Okay. Good. Ticking all the boxes etc. We got this. We got that. Call me old fashioned though, but if I was the Conference Producer I’m not sure I’d want all potential delegates having access to my holiday photos. Web2.0 can go too far. Think privacy settings people and maybe Flickr for Business and Facebook for Pleasure. You gotta have a system. Make the divide.
Update 2: Unless I am mistaken my stats point to an email being opened and a link being clicked for this post. It was sent to the conference big cheese with the title: “Slightly dodgy comments on blog”. Ah well. I think we made our point.
