It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same people making the same kinds of comments over and over. The value to the publisher is obvious, in that it encourages readers to come back, click more articles, view more ads, buy more stuff. But what value, really, does it add for the reader?

Certain topics are guaranteed to bring out particular brands of loonies – think climate change or religion. But even reader comments on relatively innocuous topics are an incredibly effective stupidity concentrator.

Essentially, all reader comments on any article ever can be boiled down to one of the following:

1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article agrees with that opinion, it is an unbiased, worthy and well written article.
2. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article disagrees with that opinion, it is illogical, biased nonsense.
3. The parts of this article I disagree with are illogical nonsense. The parts I agree with are worthy points, well argued.
4. Some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with surely proves this article correct/incorrect.
5. This article surely proves some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with.
6. Personally abusing and/or expressing sexual admiration for author, subject(s) of article and/or other commenters.
7. The affiliations of the author who wrote this article allow us to discount anything it says.
8. The bias of the publication in which the article appears allows us to discount anything it says.
9. Immensely long and off-topic rant containing wild conspiracy theories and LARGE SECTIONS OF ALL CAPS.
10. Repeating the same point five dozen other commenters already made and clearly demonstrating this commenter didn’t read any of the previous comments before mouthing off.

And…

11. I had an opinion before I read this article. Because the article is logically argued and presents the evidence clearly and without bias, I am willing to concede I was wrong about this subject previously. [Note: this never happens]

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A invested heavily in technology for its food manufacturing business, but the machinery was beset by diabolical difficulties.

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed their one hundredth circuit of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

At the gate, he asked to speak to Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

“I said, ‘Go away old man, we don’t need your witchcraft here’,” recounted Estratégico. “But he replied, ‘So, you don’t need help with your coffee beans turning into beetles? Your corn flakes becoming porn flakes? And your sausages that look like … you know what they look like.’

“I knew then that this old man had corporate learnings we could assimilate into our knowledge-based strategies moving forward.”

“Even 150-year-old wandering wise men need to visit the supermarket occasionally,” Sostenible said.

Estratégico and Sostenible ascended the four hundred steps to the company datacentre, at the top of the stone tower from which Colonel Sistemas Legado and his men held out in a heroic last stand against the army for 15 days and nights at the end of the revolutionary war.

“As soon as Desarrollo Sostenible entered the datacentre, the servers doused their flames, though the heat was still palpable,” said Estratégico.

Sostenible rummaged in his threadbare carpet bag and withdrew a small paintbrush and set of paints. He then proceeded to paint an uncannily accurate picture of an eye on the production control server. He repeated the process with the database server. He then began to chant in a deep voice that reverberated throughout the datacentre and over the whole factory.

“I couldn’t make out all the words he was saying, but it was something like ‘la ecología, la población local, el futuro’,” said Estratégico.

“Gradually a thick fog crept out of the forest to surround the datacentre tower. It started to seep through the cracks in the walls and settled around the servers.”

As this misty wet blanket smothered the passion of the servers, they began to work properly again.

“You don’t have to be a 250-year-old wise man to know you need two virtual eyes to prepare your datacentre for cloud computing,” explained Sostenible.

Business benefits

With the servers no longer overheating, the production lines gradually resumed their normal operation, aside from the occasional flocks of butterflies from the pasta machine.

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates successfully expanded its operations into Ecuador and Venezuela. Estratégico then developed an innovative new product for the Brazilian market.

“The bonus payment and royalties I received for inventing deep-fried butterflies helped me gain my financial freedom,” he said.

“Finally I was able to marry my second cousin Estrategia de Comunicación, who I had loved in secret ever since I saw her swimming naked under the waterfall in the forest when we were teenagers, but our family forbade us to see each other and promised her to Barón de Ladrón.”

Having finished his work, Desarrollo Sostenible fed a few chocolates to the mule and packed up his decrepit cart, piled high with packets of sausages.

“They may not look appetising, but they are the most delicious sausages I have ever eaten in my 347 years,” he exclaimed.

I Can Do All Things by Julie Kirkland

Business situation

To support its expansion into Ecuador and Venezuela, Grupo Nacional de Chocolates invested in a $10 million solution based around gleaming machines that worked 24 hours a day and never went on strike. This enabled the company to redeploy 150 staff to higher-value activities. One day without warning, a troop of soldiers arrived at the workers’ camp at dawn and marched them into the forest, never to be seen again.

No sooner had this occurred, than the machinery began to experience diabolical difficulties.

“The manufacturing line we used for pasta started producing live butterflies instead of farfalle,” said Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology. “Instead of jelly snakes, there were poisonous vipers. And don’t even ask what came out of the sausage machine.”

The control systems also suffered a range of performance and technical problems.

“The servers would burst into flames from the heat of their passions,” said Estratégico, a veteran of the revolutionary war. “I started to think this was a problem for which there was no end-to-end solution.”

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed one hundred circuits of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

[The story continues...]

1. Hard drive

What a lot of people think it means: The box part of a desktop computer.

What it really means: A smaller component inside the box that is used to store data permanently.

Why people get it wrong: If the box part of the computer has an official name, it is the ‘system unit’. You can see why it doesn’t grab anyone. Whereas calling the thing a ‘hard drive’ sounds about right to anybody who doesn’t know what’s actually inside one.

2. Screen saver

What a lot of people think it means: The image you put on the background of your computer’s virtual desktop.

What it really means: A piece of software that puts moving images or animation on your screen after you haven’t been using your computer for a while.

If computer monitors are left for too long with the same image or text in the same place, they can suffer ‘phosphor burn’. The light-emitting phosphor compounds in screens (especially old-fashioned monochromatic cathode ray tube screens) lose their brightness through use. If a screen always displays the same text in the same spot, that area will eventually become burnt in, leaving a faded ‘ghost’ image of that text.

Screen savers were designed to prevent this by placing an always-moving image on the screen.

Why people get it wrong: Aside from falling into the same category of ‘stuff you can put on your computer screen to personalise it’, these two things don’t have a lot in common. Modern LCD screens don’t suffer from phosphor burn (although plasma and OLED screens do), so actual screen savers aren’t particularly popular anymore. It’s all a bit of a mystery.

OK, so those are my two. What other tech malapropisms boil your blood?

It’s not always done well.

For instance, lately I have been receiving emails, about one a day, along the following lines:

Hi
It`s Rosalyn again. Will you ever contact me?
I made those nude pictures especially for you.

Phew, state-of-the-art social engineering there! The next day it was Jessie, not Rosalyn, but the message was the same.

Since this approach clearly hasn’t worked with me, the spammers thought they’d try a different approach.

Hi
It`s Cleveland again. Will you ever contact me?

Genius!

I don’t get it.

But after a lengthy comparison of iPhone cases online and at a local retailer, I found one which seemed to fit the bill: the Belkin Light Protect Rock (or LightProtectRock), also known as the Shield Flex, for 40 bucks.

First off, let’s clarify why you might need to protect the iPhone screen.

Here’s the back of the iPhone. Note the shiny, white, hard plastic.

Next, let’s look at the front of the iPhone. While this is also relatively robust, note it is made out of softer, more bendy plastic.

Now let’s look at a variety of objects you might find in the average pocket or handbag. Note how they are quite hard and pointy.

OK, so we have a combination of hard, pointy objects and soft, bendy plastic. Note how combining the two seems like a fairly bad idea.

Thus the need for a case for the iPhone which offers some kind of protection to prevent the soft, bendy plastic screen coming into contact with hard, pointy objects in your pocket or bag.

Now observe the box of the LightProtectRockWhatever. Witness how it clearly says ‘screen protection’.

Would a reasonable person, seeing this, assume this product provided some form of screen protection? Something to prevent the soft, bendy plastic screen coming into contact with hard, pointy objects? I think so.

Now observe the Belkin LightProtectRockRipoff once removed from the box.

Ponder how such a device would, in fact, provide any form of screen protection. Now place the iPhone inside the device.

Note how the screen actually protrudes from the device by a couple of millimetres.

So there you have it: a product which promises to provide screen protection actually provides no screen protection whatsoever.

Australian law is pretty clear on this. A company is not allowed to make false claims about “the sponsorship, performance characteristics, accessories, benefits and uses of goods and services”.

Seems like an open and shut case.

All the while, LinkedIn sat around gradually building momentum without any of the fanfare or media hype. Recruiters loved it, if only for its ability to fill quotas on candidate lists. But the developers also pulled in a few ideas from here and there – groups, events, marketing, status updates – OK, they nicked it all from Facebook and Twitter.

As a result, people looking to network for business – not to share pictures of kids and cats – have been coming back to LinkedIn and thinking, ‘Hey, this is pretty good!’ And LinkedIn gave them somewhere to put all their relevant career and skills information, which is a lot harder to do on Twitter.

Last week I hosted an online seminar with Karen Moloney from Get Me Learning Resources and Faye Hollands from Outshine Consulting. Karen took us through the nuts and bolts of promoting yourself and your business while Faye told us how she had used and benefited from it. And as usual, there were heaps of cracking questions from the audience.

If you’re dead keen to find out more, you can read Karen’s helpful handout notes or watch a recording of the webinar (though you will have to fill in your details to get it).

Sure, it’s one way to attract a lot of attention to an otherwise dull job ad, but everyone from female job hunters to company management was not impressed. The company and police are looking into it.

In Melbourne’s western suburbs a transport company employee was killed after a server fell on him while it was being unloaded from a truck. He reportedly saw the 200kg fridge-sized machine coming loose from a forklift and decided he would try to save it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone put their body on the line to try and save an expensive piece of gear. With photographers, for instance, there’s a strong instinct to save the camera even while risking their own health, or body parts. But no matter how expensive the gadget, chances are a limb – or a life – are much harder to replace.

This could lead me to believe the majority of Australians are as passionate about internet censorship as me and my friends. But then I remember that most of my friends are university educated, left-leaning types who work in journalism or the IT industry.

This same selection bias is at work in the online community, particularly on Twitter. The sort of people who use Twitter, who blog, who read the IT media are precisely the sort of people who would oppose internet censorship.

This has led many people to believe if they make enough noise about it online, the Government will drop the filter. Unfortunately, this greatly overestimates the importance and influence of Twitter and social media generally when it comes to real-world politics.

Even an infinite number of angry posts on Twitter, sarcastic blog posts and articles in the IT press would still have no effect on Government policy. Politicians only care about who can deliver them blocs of votes in important electorates.

Online fame is fleeting, but mine was the top article on ABC's The Drum for a little while

As I argue on ABC’s The Drum blog, so far the Christian lobby – which is for the filter – is doing this a lot better than the disparate anti-filter coalition.

This is not to say the anti-censorship campaign is doomed. However, it needs to focus less on preaching to the choir and more on real-life, professional political lobbying.

It’s a big ask, particularly because many of the anti-censorship groups have little experience in direct political action. But it must be done if we are to convince the Government of the immense folly and dire (supposedly) unintended consequences of its current plans.

In the same spirit, yesterday I called Toshiba tech support for help on a very minor issue with my laptop. Ideally I would have preferred to email a question and then get annoyed when no one responded (59% of companies don’t respond to email queries, you know). But Toshiba doesn’t give you the option; just a phone number and a postal address. So I called, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast. Because I had nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I started Tweeting:

• I am currently caller 57 in the queue for Toshiba tech support. 57! Customer service FTW!
• Enjoying Toshiba’s commitment to customer service; I am now 43rd in the queue after 10 minutes.
• “Challenges we all face are the future and the environment” – who writes these on-hold scripts? 26 min and counting. Yay Toshiba!
• “An uguarded MFD could be an easy target” – so true! Celebrating the first half hour of Toshiba’s customer love.
• “In this oversaturated market, good quality in LCD TVs stands out”. Toshiba has stopped telling me my position in the queue. 47 mins.
• Do on-hold music composers proudly call their mothers to say, ‘Hey ma, my music was used in Toshiba’s HOUR LONG CALL QUEUE’?
• Oh wow! An hour and five minutes on hold and I get put through… to a voicemail system. Bad Toshiba. BAD BAD BAD TOSHIBA.

While I was on hold, the system repeatedly gave me the option of giving my phone number for someone to call back. I did not use this option because in my experience, nobody ever calls back and it’s just a way of shortening the call queue to improve ‘performance’ statistics.

My live tweets were attracting a fair bit of attention and a few retweets. Jonathan Crossfield suggested I invent a hashtag for live-tweeting a call queue, which I did: #YourCallIsImportantToUs. Guess it hasn’t caught on yet.

I tried calling again later in the same day, but things were even worse than the first time. Once again, the live stream tells the story:

• Just call me glutton for punshiment: round two of Toshiba #YourCallIsImportantToUs Why can’t I email my question?
• OK, forget it. 75 callers in queue. Have used callback facility. Now holding breath until someone from Toshiba calls.
• [Two hours later] Still holding breath waiting for Toshiba to call back. Evidently they don’t monitor Twitter. Turning slightly blue.

First thing this morning, someone called. It was Toshiba’s PR manager, who admitted something was not right with the call centre and this was a cause for concern over at HQ. She got my problem fixed immediately. Happy me, but what about the 74 other p0or bastards in the call queue?

I might be a relatively well known tech journalist in real life, but on Twitter I am not hugely influential (no matter what Topsy says); I have a modest following of a smidge over 500 people. But thanks to the magic of retweeting by ZDNet Australia (1700 followers) and  Jonathan (more than 2400), my whinge was now reaching an audience of thousands. So did I get a call back because I complained a lot, because of who I am, or because some fairly influential people took up my cause?

Some conclusions and questions:

• Big companies: if you under-resource your call centres, you reduce costs but risk pissing off customers in a really big way. This isn’t as easy to get away with as it used to be because consumers have ways to hold you to account.
• If you want to reduce your call queues, provide an email support option and actually respond to queries when they come in. Why does no one understand this?
• Consumers: many big brands (or their PR firms) monitor what’s said about them on Twitter. They’ll call you back a lot faster in response to bad publicity than for regular tech support.
• If you’re influential on Twitter, or have friends who are, complaining loudly and rudely in public about poor service gets results; we’ve know this for a couple of years now. But if you’re not as famous as Michael Arrington, or even me, how effective is this technique?