So I was forced to sign up for eFax. Didn’t want to, didn’t really have an option, so oh well.

So last night I went to cancel. Of course your can’t really cancel online - you have to talk to a real-live operator.

So today I initiate a chat. This is the first time I have ever come across a live-chat that is actually embedded in the browser window. If there ever was a case for popups, its live-chat - browsing multiple tabs, it is easy to forget you have a live chat window open.

So I fill out the info (including my email), and ask to cancel. I explicitly state ‘I want to cancel my account, xxx@xxx.com is my email’. I get the usual ’sorry to see you cancel’, and then get asked for my email (alongwith other info). Now I assume the person is using a script, but I already put my email when I initiated the chat, and I just told you my chat roughly 15 seconds ago.

So then my good friend ‘Scott’ asks me why I want to cancel with a list of 8 options. Best of all, he says he cannot proceed unless I pick an option.

Of course, while talking to him, I have one of those ‘talk to a live operator’ popup appear. Sigh!

And then the credit sell. What really infuriated me (and thus sparked this post) was the complete evasiveness. It went like this:

1. I ask that my account be cancelled.
2. Scott said it would be in my interest to keep an account, they are willing to credit me $33.90 for ‘2 months of service’. I won’t be charged then. (note the amorphous language regarding being charged)
3. I ask him explicitly if I will be charged again (I have absolutely no interest in their service, I have my own fax machine now)
4. “Please be assured your eFax account will be credited with $33.90 so you will not be charged any monthly fee for next 2 months.”

You bastard. I didn’t ask for free two months, and I asked for my account to be canceled.

And this went on. I was given more credits, a ‘gift’ usage of $10.00, the ability to send ‘100 pages of faxes for free’, and so forth. I felt like I was talking to AOL.

I’m sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

Fat chance.

Vicodin is a common pain killer from Abbott Laboratories. Many people get addicted to it (including a friend of mine), usually during recovery following from surgery (who doesn’t want to be pain-free?) To quote Wikipedia:

The hydrocodone component of Vicodin is the reason for its abuse. Hydrocodone is an opioid, so its effects are similar to those of heroin (although not quite as strong) and it is highly addictive. It increases the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine, causing a strong euphoria. Vicodin addiction and withdrawal are also similar to those of heroin.

So when I read this post I just shook my head and laughed. Vicodin.com is owned by Abbott, just like you would expect. But what you won’t expect - the site is just a PPC-landing page.

Sure you can blame the typosquatters and the cybersquatters for all those search results/domains filled with PPC ads, but when a company with over $20 billion in sales is doing domain parking, you know there is no turning back.

Seems like everyone is confused about everything.

We talked to quite a few Yellowpage companies. From Yellowbook to SuperPages to regional and independent yellowpages companies, many of them were there. And none of them knew what to do.

We had a real enlightening chat with a person who worked at a regional yellowpages company. He said that he would be attending a YP conference sometimes in the next two weeks, and he was preparing for the same barrage of confusion that they always pull out - ‘what about the internet?’ Sure, some of them are getting online. Some of them are getting with the time, realizing their brands and sales forces they have assembled are fantastic. But in general, for the last 10 years (he runs their internet division), that is all they have done - ask ‘is the internet worth it?’ If people thought newspapers struggled with inertia, then they haven’t seen what the yellowpages are upto.

Another interesting tidbit we gleamed was that these companies do not care (much) about the data itself (ie what we are selling at iBegin Source). Their true focus is on advertising. Not only selling, but upselling (far easier in terms of effort vs return). These companies could potentially compete in the marketplace - but they are all too focused on just the ad sales.

There were some interesting battle stories. One of the most bizarre went as follows:

Two brothers each had their own rug business. And they hated each other. Both were big YP advertisers, and they would continually call in to cancel the others’ advertising print. They would pull all sort of tactics, such as calling on the weekends, confusing the weekend help (with a barrage of obscenities and what not, customer support just tries to you you off the phone). Eventually it got so bad that they had to do a lock on both their accounts. The only way any change could occur was if they went down to the store and saw the owner’s ID. In the end, one of the brothers ended up going to jail … for burning the other brother’s business down

YP data is the other problem with data categorization. Imagine you are looking at two pages - on the left is ‘Carpet Cleaning’ and on the right is ‘Carpet Drying’. Often times the categories do not have an obvious endpoint/startpoint. Someone who is doing data entry that sees an ad somewhere in the middle - what category will he chose? A lot of errors arise that way.

Next up: newspapers.

I’m finally back, and right on the cusp of exhaustion.

So - data.

Learned a lot of interesting stuff over the time. Some points to note (going to adopt this format for various topics):

• InfoUSA claims 14 million listings, but the online system only shows roughly 11.5 million - what gives?
• Acxiom rep threw out ‘19 million’ at me. Their official sales only claimed 15 million - disconnect?
• Amacai is mentioned, but seems to be staying afloat because of their parent company
• TrueLocal is out there, but they have multiple brands. Especially confusing is FranDat (listings of all franchises) vs BranDate (listing of all brands). Why not just merge them? Whats the definition of franchise vs brand. Is there overlap?
• Again mentioning TrueLocal, they claim 5 million URLs. Taking a high rough estimate of 15 million, are you telling me 33% of businesses have their own website? As a user - think of your own experiences. Searching for XXX online - did you find a URL? Color me skeptical
• Yahoo! claimed 22.5 million businesses. 22 million were local, and about 300k (my memory may be fuzzy) are regional-local (eg In-N-Out Burger is only in the west
• Quicken claimed 29 million businesses. Of them, 19 million are single-employee businesses.
• Quicken also claimed 6 million new businesses a year, 5.5-5.7 million fail (I wonder how many previously-established ones fail)
• Kudzu’s (owned by Cox) Atlanta site is nothing like their other sites. They buy meta-data for Atlanta that they do not for the rest of the cities
• There is a lot of meta-data services companies out there. Some of them are big fans of us, some of them not so much. We will be expanding into some other areas where we (again) let users contribute. This is an especially micro-local play, and might not even be a part of iBegin (superficially)
• Taxonomy databases are abound. They basically help build relationships between (seemingly) unrelated items. A simplistic one is where you define ‘furniture’ to include anything related to ‘chairs’ ‘couches’ ’sofas’ ‘bed frame’ etc. This is a huge gap that local search has right now, and improved taxonomy will help greatly. But will it happen soon? I’m leaning towards no
• There is no concept of accuracy. I might as well be asking their mother’s favorite prime number (answer: “no clue”)
• (potentially tipping my hat here) but a lot of work has to be done using census data. Demographics are key
• The rise of partnerships are accelerating. It is almost like newspapers are slightly transforming into conduits for users to express themselves, and other companies then provide technological poweress. It isn’t about raw data - it is about the access to that data (XML, pre-built solutions, etc)
• Yahoo! rep scoffed at San Diego Tribune’s usage of low-cost open source solutions. It actually grated my nerves.

It was interesting last night -I talked to the other data brokers.

No one has a clue.

One of the reps claimed 20 million listings (their first question was how many listings we had). Yet their own ads spoke of more than 5 million less.

TrueLocal claims 92% accuracy - how can they measure that, and what does it say for the industry when that is the best anyone can guarantee?

The most honest award goes to one of the data brokers, who, while leaving, stated (in essence) “we all have the same data, it just matters what you do with it.”

I did get a compliment yesterday - on my colorful (teal) shirt

In roughly 12 hours I’m off to the airport to attend Drilling Down on Local ‘07.

I will try to blog about anything interesting I learn, but we will see how long I can stand my tablet [I did buy an external keyboard + mouse for it]

The beauty of having data is once you know what to do with it, you can get it done fast.

So I spend a few hours whipping up a quick and easy mashup of restaurants + mapping. Basically pop in an address or move around the map, and it will show you the 30 closest restaurants.

I do want to add that the Explorer actually uses our own in-home geocoder solution (which we will be releasing ’soon’).

Of course, extending this to any other category/categories would take all of 5 minutes.

I plan on releasing the code so anyone can see how it was done … but right now, the conference is around the corner.

UPDATED: Just noticed it doesn’t always work in IE - some little JS bug. Will fix it later on. Try this link for now: restaurants near 91101. And if entering an address, click on ‘Center’ (dont press Enter).

Yeah yeah, it is just a quick prototype!

This isn’t about politics, it is about blogs as a form of crowdsourcing journalism (maybe I should add ‘citizen’ to complete that buzzword collection).

I read a story on the LA Times about how a blog drove the the US Attorney story.

For those that don’t know, the current US General Attorney (and I guess Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff) are under heat for firing US attorneys’ whose politics did not line up with the administration’s.

The storyline is simple:

1. Blogger (Josh Marshall, owner of Talking Points Memo) posts that the state’s attorney is being fired.
2. He does a follow up story that several others were being replaced (an oddity mid-term). He asked his 100,000 readers to write in if they knew anything about why they were being let go.
3. Over the span of two months, they figured out who was fired, and the likely politics behind it.
4. Heads start to roll …

Of course I simplified the story, especially the grueling work of putting it all together. But what is amazing about this story is that it could never have happened without all these readers coming together. This would never have come out five years ago (with the exception of a leak). I could wax on about the great power this gives us individual users (huzzah, watch out politicians), but it should not be needed. And yes, stories like Dan Rather and the Trent Lott were also due to bloggers, but they could have been picked up by reporters too. A story like this only came out because so many people worked together in figuring out what the hell was due.

On the lighter side - am I the only one who thinks Josh Marshall looks like Dennis Quaid? (source)

Google has changed its logo for St. Patrick’s Day.

I was struck by the #1 site. I was especially struck by their Alexa graph (click for full size):

Incidentally the spike is getting higher every year - is their site simply ranking higher, and/or is Google just becoming more powerful?

I have an odd obsession. Almost every time I come across a company that I find even mildly interesting, the first thing I do is run for the ‘About Us’ page. I want to know about the company, and invariably, I am always failed. Really, the ‘About Us’ page should be renamed to ‘Marketing Drivel that touches upon the company at a tangent.’ I’ve been so frustrated with what passes off as an About Us page that I didn’t even bother including one on iBegin Source. I instead opted for the more generic What is iBegin Source?

Even 37signals falls short. Sure they have a nice little blurb about the company, but I want to know the meat of it. I want to know who founded it. I want to know what happened. I want to know what really makes the company tick.

And so today, imagine my delicious surprise at the SitePoint About Us page. Fantastic! It is both marketing and actual meat. I absolutely loved the timeline on the right - the chronicling of how the two founders started, how they crossed roads, and how they have gone from strength to strength. Matt using Xoom.com? It brought a smile to my face - who didn’t use one of those atrocious free hosts back in the day? (before we knew better). I remember seeing webmaster-resources.com in the SERPs for the longest time, and now I know why it redirected to SitePoint.

The page is laid out in a perfect manner - the keypoints, impressive Alexa graph (even though admittedly I am not a fan of Alexa), news, and a nice timeline.

So with that in mind - kudos SitePoint - great job indeed.