Due to others’ appointments, the Vista Group meeting today was a mere duo: myself and Jim Donovan, Esq., who will give up blogging in 10 days. It meant it was the second-least well attended meeting in our history. Jim has never let us forget the least well attended one.
   I have always said that one should blog when one wants to. If one feels pressured to do so, then stop. Blogging should be a fun activity and, for me, it’s cathartic. With a new venture on the horizon for Jim (from where he will likely blog again), time is at a premium, and I can fully appreciate that he needs to take a step back.
   Of course we will not bid farewell to Jim just because he stops blogging, principally, as Natalie wrote in our emails arranging today’s meeting, we are too incompetent to organize the monthly meetings without him. And he got us in to the Wellington Club for the end-of-2009 edition where we took over the Deputy Mayor’s table. (Albeit on a day that the Deputy Mayor was not there, which made for a less comical time.)
   The Club (the luncheon at which should have been chronicled at the time) has its own gym. Apparently, Club members often talked about how our gym’ll fix it. That is, however, another story.
   There were some in-depth discussions about my mayoral campaign and the Wellington City Council, the fact that Anouska Hempel, a.k.a. Lady Weinberg, is a Wellingtonian and how she is important to anyone who watched various Hammer Horrors, and the Y2K episode of Family Guy and its homage to Dallas—things that we would not have digressed to had Natalie and Mark been there. (Jim had brought up ‘Who shot J. R.?’* on his blog a few days before.)
   However, we covered the boiler-plate approach of some IP law firms, the bad customer service we received from Vodafone and Sky TV, and the lack of clarity over some WCC charges over which Jim got three different figures for the same thing. From what I could make out, the charge varied depending on the person he spoke to, the day of the week, and the flutter of a butterfly’s wings over the Shetland Islands. Need I push transparency again?

Above One of Anouska Hempel’s creations, the self-named Hempel hotel, in London. I believe they want a definite article in the official name, but I can’t be brought to capitalize it in the middle of a sentence. I will only make an exception for residents of The Terrace in Wellington.

* It was, of course, Kristin, Sue Ellen’s sister. Everyone remembers the hype, no one remembers the answer. Back in those days, we found out a year later in New Zealand, and there were no internet spoilers.—JY

As of tonight, the Beyond Branding Blog, where I first cut my teeth blogging, is no more.
   The posts are still there, but no further comments can be entered on to the site. The nearly four years of posts remain as an archive of some of our branding thought of that period.
   The blog had a huge number of fans in its day, but as each one of us went to our own blogs, there seemed little need to keep it going. Chris Macrae and I were the last two holding the fort in late 2005. Since January 2006, no new posts have been entered on to the site. No new comments have come in a year.
   Google’s announcement that it would end FTP support for blogs in May spurred me into action, and I advised the Medinge Group’s membership this morning that I would take it off the Blogger service.
   I altered the opening message to reflect the latest change.
   I was very proud of the blog, because it was the first one I was involved in. It was also the first I customized to match the look and feel of the rest of the Beyond Branding site, which I designed in 2003. While the design is one from the early 2000s, it has not dated as much as I had expected.
   Beyond Branding’s core message of transparency and integrity remains valid, so while the blog is no longer updated, I think the book remains relevant to the 2010s.

Blogger has announced that it will cease supporting its FTP publishing service, which means the shifting of this blog to Wordpress was well timed. It seems I would have had to shift in any case—the fact that this happened just over a month ago was fortunate.
   I received an email about this for the first time from Rick Klau, the gentleman who helped Vincent Wright and I restore his Social Media Consortium blog, today. I was surprised to learn from Rick that ‘only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP’ and ‘On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable’.
   After personal experience, I can say Rick is one of the good guys at Google, and I have no doubts about what he says. It highlights that Google wants to host as much of our data as possible, which, as readers of this blog have seen over the last year, is a dangerous proposition. If Blogger decides to pull your blog, then good luck getting it restored: you won’t have ready access to your data.
   In fact, if this blog was not self-hosted, I would have faced far greater concerns with my shift to Wordpress; and the fact that Vincent’s was hosted at Google almost saw to its total demise, if it had not been for Rick’s intervention.
   With hindsight, if it were not for the issues with the Social Media Consortium, my offer to help, and the subsequent stonewalling I received on the support forums, I might never have made the move when I did. Funny how things work out in the long run.

When the Social Media Consortium disappeared again, we panicked and alerted Rick Klau at Google. Once again, Rick was as good as his word and found out there had been an accidental deletion.
   What impresses me about him—as if I wasn’t already impressed—is his quick action. He must have other matters to deal with, yet he responds within minutes and actions things soon after.
   Initially, the newly restored blog was not appearing in the Dashboard, but that has now been remedied.
   Once again: thank you, Rick.

I was pretty stoked to find that this blog ranked so highly in Technorati on the subject of cars, considering it’s not a core focus, even if it is a passion of mine.
   I was visiting the site in order to update the Medinge press room URL, which shifted late last year when we moved away from Blogger (the usual story). Turns out you can’t update a URL—you have to claim a new blog.
   To all those who helped me get such a high ranking, thank you.

Rick Klau’s action today in restoring Vincent’s Social Media Consortium blog got me putting things into perspective.
   We know sites like Blogger and Vox are free, but what happens when they fail?
   Vox, the Six Apart blogging service, had been where I had put my personal posts—as well as a bunch of private ones inaccessible to the general public—for three years. I built up good friendships there, before social networking became everyday.
   Yet when that service failed, I went from Vox evangelist to someone who became acutely aware of the site’s failings. Those who dissed Vox months before I did, and whose complaints I thought little of, suddenly seemed to be visionaries.
   I don’t think things were handled brilliantly. While I was still there and keeping up my rate of complaints about their service being dodgy, I got replies. The minute I left, that was it.
   ‘Phew, we don’t have to talk to that nut again.’
   All the claims about wanting to get to the bottom of the problem suddenly seemed insincere. And it’s worth noting that the bug I experienced—where a compose screen would take between 15 minutes and 48 hours to load—is still present.
   They had lost quite a few users, as I had noted, and it’s obviously something deep within their code.
   The damage had been done.
   Meanwhile, Google hasn’t exactly helped, either. While Vox had me pursuing its problems for six weeks, Google was damaging its brand for six months.
   When Vincent’s blog was first blocked in July, the company promised two-day reviews. These promises were all broken. I’m sure Vincent and I, and many other bloggers who contributed to the Social Media Consortium, would have loved to have known why. As it turned out, the blog’s reviewers agreed with the computer’s decision to render the blog inaccessible, and then to delete it altogether.
   By the time I got to the Google support forums to argue the case in November, there were more broken promises—as well as downright obstruction by someone who probably gets his kicks from it.
   It got me wondering: people who do things in Google’s name aren’t very intelligent, if they can’t grasp some of the basics of their role.
   They were also not particularly courteous or understanding.
   As the frustration grew, things in my world got un-Googled. My Firefox default search engines became Cuil or Bing. I shifted my blogs away, including this one, or simply stopped blogging at Blogger. (The Medinge Group’s press room went to Wordpress late last year.) While once upon a time I would recommend Vox, Blogger and Wordpress to people depending on their blogging needs, I would only now say, ‘Wordpress’.
   I never was sold on Gmail—and I notice friends are beginning to have problems with that service, including being locked out. People using Gmail to commit fraud and use Lucire’s name were allowed to continue to do so, even after we reported them. Even before this incident, but within the same calendar year, I discovered that Adsense was a load of rubbish.
   All this began making me think: Google has jumped the shark.
   If someone like Google’s Rick Klau—who, if you read his blog, is an incredibly intelligent guy, not to mention an incredibly courteous one—had known of our case earlier, I’m sure we wouldn’t have allowed the Google brand to become so tarnished in our minds.
   Rick fixed things in 24 hours and saved the day as far as the Social Media Consortium was concerned. He’s also given himself a lot of good karma—I’ve seen other blogs he’s gone and restored in the last few days. But it’s a couple of days of Google goodness versus six months of its own brand-wrecking, through either bad service done in its name, bad products, or not having much of a human touch.
   Given that I was one of the first people to use Google in the late 1990s, and abandon AltaVista, Infoseek and the others in its favour, it’s a disappointing end to the 2000s.
   The trust I once might have had for Google has evaporated into the ether. It would be stupid to say that I would never use the company’s services again—you can hardly avoid it—but I’ll be thinking twice about anything new that it introduces.
   The internet leadership vacuum is becoming a reality, because I don’t see Facebook or Twitter dominating (especially not the former, with its questionable practices). And that means a new company can fill the void in the 2010s. It could even be a New Zealand one—or, better still, a Wellington one.
   There’s enough world-class thinking here which can be used as a base. And, if elected this year as Wellington’s mayor, I’d like to build on that and see if we can create an online world-beater.
   I know of a couple of Kiwi ventures already that have world-beating capabilities, currently seeking capital. The “next Google” might be among them, if we can make sure that they can grow the way they should.

All it takes is finding the right bloke and hoping they would do the right thing.
   At the end of the day, that was the lesson in getting Vincent Wright’s Social Media Consortium blog restored.
   Yesterday, Josh Forde Tweeted me about an article he had read, where John Hempton’s Blogspot-hosted blog had been removed by Google. In the comments, a Blogger manager, Rick Klau, responded. I wrote to Rick on Josh’s suggestion.
   Today, Rick responded to say he had restored the blog. He also privately gave us some advice on what got the blog picked up by Google in the first place and why it might not have been restored in those ‘two business day’ reviews.
   It was, of course, the first we have heard of the reasons, and he has a point. At Rick’s request, Vincent and I have promised not to share that publicly.
   The blog was temporarily removed again as the bot picked it up, but Rick has now whitelisted it so we can begin posting again, at long last.
   It’s been a six-month battle but we’ve finally got there.
   I still think Google’s procedure needs some work. The way we were spoken to on the forums was unacceptable, as was the obstruction and even deletion of evidence.
   However, Rick’s actions have restored a bit of our faith. It’s good that the people actually working inside for Google can tell who the good guys are and have some horse sense.
   What Rick also did right was to be accessible, and he kept his word not only to us but to other bloggers.
   His emails to us were punctual, and on that note he kicks my ass given how long I can take to get back to people.
   So, a big thank-you to Rick Klau—and I look forward to seeing more posts over at the newly restored Social Media Consortium.

Fascinating, isn’t it? If you happen to have a Blogger blog that was wrongly deleted, and one of your readers is Felix Salmon of Reuter, then of course Google is going to come to your rescue within a day. (The link, and an important detail below, was found by Josh Forde and Tweeted to me earlier today.)
   There’s good criticism from Mr Salmon here on Google’s policy as well as other examples of the company’s broken promises in the comments.
   Rick Klau, one of the Blogger managers, put his address in the comments asking one disgruntled blogger to contact him, and to get his site restored.
   I’ve now written to Mr Klau, too, about Vincent Wright’s Social Media Consortium and the “service” Google has provided us to date. We shall see if he, and his company, are being sincere.
   If I get no satisfaction, then we might conclude that there’s one rule for those who manage to get the profile of a Reuter editor (Felix, we miss Portfolio), and another rule for everyone else.

PS.: On the afternoon of January 6 NZDT, Rick Klau reinstated and whitelisted Vincent’s blog. Thank you, Rick—so glad we finally got the definitive word from Google!

Is it any wonder Vox’s resources are taxed? Here’s a chap that does 3,265 posts in a month—all off-site spam. (I won’t give them the privilege of a link—no point raising their search engine rankings.)
   I vote that Vox has some form of alarm at HQ for people who blog too often. Twitter and Facebook, as I understand it, has a trigger point for excessive posting, even if it catches legitimate users from time to time.
   But set the per-day bar high enough, and they should be able to catch abusers like this.
   I know: I really shouldn’t care what happens there any more. However, I still have a few groups that I manage there, where I am particularly alert about spammers and sploggers.

Spot the difference The Blogger blog (top) and this Wordpress one (above).

It took quite a bit of time redoing the template for Wordpress, but I think we are there.
   There are some differences between this and the Blogger blog, but if there are any issues, please let me know in the comments. And there’s still some tweaking that needs to be done with the headers, meta tags and categories.
   And if anyone knows how to get mouseovers working in PHP, please let me know. The menu bar above is a tad less animated than it used to be.
   I won’t switch over the feeds at Feedburner and Twitterfeed just yet till I get into the swing of things.
   Interestingly, last week was the record week for this blog’s traffic—ironical since I’ve opted to start afresh on Wordpress. I had planned to do some “best of” posts based on what were the top posts in Feedburner, only to discover that most were done in the last six months.
   I know it’s the middle of summer and we’re watching re-runs on TV, but it doesn’t seem right to fish out posts that were that recent. So, I’ll build this blog the old-fashioned way, and switch the feeds over when I have something interesting to post.
   And happy 2010! It’s nice to start blogging at a new place.