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We had a company outing to the London Symposium On Social Tools In The Enterprise (hereinafter referred to STES in deference to my carpal tunnels) yesterday – a long day, starting with a train at 0700 and ending in the car at 2230, but worth it.

I’ve been to (and spoken at, for that matter) a fair few conferences in my time, but this was my first experience of a conference where the majority of attendees were social software geeks – mucho chunky glasses and Powerbooks. The actual conference itself was pretty good from a professional point of view – A-listers like Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolff, Marc Eisenstadt and Euan Semple, with some interesting stuff on how you get these kind of tools into the enterprise.

It was also the first time I’ve seen back channels and group-blogging with SubEthaEdit in action (albeit on a fairly small scale), and pretty impressive it was too. All of which makes me think that a trip to London’s in order for the next NotCon-style event, or further afield if I could justify a trip to Supernova…

Today’s been a bit of a green-ink sort of day. This morning I fired off a broadside at the MD of Powergen (or useless cretins as I prefer to know them.) Nothing particularly earth-shattering, just a complete inability (after 12 months) to comprehend the fact that I no longer live at the address I used to live at, which means I’m no longer using any electricity there. I got fed up with talking to the munchkins that populate their call centre, so a quick trawl through the Companies House database led to the name of their MD and a registered office address, and after venting my spleen I feel Much Better Now. Maybe I should have done a Cheney…

Then for an encore I decided to bang off a rant to Luke “Don’t know a good thing when it points out where my website has gone wrong” Vetere, the Marketing Director of Odious Cinemas, who’s currently firing off nastygrams to bona-fide web hero Matthew Somerville:

To: LVetere@odeonuk.com

Dear Mr Vetere,

I’m an ex-customer of Odeon. One of the main reasons I’m an ex-customer is that I got fed up with the ridiculous struggle that was involved in trying to give you my money in order that I could book a ticket. One of the reasons that I’m likely to stay an ex-customer is that your organisation doesn’t seem to know a good thing when it’s presented with one.

In case you haven’t realised, I’m referring to your email conversation with Matthew Somerville, who has gone to the time and trouble to do what you should have done in the first place, and produced an accessible, standards-compliant website which enables customers to do what the website should enable them to do – namely access your listings and make bookings for your films. But rather than take his advice (and believe me, you need to) you’ve dismissed his efforts out of hand, and threatened him with legal action on the basis of what seems to be some rather confused ideas about data protection. Which is somewhat ironic when you consider that as your website stands, you are running the risk of being one of the first organisations to fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act as it applies to services such as yours.

All of which is making you look both ungrateful and arrogant, is garnering considerable amounts of negative publicity for your organisation, and is likely to make me and others who care about this kind of thing remain ex-Odeon customers. Considering your role as the marketing director is to persuade people like me to forsake your competitors and come through your doors, might I suggest that you should treat your customers (and Matthew Somerville in particular) with a little more respect?

Yours hopefully,

Tim Duckett

Thankfully I no longer have to use Odeon cinemas thanks to City Screen being just around the corner – I say thankfully, because as a result of their atrocious website, I wouldn’t be able to find out what they were showing – it simply doesn’t work on any of the five (count ‘em) different browsers I have at my availability on this Powerbook.

The bizarre thing is, it’s not like they don’t know it’s atrocious – it’s been crap since I last lived anywhere near an Odeon (about 2 years ago), and nothing has improved. Which is despite the fact that there’s now a pretty good chance that it’s actually illegal, thanks to the Disability Discrimination Act.

So you’d think that someone doing something about it would either a) be a good thing for Odeon; or b) shame them into doing something about it. Neither of which is the case. In a classic demonstration of why they need a good whack with the Cluestick, Odeon have seen fit to fire off legal-threateningnastygrams demanding that Matthew Somerville take the “offending” site down. How dumb-fuck stupid can Luke Vetere, Marketing Director of Odeon, be?

I get pissed off by companies that see fit to ignore standards and produce crippled sites that only work with IE, or use gratuitous amounts of Flash, or simply ignore common sense and have vast graphic splashscreens. But now that there’s the Disability Discrimination Act, which as far as I’m aware puts a legal requirement on firms to make their sites accessible, presumably there’s nothing to stop someone making a complaint about Odeon’s site, just to bring their stupidity home to them?

I’m wondering if I should start to feel like some kind of a pariah, but I haven’t had any Gmail invites yet. And I seem to be the only person with a blog on this side of the galactic spiral arm who hasn’t got about 40 of the damn things to give away, which makes me wonder a) what it is that other people are doing that means they get given these elusive things? and b) have I done something to upset the Great God Of Google in a previous life?

Having said that, I’m not exactly sure what I’d do with one, because I’m not convinced from what I’ve heard that it would give me anything I don’t already have with Fastmail (except perhaps a slightly funkier interface). But the chance to find out would be nice

Partly because I’m intruiged as to the strange people who subscribe to my XML feed, and partly because it could be quite useful for a couple of clients that I’m working with, I’ve been playing around with FeedBurner. It’s a pretty neat idea, at least until they go evil and start squirting ads down the feeds – you use their site to parse your XML feed, redirect your subscribers to the new FeedBurner feed, and they collate lots of stats about who and where and where and how people have been reading.

So far it seems to work quite well, and gets neatly around the ‘who the hell is reading me’ question…

…because the house sale is back on. It was starting to look a bit dodgy because one-half of the lower chain hadn’t seen any progress since their offer was accepted – the buyer’s disappeared and his solicitor hasn’t been instructed, all of which started to look distinctly dodgy. So the sales coordinator at my estate agent (who I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of, having seen him in action today) did or said something which resulted in them upping their mortgage offer so that they were proceedable again. Which means that having signed my contract, it should all be rattling through any day now. Now then, how many chickens did I have again…?

I suppose that this report about one in four internet users downloading films comes from the school of “if you’re going to tell a lie, you might as well tell a big one“. One in four internet users downloading films? Total, complete, unexpurgated fictional bollocks.

To quote the BBC (which has regurgitated the press release verbatim, to it’s shame):

For the study, the MPAA questioned 3,600 internet users who regularly went to the cinema from across the world. It found that a quarter admitted to having downloaded a film from the internet.

This flies in the face of logic if you stop to consider the logistics of this. From a random sample of internet users worldwide, it’s highly unlikely that broadband access is going to amount to as much of 25% of that sample, and broadband access is pretty much a prerequisite for downloading something the size of a film. But then even bog-standard 512Kbps broadband is hardly adequate for pulling down your average movie, which is going to run to 600Mb-plus. The “survey” is asking us to believe that one in four of us regularly waits around for 24 hours or so while the latest blockbuster downloads.

The other factor to bear in mind is that this “survey” was released in the same week as we learn that the studios are struggling to cope with a 5% increase in box office takings. Coincidence? Or just spin?

Not that it matters to the BBC, it would appear, because there isn’t a single line in the report that might question – even subtly – whether this isn’t opinion masquerading as fact. I’m all for Jeremy Paxman and the Today programme continuing to do over lying bastards politicians, but their technology hacks could do with some Huttoning.

UPDATE: See, I told you so…

Bill Gates is quoted as stating that open source software is A Bad Thing:

“If you don’t want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source. It is not something you do as a day job. If you want to give it away, you work on it at night,” he said.

“[Open source] doesn’t guarantee upward compatibility or do that kind of integration [for seamless computing to work].

“We certainly will have open-source apps that compete with and that run on Windows. But when it comes to a guarantee or having someone who stands behind your software, [open source] is typically not something done in a capital approach.”

To which I would have to say – with the greatest of respect to the richest man in the world – phooee. If it wasn’t for open source software, my company, my job and the intellectual property that my company has created wouldn’t exist, because we’d never have been able to start in the first place. We wouldn’t have been able to afford the suite-load of Microsoft server licenses, nor would we have been able to take the source code and create the new and exciting creations that we’ve created.

They produce fantastic products, but unfortunately Apple’s after-sales support is on a par with some of the crappiest. Which is a great shame, because if they squared that particular circle, it would be pretty much an unbeatable combination. And even though I am now a rabid Apple fan, at the back of my mind there’s always the lingering fear that some day, It’ll Happen To Me…

So here’s a link to a tale of woe about a 12″ PowerBook to give it some Google juice and hopefully go some way towards shaming Apple into doing something about it… (and a link to the tale on Plasticbag.)