Panchromatica

Restraint of Trade?

From Ebay

In February, we reduced the visibility of UK items on eBay.com, as they had reached a level where they were significantly impeding domestic trade on eBay.com. We are aware that a small percentage of sellers, who relied in whole or in part on US buyers, were significantly affected by this reduced visibility.

Since then, we have been planning how best to display some UK items on eBay.com and some US items on eBay.co.uk so that cross-border trade can thrive without impeding domestic trade on either site.

It seems to me that there are several ways to read this. One is that US sellers are worried about competition - especially with the slipping $ to £ and $ to € rate of exchange. References to 'impeding domestic trade' tend to reinforce that interpretation.

On the other hand I've noticed - for example on Etsy - that many US sellers seem frightened of selling internationally. Having looked at the US Postal Service Web site I can see why. Sending anything out of the US seems to be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Some US sellers however seem almost to be unaware that there are people outside the US borders who actually buy things. This shows up a great deal in forum discussions of all sorts. I remember being accused of being 'Unamerican' back in the days when I had an AOL e-mail address for example, the person concerned clearly having no idea that AOL was an international company. I suppose, given the huge size of the USA, this isn't entirely surprising, since making any international journey takes much greater effort than travelling within Europe.

EDIT: It occurs to me that it is always possible for the buyer to exclude non-local sellers so I suspect my less charitable conclusion has some merit.

 

MyThings U.K.

Just as LibraryThing allows you to keep track of your books, so MyThings U.K. now allows you to keep an online record of your valuable belongings     and track their values. Stolen goods can be reported to a Trace service, said to be "the leading global registry of lost and stolen valuables used by police departments, auction houses, and second hand dealers."

Time Goes By - What it's really like to get older

Via Ronni Bennet at Time Goes By.

We went to breakfast at a restaurant where the "seniors' special" was two eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast for $1.99.

"Sounds good," my wife said. "But I don't want the eggs."

"Then I'll have to charge you two dollars and forty-nine cents because you're ordering a la carte," the waitress warned her.

"You mean I'd have to pay for not taking the eggs?" my wife asked incredulously.

"Yes!!"

"I'll take the special."

"How do you want your eggs?"

"Raw and in the shell," my wife replied.

She took the two eggs home.

There's another nice story in the comments too...

A very self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

"You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one," the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear. "The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon; our spaceships have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light-speed processing  and...," pausing to take another drink of beer.

The senior citizen took advantage of the break in the student's litany and said, "You're right, son. We didn't have those things when we were young........so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little twit, what are you doing for the next generation?"

League of Gentlemen (and women)

I'm not a huge fan of 'link swapping', but the basic premise of this scheme is one I can subscribe too - I find lots of blogs with huge traffic and I wonder why these?

EDIT: I like the 'Carnival' idea much better and this one - the 'Carnival of Citizens' looks as if it could be good. Deadline for the next one is December 15th - more here.

Alternatives to flickr

I'm looking into alternatives to flickr - not because I don't like it, I do - but because its policy towards anything other than plain vanilla photography is pretty poor. Th emain alternative seems to be Zooomr at the moment although nothing quite matches flickr's 'social networking' aspects.

This is the first - and so far only - image I've uploaded to Zooomr. I'm preparing a longer post on the various sites available, so expect more.

Edited because I missed off the Zooomr links

Another moving story

If you look at my side bar, you will see that I sell some craft items through a site called Etsy. Payment for these is via the ubiquitous PayPal.

While I was incommunicado because of the move an order came in but, not having any net access, I was unaware of it. My poor customer tried without success to get her product and when answer came there none, she of course - and quite correctly - registered a complaint with Etsy and Paypal. Once I was aware of what was going on (3000 emails remember!) I of course got in touch with her and with Etsy explaining what had happened and offering profuse apologies (and offering the customer her product FOC). Etsy rapidly reinstated my account.

PayPal is another matter however. Their terms of service allow them to refund the customer in these circumstances which in this case they did - all bar $0.55! Until that last tiny amount is paid my PayPal account is frozen. Why they didn't pay it I don't know. I tried to pay it but was told I did not have enough funds in my PayPal account. (I don't hold funds in my account, making all payments by card.) According to the PayPal site this last amount had to be paid by cheque to PayPal in the US!

I was also forced into a complex process of verifyng my bank account details which took about 5 days. Once that had been done I was then finally allowed to pay the $0.55 - except...

Trying to find out why my account was still blocked, I got an e-mail which claims to be from a human (although I think it is an automatically generated form) telling me that it will take up to 9 working days for the payment to go through. Until this happens and someone at PayPal has looked at the account it will remain blocked.

So - for the sake of $0.55 which is only payable because PayPal messed up the original refund, I can't trade on Etsy or via my own pages or buy or sell on EBay and overall this state of affairs will persist for something like 3 weeks. Am I missing something here? This seems like deliberate punitive behaviour - it certainly isn't good customer service. I have no choice with Etsy, but I will certainly be looking into alternative methods of making and receiving payment for my own site and for EBay. Any suggestions?

Normal Service will be resumed as soon as possible

I should, with any  luck, be moving on Wednesday. As these things happen in England, it has been a messy business and may yet form the basis of a post. The effect though is that I amn likely to be without a broadband connection for a couple of weeks so will probably not be posting. I can't even guarantee e-mail access for the first few days.

So - please bear with me. I have a couple of guest posts lined up to appear while I'm gone, but won't be in a position to reply to comments.

Firefox 1.5

Sad to say I have had my first significantly negative experience with Firefox with this upgrade. From the Firefox forum it appears to suffer badly from memory leakage. This may be related to my problem where after a few minutes online it simply stops working and won't even restart after closing it down. I don't have the time at the moent to investigate fully and from the Firefox forum it looks as if there is no definitive fix yet anyway, so for the time being I've reverted to an earlier version. Has anyone else managed to get it working consistently?

Non-flashy Flash application

An unfussy (and free) Flash application for displaying photos on your web site.

[via Brendadada - actual link here]

Wikis, webs and what people REALLY think

In a recent post I quoted this:

Rather than expect people to visit somebody else’s online space to share their views or debate issues, more and more people will share their own views through a personal space, weblog or wiki with the expectation that these can be cross-posted or syndicated to other places that would like to share them. People should own their own contributions and express them in their own voice - it should be up to the consulting organisation to do the leg-work to aggregate these contributions by going to the people, rather than vice versa.

I've been playing with wikis for a while, using PBwiki, and I used to visit Ecotone when it was active, but I have never used it for any serious purpose. Now in a naked attempt at promotion, which I freely acknowledge, those nice people at PBwiki have offered to double my wikispace it I post about them here. You can tour their site or sign on and play as I did.

There is a serious point to this of course. The availability of extra space gives me a chance to think about slightly more complex possibilities. I also believe that the greater the variety of tools available, whether blogs and wikis or photologs (like flickr), the more likely it is that they will permeate into the wider community and give the standard member of the public the chance to have their say in their own words.

I'm working on something at the moment which could bring some of these ideas together in a public consultation. If it is going to work I have to be able to do it myself because I am in no way a programmer - I stopped doing that when I sold my BBC Micro. Anything that depends on complex tools simply won't work. I'm hoping to adapt an idea from Village Design Statements that I know has been used elsewhere in other ways (here and here for example).

I'm looking for funding for a bundle of disposable cameras (or better still some digital compacts) to give out to 'ordinary people' so that they can then take pictures of what matters to them. The current context for me is our local town centre, but it could be health, being young in this town or anything . The idea is to upload the pictures plus writings by local people to a wiki or perhaps to a photolog and enable a debate around those images and writings. A wiki would be better in many because it can take all forms of comment in formats not predetermined by others, but the downside is that with no structure it can be hard to find your way around. It is important that this doesn't take place in isolation - it has to be tied in with other things to give everyone as many ways in tot he discussion as possible. We could also for example set up an online forum, hold 'cafe conversations', exhibitions of the photographs, invite letters in the local paper, do guided walks, have a market stall. We could look at the history of the place - and therefore at why it looks and operates as it does today. The Urban Tapestries project might be another option

I'm quite excited by the possibilities, but also slightly daunted. Most public consultation activity does one thing - it almost certaintly isn't enough and it may indeed be the wrong thing, but by and large it is easier, especially for time pressed and/or cash strapped local authorities or voluntary groups. The approach I'm thinking about is multi-stemmed and much more complex. I haven't even begun to think about how we might collate what comes in...