Note: This column represents the opinions
of the writer and as such, is not purported as fact
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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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Telecom has been having some more problems with its DSL service and the
XTRA Network Status Summary
keeps promising that it will be fixed real soon now -- but that resolution
time has repeatedly slipped for several days already.
At 9pm last night it was promising that the problem would be fixed three
hours previously and shortly afterwards, they simply changed the resolution
date from 03 Mar 2002 to 04 Mar 2002.
Okay, so no technology is perfect and outages are an unfortunate fact of
life -- but I note that Telstra's DSL service has also been
suffering some problems in the past few days.
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This "coincidence" rang some alarm bells and reminded me of
a column
I wrote back in December last year.
Now is it *really* just another coincidence that Telstra and Telecom's
DSL outages seem to fail in unison so very frequently?
Or could it be that they're both so unreliable that simultaneous faulting
is a statistical certainty on frequent occasions?
Whatever the explanation, it doesn't stop either Telecom or Telstra customers
from being really annoyed that such an expensive service should be so
flaky and take so long to fix.
Can someone remind me again what Telecom's promised Network availability
percentage is?
Websites Cry Out For Cash
One of the Internet's most popular discussion sites for geeks,
Slashdot has
announced that it's going to be offering regular users a choice:
cough-up a per-page fee or put up with those new mega-sized
display ads.
Despite many users' virtual addiction to the popular website,
the discussion
that followed the announcement seems to indicate that the move could
have a significant adverse effect on readership.
It looks as if Slashdot's move might just be the start of yet another move
towards squeezing web-surfers for money and coming hot on the tail of
their announcement, another popular discussion site,
Delphi Forums has
announced it is shifting to subscription based service.
Despite reports suggesting that the levels of online advertising are beginning
to recover, it appears that the ad-funded model on which so many print-world
and broadcast content offerings are based is still not viable on the Web.
I doubt therefore that the local initiative to try and create some new
kind of
ratings service
will help things much.
Let me say it again (just in case anyone's listening) -- until the ad industry
gets off their backside and starts providing the Net audience with something
just a little more creative than ever-larger banners then advertisers will
continue to be disappointed -- and that means that they'll keep their wallets
in their pockets.
Just as a sidebar -- neither Kevin Roberts, nor anyone else from the ad-industry
seem to have responded to my previous offer to share my smart idea regarding
a new advertising model. Maybe the local consortium of online publishers
would be interested -- after all, it also acts as a method of monitoring and
reporting online Web usage.
Have your say.
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