Don't "Contact us" pages

Why is it so difficult to contact a website owner?  The bigger the website, the more difficult it is to contact them. 

Ever tried emailing Amazon?  It is nearly impossible! You get directed to endless lists of FAQs and useless information pages.  It is often said that if you can't get to the page that you are looking for after 7 seconds, most users will give up.  These websites seem to be using this to their advantage - make it really hard to find the "Contact us" page and then users will give up.  Result - it reduces the number of emails that they need to reply to and this saves money. 

You have to wonder about these companies.

So today I got some spam that looked like the regular "spam" that I get from Amazon as a loyal customer (thanks Amazon by the way).  It got passed my Norton software and appeared in my inbox.  It looked like a regular page, but there was something not quite right.  Well, all the images were from Amazon.com, but the links were to mefall.com.  A quick lookup shows that the website is registered where? Yep, you guessed it, China.

Thought I would be helpful and alert Amazon to this, but after a few minutes I gave up.  Thought it would be more useful to expend my energy (and frustration) on a blog entry instead.

Innovation takes perseverance

Innovation comes from perserverance and if you aren't convinced here's an interesting article from Information age.  Just like Edison's light bulb, these modern innovations took time to catch on (even once they start to work!).

http://www.information-age.com/blog/1249253/brits-that-pursued-bad-ideas-tipped-for-techs-top-accolade.thtml

Drive - Dan Pink

The best business book I have read so far in 2010. Well written and researched - it has a clear message that runs through it from start to finish. Anyone who works and lives in the corporate world will find this book a compelling read.

The basic premise of the book is based on scientific research that is currently poorly understood by the business community. Much of this research flies in the face of current business practices and highlights that the traditional carrot and stick mentality to management, not only does not work, but is likely to damage the very behaviour that we are trying to encourage.

The book highlights the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and that the new world of work is based on intrinsic motivation – a motivation based on personal drive to master new skills and knowledge rather than an extrinsic motivation that essentially boils down to money.

This book brings a new level of understanding to the modern corporate world that we live in and provides a useful and new perspective. Having worked for Microsoft for a period of time, one of the questions that often went through my mind was why would people take a drop in salary to work for the company and why were we all so dedicated? To my mind, this book answers these questions and many others. Highly recommended.

Using the body as an input device

Came across this and it looks really interesting.  It is a way of using the body as a input surface.  More information here.

Geocaching profile

There are a number of utilities around aimed at helping the Geocaching community.  Here's one that I came across recently that automatically produces a prodfile signature.  If you click on the image below, you will be able to create one of your own.