Information Research Weblog

Yes, I know it isn't even Christmas Eve yet, but a number of things cropped up and this may be my last message before the festive season gets thoroughly under way.

Web site crimes

Jakob Nielsen has come up with his pet usability problems of 2003: let's hope they strike chords with the major offenders. I particularly felt sympathy with number 2:

2. New URLs for Archived Content

Archives add substantial value to a site with very little extra effort. Although more and more sites are archiving old content, most sites still fail to maintain good archives. Some sites treat archives as a separate site area, assigning pages new URLs when they move them from the main area into the archive. Changing the URL when archiving content causes linkrot. It also makes other sites reluctant to link to you. Although sites might consider linking to a current article, if they've been burned by linkrot in the past, they'll often pass you by because they don't want to bother with having to update their own pages when you move yours.

Help desk and customer service

This week's Fortune magazine has the first article I've seen on companies pulling their call centres back home from India because of reduced customer satisfaction. Funny, I was suggesting to someone just a couple of weeks ago that I figured the pendulum was bound to swing. The Fortune article tells us that Web.com and Dell have both done this recently. There's a comment that suggests that the 'one law for the rich' saying holds true:

"Not everything is moving offshore," says Amit Shankardass, solution-planning officer at ClientLogic, a Nashville-based call center outsourcing company. "Airline companies would not move management of high-yield customers offshore." Instead they practice, to follow industry jargon, "onshoring" or "nearshoring"—which means sending calls to Canada.

The Guardian gets it wrong - well, slightly, anyway.

Frank Miller - he of the wise words to the IR-DISCUSS list sent me an electronic Christmas card, which was so good that I immediately signed up to send them out myself. The artist Jacquie Lawson, together with a musician cum IT guru, designs interactive cards that are quite delightful. Jacquie was trained at the St. Martin's School of Art and lives in a village in West Sussex. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find one of her cards pictured on the back page of Guardian Media supplement (the tabloid bit) with the comment, to the effect that the card was from the USA. Very ambiguous - the sender might have been in the USA, but the server that delivered it was just down the road (well, relatively) from the Guardian offices in London. So - if you are interested in supporting British creativity - take a look and sign up. It's a modest subscription for such quality.