Archive for March 9th, 2007

Customer Relations

CityRail FAILS | Posted by Dean
Mar 09 2007

Today there has been nothing but reasons to blog. It is quite amazing really. The driver for this blog is City Rail. Normally I would not blog about City Rail unless I had ridden a train and had another shocker of an experience. Today though, I did not ride a train, however City Rail have found a new way to affect customer relations with myself.

In my earlier post Cattle Class on a Craptacular I reported the disgrace that is the Mortdale train station elevator project. I also reported that I had lodged a request for feedback via the City Rail website. At the time I predicted either no response, or a response after the elevators were turned on. Today, after lodging a secondary enquiry, I finally received a reply.

Dear Miss Thompson,

Thank you for contacting CityRail in relation to your query in reference to Mortdale station.

After speaking with the Station Manager at Mortdale they have advised that escalators are expected to be operational by Wednesday 7 March 07.

I trust this information is of assistance.

Yours Sincerely,

[Name Suppressed]
Correspondence Case Manager.
RailCorp Customer Relations.

Now there are several issues with this response. First off I am not a female. This has been assumed by the responder and as with all assumptions has made an ASS of yoU and ME. This is a disgrace for someone that is a Correspondence Case Manager and in RailCorp Customer Relations. No wonder noone feels like the company cares with basic errors like this.

Second, I enquired about elevators not escalators. An elevator is essentially a box that is cabled between floors, whereas an escalator is a moving stair case. They are totally different approaches to get similar results. Escalators though are not friendly to the disabled and infirmed among us.

Thirdly, I am being informed about the expected operational date 2 days after they should be operational. This email should thus confirm their operational status. However, it is not.

I will now be taking a walk to Mortdale Station and verify for myself that the elevators are operational. If they are not I will be sending yet another feedback to City Rail.

PatHATIC Bulldust

Geek, Web Sites and Social Networking | Posted by Dean
Mar 09 2007

In a recent blog enty on phatic.org the author claimed that adhering to the W3C standards is good for SEO. This is complete nonsense as many top sites do not validate to the W3C standards. This is discussed within the following thread at iServ in greater detail. I will not discuss that again. However, I thought I would do some checking on the SEO credentials of the author.

I chose to compare the statistics of:

  1. phatic.org
  2. schwoit.com
  3. iserv.com.au
  4. vilesilencer.com

The first test was to plug the site name into Google and see where it returned.

  1. phatic.org – Not in the top 100 when searching for the word phatic.
  2. schwoit.com – Ranked number 1 for the word schwoit. In fact the entire page is dominated by links to the domain or sub-domains.
  3. iserv.com.au – Ranks at number 2 for the word iServ.
  4. vilesilencer.com – Ranks at number 3, however the site that leads the way is a sub-domain owned by the same individual.

Not off to an auspicious start there.

The second test was to use a popular, yet not always accurate PageRank Prediction Tool.

Now while I don’t trust the results (PR is impossible to predict), I find it astounding that phatic.org has an unknown current PR, yet the owner speaks about SEO.

The third test is via Alexa.

  1. phatic.org
    • Traffic Rank for – No Data
    • Sites Linking in – 6 (one of which is iserv.com.au)
  2. schwoit.com
    • Traffic Rank for schwoit.com – 3,642,649
    • Other sites that link to this site – 88
  3. iserv.com.au
    • Traffic Rank for iserv.com.au – 63,219
    • Other sites that link to this site – 63
  4. vilesilencer.com
    • Traffic Rank for vilesilencer.com – 9,644
    • Other sites that link to this site – 50

Again no information.

Clearly this site is new right? Wrong, phatic.org has been around since 17th June 2005. Clearly the owner has no idea about SEO and as such his assertion that complying to W3C standards has no basis for belief, and should correctly attract contempt.

Artoo Links Categories

Web Sites and Social Networking | Posted by Dean
Mar 09 2007

After trialling a different categorisation regimes on my directory sites I have decided that the most robust is that used by my most mature directory. This structure seems to encourage submitters to look harder and consider their submission before submitting to the directory. As such I have begun a category retrofit at the Directory Droid. Upon completion of the Directory Droid The Darkside will then be retrofiited.
This is is a sizeable effort and will take time to complete, I do though believe it will raise the Directory Droids and The Darksides presence in the market place, and make it far easier for myself to keep up with the overwhelming submission rate.