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So, a few people have been asking me what happened with my now world-famous  (thanks entirely to Russ and his PageRank of 7)  $1,790.84 mobile phone bill, per the update I promised in my original post. But the truth is, I don’t know yet.

What!?

Yeah, I haven’t called back yet. I can tell you that according to the Cingular site, I now only owe $1,056.22. I’m not entirely sure where that number comes from, but at this point I don’t really feel like calling to find out.

I never feel like calling the phone company (or anyone else who keeps me on hold for 20 minutes at a time), but I particularly haven’t felt like it the last few days. Why should these days be different from any others? Well, I’m on what I have been calling a mini-sabbatical.

A lot of the people at work are at CTIA this week and I didn’t have a lot of meetings scheduled, so I asked my boss if I could take a few days off from coming into the office. So on Monday night, I headed down to LA to spend the rest of the week at my parents house. I put up an out-of-office notification, but I am still answering emails and dialing into our daily staff calls. The rest of the time, I have spent working on some white papers based on various ideas that have been percolating in my head for some time, but which I just haven’t had a chance to write down. These are mostly for my own edification, since I don’t really expect anyone else to read them (like much of what I write). But, I am having a good time feeling productive for the first time in a while. And that productivity doesn’t include sitting on the phone with Cingular for another half hour plus.

I am almost through with a big chunk of one paper that isn’t really proprietary at all. So, maybe I’ll post some excerpts here once I have proof-read.

I know, I know, you can’t wait!

I do a quintuple take when I log into the Cingular site this evening to pay last month’s bill. Yes, it says one-thousand seven-hundred ninety dollars and eighty-four cents…WTF!?

It takes me a couple of minutes of browsing through the details to figure out where this insane figure is coming from. But, I had already dialed 611 and am on hold for a customer service rep before I even click through to the detailed statement. I know that I could not possibly owe that amount (more importantly, I know that I could not possibly pay or expense that amount), and I know I will be on hold longer than it will take me to figure out where Cingular had gone wrong. Of course there is this creeping fear that it was I who had screwed something up, not them. And so in the back of my mind, I am also preparing my preferred corporate customer speech – even though I know no one who would fall for that would be authorized to refund the kind of money we are talking about.

I had spent 2 weeks in Europe on business and I had to use my phone a lot while I was over there, but I had made sure to get the special international roaming package ($0.99/minute is hardly a discount, but it’s better than how they try to rape you if you don’t pay the $5/month for ‘discount international roaming’) before I left. It turns out that I had 517 international roaming minutes for a total of $527.25 (yes, I know that’s not $0.99/minute, but I have bigger fish to fry right now). Ouch!

But, that doesn’t get us to $1,790.84.

Then, I see it. $1,154.99 in data usage. Woah! The primary reason I have this phone is to use Yahoo! Mobile products (like Yahoo! Go Mobile), and they can be pretty data intensive. So, I have had an unlimited data plan since I first switched over to AT&T Wireless almost a year ago. Wait, where’s my $19.99 unlimited data charge in the “Monthly Service Charges” section?

Shit!

A few months after Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless, they abandoned support for users on the legacy (Blue) system in order to drive them to migrate to the new (Orange) Cingular system. But this transition was so painful and inelegantly designed (you had to cancel your AT&T Wireless account altogether and then open a new Cingular account, sometimes resulting in as many as 3 bills in one billing period), that a lot of people like me continued to hold out and stay on Blue despite the deterioration in service. When I knew I was heading to Europe, I realized I would have to switch to Orange in order to get the international roaming package. I consulted Lisa, the very nice Yahoo! account rep at Vision Cellular, who helped me navigate some of the maze and then informed me that I would have to go through Cingular directly to finish the process. Lisa also explicitly advised me to double-check that my international roaming package got on my new plan, because Cingular was notorious for losing feature requests like that in the migration shuffle.

It was a long and painful call. I was rerouted several times to several different people, who were all very nice, but none were too sure exactly what needed to happen. I was finally connected to someone who could figure out how to do the complex things that needed to be done. I stated and restated the features that I wanted on my plan. She stated them back to me. I hung-up. A week passed. I called to check that my international roaming plan got put on. It did. Hooray! I don’t know what Lisa was so concerned about.

One-thousand seven-hundred ninety dollars and eighty-four cents. One-thousand one-hundred fifty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents in data usage. No $19.99/month unlimited MediaNet charge. Lisa’s words ringing in my head. They got the international roaming right, but they forgot the data plan. Doh! Well, at least it’s not my fault. Wait, what if it’s not in their records? Well, at least this gives the preferred corporate customer speech a little more weight…

…”Hello, this is Jason. How may I assist you this evening?……Hello?”

Oh, it’s a real person – not just a recording of a real person telling me how valuable I am to her. I always put the phone on speaker when I’m on hold and it always takes the person saying “Hello?” a few times to get me to realize they’re finally there.

“Hi Jason, I’m calling about a bill I just got that seems a bit high…it’s around $1,800.”

That got his attention.

I explain that I think my unlimited data plan got lost in the migration shuffle. Jason is very solicitous (I must say that in general, Cingular operators are some of the nicest call-center operators I have encountered, right up there with Southwest), and we quickly run through the bill. We talk about the $527.25 in roaming, and I admit that it is high but not unreasonable. We both agree that the $1,154.99 in data is the crux of the issue. Jason puts me on hold while he tries to confirm my story about my unlimited data plan on Blue. I wasn’t lying, he puts me back on hold while he tries to dig up my migration request. He comes back to tell me they are still looking. I tell him to take his time. In the meantime, I see that they did this to me as well on my last bill. But, it was only a 6 day billing period (this is the whole painful 3 bills at once thing I mentioned above), so the total error came to $34 and I didn’t notice it. Jason comes back to tell me they can’t find it.

OK Jonathan, get that preferred corporate customer speech dusted off.

But alas, Jason’s ‘team leader’ isn’t working this shift. Jason is going to file a credit request form and annotate my account, and his ‘team leader’ will� take a look at it when she is in tomorrow. Is there anything else I should do? I can call back tomorrow and talk to Jason’s ‘team leader.’

“Have I resolved all of your issues this evening sir?”

What!? No! Oh, he’s back on the call-center script. He tried to be helpful, I’ll play along – after all, this call may be recorded for quality-assurance purposes.

“I guess as much as you could.” [As long as I get my f*cking money refunded!]

“Thank you for choosing Cingular sir, and have a nice evening.”

“Thanks, you too Jason.” [Good karma will help ensure the safe return of my money.]

I look at my phone, that call took 33 minutes and 56 seconds. I still owe Cingular $1,790.84.� I need a drink.

For those of you who read this far, I will post an update after I speak to ‘team leader’ tomorrow. In the meantime, I did find an email from Lisa confirming that the migration order was filed with the unlimited data request. So, I am feeling pretty confident that I will get the money back one way or another.

Oh and btw, you can thank Russ for telling me I had to blog about this (and my procrastination instincts for actually listening to him…and probably taking it a little farther than he had in mind).

I posted a little update here. Bottom-line is that the bill is now down to $1,056.22 on the website, but I haven’t called them back yet.

Congrats to Randy and Jon, who are now officially living in sin. Jon is one of our few regular readers, and complained that updates have not been frequent enough of late.

The people have been heard!

An inevitable after-effect of Sundays like this.

If we weren’t at a bowling alley, they would just be penis-shaped Bud Lights.

Honestly, who throws a shoe? I haven’t seen paper files in so long, it’s kinda shocking that people still work this way. I’m soooo Work 2.0.

I just tried using Yahoo! Answers for the first time this afternoon.

We BarCampers were trying to find a place nearby to donate the leftover food from the weekend, and I did several unsuccessful searches on both Yahoo! and Google (terms like “homeless shelter downtown los angeles,” “foodbank downtown los angeles,” etc). So, I turned to our new knowledge search product, Yahoo! Answers – posting the question “where can I donte food in downtown LA?” (yes, I misspelled ‘donate’) in the “Community Service” category.

I was pretty psyched when the first answer came back in minutes. But as you can see here, the 3 answers I have gotten back so far were utterly unhelpful and somewhat snarky (though, surprisingly, no one mocked my typo). But I know that’s the cost of doing business here in Web2.0, so it’s not the responses that I want to rant about.

What upset me was that there was no mechanism for granular reputation feedback, which I believe to be essential to any community-generated intelligence. Instead what you have are the very binary options “Choose As Best Answer” and “Report Abuse.” Come on guys! What about the very simple (and already available elsewhere on Yahoo!) “Was this helpful to you?” Without a mechanism for this kind of more granular feedback, Yahoo! Answers will have issues elevating the signal to noise ratio.

Here’s the link to my presentation from BarCampLA: http://straussnet.gorjk.com/random/Reputation.ppt

The first few slides are a bad joke based on the presentation Ian was to make later in the day (Media 2.0 Physics). So, you can probably skip straight to slide 8. Also, a special shout-out to Michael for sharing his presentation time with me.

I did some work on another presentation over the last week. But last night when Ian and I were comparing notes, I found mine to be very similar to his. So, I decided to explore a topic that has been nagging at me for a long time – it stems from my feeling that reputation infrastructure is being overlooked in the race to on-demand media experiences.

A lot of this thinking crystallized through discussions at and following an emerging technologies seminar put on by The Media Center at the American Press Institute way back in February 2005. Chris Anderson of Wired and, probably more importantly, Long Tail fame was a presenter, and I had an opportunity to chat with him after he spoke. The quotations I attribute to him in my BarCampLA presentation came from a subsequent continuation of our conversation via email. That event also sparked an extended conversation with Rich Skrenta of Topix.net that resulted in a related blog post by him, which also generated a blog post by Russell.

In the 14 hours between when I came up with the presentation title (Reputation as Currency) and when I presented it today, I tried to take those discussions along with the developments of the last year and put them into a sequence of slides that make some kinda sense. I’m not sure that the final product stands alone, but I was pretty happy with the discussion that it provoked. The point I was trying to get across is that I think we need a W3C-type open format for reputation. In a nutshell, my hypothesis is that pervasive on-demand digital delivery (i.e. ubiquitous search) will reveal a user need for the highest quality recommendations, which demands highly trusted systems that can only be enabled by a widely adopted standard for interacting with entity reputation. The reason I think it needs to be an open format is that the full power of such a system can only be realized through distributed innovation – and it needs to be able to work across walled gardens, because our social networks aren’t limited by our friends’ email domains.

So if any of that makes sense to you, please comment and continue the conversation. I know what I want the final product to look like, but there is a long and winding road between here and there – and I ain’t got the map. One of the things Ian mentioned I should look into is the Identity2.0 concept being evangelized by Dick Hardt of Sxip. We shall see…

So per Ian’s suggestion, I watched Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation at Web 2.0 2005. And I have to say that there is a lot of overlap with my call for an open reputation format. I do agree with him that a universally adopted open format for secure identity is probably a prerequisite for distributed personalization on the web, but I’m not sure if I agree with his rationale for adoption (he doesn’t seem so sure himself, but suggests that website operators will have an interest in standardizing at some point). Coopting his thesis into my hypothesis about the emerging importance of automated personalized discovery (aka recommendations) in media consumption , I think that the uderlying need for a reliable open format for reputation may be a driver for the adoption of the necessary secure identity standards. I’m gonna see if Stewart can put me in touch with Dick next time he’s in town to discuss some more.

On a related note, an unnamed executive at an unnamed online company, who spoke at BarCampLA after me, went to town on the dozen or so Yahoo! employees in the audience (out of ~30 people, LOL!) for Yahoo!’s recent conduct in China. He personally challenged us for our lack of moral outrage at the fact that our company turned over the identity of dissident Chinese journalists, resulting in their imprisonment. I have to say that he is right! I am pretty pissed off at whoever made that decision (I have no idea to what level it was escalated at the time), and I’m also pissed at the fact that we as a company have a culture that would allow that decision to happen and only see a downside in it when it results in bad PR. I guess I’m not going to quit the company over it, but it definitely doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about the big purple.

After doing some more research, I do have to agree with Randy‘s comment that I was way too quick to jump on the bandwagon. I guess the uninformed thrashing I got at BarCamp clouded my judgment. It turns out that the situation that has been oversimplified to Yahoo! turning over dissidents to the Chinese police (and has been likened to collaboration with the Nazis in WWII) is in fact much more complex. I think there is a pretty well-researched and objective account here, also Russell gives his never blunted point of view here.

What I have learned is that the Chinese government does not have to provide Yahoo! with the nature of the crime suspected when making a request from information – it could be for a child molester, drug dealer, or DVD pirate (heaven forbid!) just as easily as a political agitator. And because part of being a registered internet provider in China is complying with such requests, Yahoo! or MSN or Google or anyone else who wants to offer services to the Chinese people would need to forfeit their right to do business there in order to protest such a warrant – all that without knowing the nature of the suspected crime (i.e. is it something really bad or something we think is ok – also since when is it the role of a private company to pass moral judgment on the laws of a sovereign nation?).

So now, I’m not really pissed at Yahoo! anymore. I’m more pissed at myself for not having been engaged enough beforehand to have the knowledge to rebut the under-informed attacks leveled against me and my colleagues this weekend. But, I’m still leaving up the poll (though with a minor copy change) because I want to test out the feature.

Bloggers at a conference talking about software for bloggers at conferences.

Danger, danger Will Robinson: conventional media cash (and margin structures) invade the internet!

Ya know how I said, big changes don’t fully hit home until you experience their effects on a personal level? Of course you do!

Anyway, I just had one of those moments here at BarCampLA.  Fox Interactive Media (FIM), the branch of News Corp for which Rupey-boy just earmarked $2B for acquisitions (they’ve already bought IGN, Scout.com, MySpace, and some other shit I can’t remember right now), sent an executive recruiter to BarCampLA and is buying all of us pizza.

Being on the inside at one of the largest Internet pure-plays around, I am acutely aware of the financial pressures the market is putting on the business models that survived the original Internet bubble.  Case in point is the fact that there was a tacit embrace of FIM’s presence at this indie geek-fest by a crowd from which you would expect at least some measure of righteous indignation – it appears that people are realizing that geek-cred alone doesn’t pay the bills. However for big media companies that are still printing cash off their legacy businesses that aren’t dying nearly as fast as the press would make you believe, anything above 10% margins is a boon to their valuation. So, look for a lot more over-priced under-thought acquisitions from FIM and the like. You will also see CorpDev groups at  Yahoo!, Google, and IAC foolishly staying in the race – because we have the cash and acquisitions like these don’t generally impact margins. Now’s the time to start pitching that start-up concept guys…

P.S. Props to Kakul for saying way back in May 2005 that News Corp should be considered a top competitor to Yahoo!.