It seems that AT&T WorthWireless really does have the worst customer service. My partner is a plum cellular customer – international business trips rack up impressive roaming charges. But their customer service [or lack there of] is on the verge of driving us away.

For a technology company, AT&T WorthWireless lives in the dark ages. Most modern companies prefer electronic payments. But AT&T needs a paper check. Ok, “electronic checking” can do that too. But AT&T needs to see their remittance slip to properly credit our account. Ok, we can mail a personal check with their remittance slip in their envelope. But AT&T can’t find that either.

So far, AT&T WorthWireless has managed to double bill us for months, misplace more than three “electronic checking” payments, and now misplace our personal check with remittance slip. They’ve managed to interrupt business meetings in France and Singapore to request immediate payment. And they’re just about to lose a customer.

Well, Tivo has landed in the Ideoplex household. Our initial Amazon order was backordered, so we picked up a Toshiba SD-H400 from BestBuy – on sale for $100 off last week. The SD-400 comes with a 45 day free trial of Tivo Plus. After one weekend, I’m not convinced that the service is worth $12.95/month. Yet.

It kind of fun to watch myself move up in the Userland Site Report. My enjoyment is a bit muted by the realization that I’m currently rising through the dead zone - once popular weblogs that have left the Userland community, lost popularity or gone dark. It seems oddly prophetic of my potential move to TextPattern.

NewsGator closes Series A funding with Mobius Venture Capital. Looks like a good match – Mobius Managing Director Brad Feld lives in Colorado and authors a weblog. A VC generally looks for teams that can dominate markets and markets that are worth dominating. I wonder what market Mobius and NewsGator have in mind?

I’m hard pressed to believe that Mobius is backing the NewsGator client. The news aggregator market seems too fragmented and Outlook based clients seen too vulnerable to Microsoft. I think the real opportunities extend from the supply side. Perhaps an expansion of NewsGator Online Services, an employee portal built on RSS, or …

Generally speaking, PageRank is a good thing. It allows Google to leverage the internet as the world’s largest distributed reviewing system. But it adds inertia to search rankings. The first pages to discuss a topic get the early links and become authoritative pages on that topic – overshadowing subsequent pages with better information. If the page is mostly correct and reasonably helpful, then there is little motivation for people to update their links to reference better sources. And errors and shortcomings in early pages live on in perpetuity.

I recently gave some advice on generating full text feeds from Movable Type. I’m not a MT user, so I performed a search on “Movable Type full text feed,” clicked on the first link whose summary text looked good and then passed the advice on. Well, it turns out that my advice was not entirely correct. So here is Randy Charles Morin‘s post on full text feeds in Movable Type. My contribution to the fight against search engine inertia.

The problem with RSS is that it is a broadcast technology with a narrow audience. Whereas email is a narrowcast technology with a broad audience. And while I’d love to see RSS replace email in broadcast applications, it’s just not going to happen until the target audience embraces RSS.

I’ve had my doubts about Google’s motives towards RSS in the past. But just in case they’re listening, they could dispell all my doubts by including a news aggregator in Gmail. People understand email from the get go. But you need to use RSS before you can understand it and you need to have an aggregator before you can use it.

I didn’t really understand the RSS until I started using it. I didn’t start using it until I had one bundled up in Radio Userland - even after reading Scripting News by email for years. And I think that I have a lot of company.

Google could change all that by adding a RSS reader to Gmail. A move that could compel competitors to respond in kind. And a move that could elevate RSS to a broadcast technology with a broadcast audience.

Weblogs.com server outage ends, little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by a heck of a flame war. Kudos to Rogers Cadenhead for stepping in to provide a new home. Hopefully, this will close the chapter on an unpleasant episode in the life of the blogoverse.

Via James Robertson: Unplug Spam-Sending PCs

Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of “spam” messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released on Tuesday by six large e-mail providers. … But the group also suggested consumers be held accountable if their machines are exploited by spammers.

+1 for the spam bot take down.

But I have misgivings about holding consumers accountable if their machines are exploited by spammers. The consumer buys the right to use some software. Security holes in that software allow spammers to exploit their machines. There is no obvious way for the consumer to know that their machine has been hacked. And this is the consumer’s fault?

What proportion of the blame lies with the company that provided the security holes in the first place? The company that sold computers without virus protection? The company whose anti-virus software stops working? Let’s not make the consumer the fall guy for bad decisions all the way around.

Try thinking more along the lines of a paid housecall to disinfect the machine and install anti-virus software before reconnection. I suspect that annual home computer checkups could provide a pretty nice boost to broadband revenues.

Robert Scoble’s Link Blog is a work in progress. I think your level of satisfaction depends upon whether you see it as a collection of links or a link blog. I suspect that Scoble sees it more as a public collection of links, indexed by time and Google. James Robertson sees it as a link blog and a failure: too many items, with no way to tell if any are interesting. Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Robertson. The S/N isn’t worthy of a spot in my aggregator.

Kunal and Scoble are working around their constraints: legal, technical, and practical. I think that they could boost the signal to noise ratio by grouping related links together. Replace the single link folder with several topic folders. Rather than post immediately, create a post-dated draft and append related links to that post. That would provide a little more context to evaluate each entry. It would certainly make it easier to dismiss topics that we aren’t interested in.

Whether I move to TextPattern or not, crawling inside the code has been very interesting. The heart of the publishing process is a call to preg_replace_callback, a regular expression search and replace using callbacks. In TextPattern, the regex identifies each layout tag and the callback uses the matching text to determine what function is responsible for the replacement text. Worth the price of admission by itself.

I’m currently on the trail of better HTTP 404 and 304 responses. TextPattern pages are dynamically generated, and it currently responds to bad requests with an empty template. I added some code to keep track of the articles retrieved and bingo &ndash 404 Not Found and 304 Not Modified are a going concern. A little more time to sort out comments and I can move on to 304 handling for style sheet requests.