creativity

Stilgherrian’s links for 22 October 2008 through 23 October 2008, distilled from the finest ingredients:

• How Not To Start A Corporate Blog: Telstra’s nowwearetalking Case Study | Richard Giles 2.0: Richard Giles has written a well-focussed piece about Telstra’s political-lobbying blog and the company’s behaviour, much of which overlaps with my own thoughts about Australia’s biggest telco.
• Heather’s Creative Process | TwitPic: A nicely amusing diagram of one person’s “creative process”. I particularly like “Crying” in there.
• Hangman, Spare That Word: The English Purge Their Language | TIME: A nice article explaining how difficult it is to purge old words from the dictionaries.
• On-line transactions, streamed content, email and social networking signal changes in how Australians use the internet | ACMA: Latest statistics on how Australians use the Internet. Streaming video is now a top-2 or top-3 application, depending on the age group. 44% claim to have used the Internet to purchase airline tickets in the last 4 weeks. Can this be true?

Last week I posted a long, angry piece describing how Dell screwed up an important order. Well, important to me. Pissily tiny to them. Within hours I received a phone call from Winston Robins, Dell’s Purchase Experience Manager for Australia and New Zealand.

What immediately impressed me is that he’d actually read what I’d posted, here and on Twitter, and instead of glossing over the mistakes he seemed genuinely interested in finding out what went wrong.

The short version is that the monitors I’d ordered were delivered as quickly as possible after that, and Winston kept me informed of progress at all times. He acknowledged Dell’s mistakes, and said the staff responsible were “coached” — which is a nice little euphemism, eh?

So what went wrong?

Read the rest of this entry »

Stilgherrian’s links for 26 June 2008 through 29 June 2008:

• Creatives grow better in the South West | YouTube: A brilliant 4-minute video explaining how to nurture creativity.
• Top 10 reasons to hate the iPhone 3G | APC: A suitably well-researched piece to help counter the Apple fanboy hype. A phone is a tool. Not all tools are for everyone.
• LEO Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch: A very fine-looking English-German dictionary site.