News Report 1

Resende, Patricia. CRM Daily. “E-Commerce Sites are Focusing on Customer Service.” December 1, 2008.


“The customer is always right,” is the slogan the e-commerce sites need to keep in mind. Consumers now days are commanding better customer service. Good customer service is the main reason the customer will remain loyal and recommend your company to future customers. Good customer service might get your customers to purchase again, when a customer receives bad customer service you better believe they tell everyone about how bad your company is. One thing you do not want is bad word of mouth about your e-commerce site.
The economy is playing a factor in how consumers are dealing with customer service. There has been an increasing trend in how consumers are not putting up with bad customer service.
“In fact, this year 87 percent of customers will cut their ties with a company after dealing with poor customer service, compared to 80% in 07 and 68% in 06, according to the Customer Experience Impact Report.”
I know one of the most frustrating things a company can do is to put me on hold with that annoying elevator music. Companies are trying to figure out ways to better serve their customers. Bestbuy.com came out with a new feature called Click-to-Call, which connects shoppers to customer service reps 24 hrs. a day 7 days a week.
Overstock.com started to use Right Now’s Smart Assistance Technology, which reduced e-mails by 72% and allowed other agents to deal with the most important problems. Right Now’s system reads keywords in customer complaint emails and responds to the customer with multiple answers to their problems.
In today’s economy the key to retaining customers and generating good word of mouth is customer service. “The Customer is always right,” needs to be the focus for e-commerce sites and if it’s not the e-commerce site will fail.

News Report 5

JJ Cook
Anne Pemberton
Lib 103
Nov 19, 2008


Stone, Brad. 16 Nov. 2008“Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries.”16 Nov. 2008. www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.html



The internet is a dangerous place for children. We need to keep children safe from sexual predators on the internet. Law enforcement officials have said they want popular sites, like the social networks Myspace and Facebook to confirm the identities and ages of minors. The children with their identities confirmed would then be allowed to talk with other minors, or with adults approved by parents.
Performing age verification is a difficult task. About two dozen companies have came up with systems claiming they can solve the problem.
People against age verification for children say all these firms don't care about protecting the children from sexual predators online but they just want the children's demographic information so tailored advertisements can be pushed on the children.
Mary Willard says it's “particularly upsetting. Age verification companies are selling parents on the premise that they can protect the safety of children online, and they are using this information for market profiling and targeted advertising.”
Eguardian has developed a system to confirm children's identities. With Eguardian people are given the choice to not have any data sent to advertisers, which is the main concern for identity verification haters. These companies are so new it is hard to tell if they are having success. Eguardian has pitched to Myspace and Facebook, which might use it to sign up members younger than the age 13. I believe that these two networking websites need identity verification more than any other website out there.
We need to protect children from sexual predators online. Protecting them from online predators is far more important then trying to protect them from an advertisement about a candy bar. Advertisements are going to be pushed on children through television and every other form of advertising.

Reading Assignment 5

JJ Cook
Anne Pemberton
LIB 103
November 17, 2008
Reading Assignment # 5
How do you know if a website is legitimate, a hoax, or a spoof? There are a lot of websites that are counterfeit, malicous, product ficticous, parodies/spoofs/entertainment, hacks and disinformation. Mistakes are another source of disinformation.
Counterfeit sites are the most serious hoax website. A counterfeit site pretends to be a legitimate site to publicize false information.
All media are susceptible to false facts, this is something internet users need to keep in mind when they both look at news reports. There was an incident in the Associated Press Report about 400 deer in Ohio that shows how gullible news professionals can be when they don't use critical evaluation skills.
Disinformation means “the dissemination of deliberately false information especially when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or the media with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it.”
There are a lot of sites that parody or spoof persons, companies, and organizations. There is very little difference b/w a spoof and a parody. The onion site and the Mankato Minnesota page are popular among parody sites.
The entertainment industry gets a lot of internet misinformation, mainly involving counterfeit stories, scripts, plot exposes, and show endings. This is troubling to the producers who will usually produce alternate endings for shows they feel will produce hoaxes.
On the flip side of the hoax and counterfeit websites “one persons misinformation can be another person's gold mine.” Such sites can offer a different perspective on topics that have a controlling truth.
The amount of misinformation is going to to continue to be on the internet unless the internet is strictly regulated, which is not going to happen any time soon. This would be nearly impossible and is something no one wants. The only way to avoid the misinformation is to question and research its validity every time.

reading assignment 4

JJ Cook
Mrs. Pemberton
Lib 103
November 5, 2008
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has become the internets hottest information source. Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia where anyone from professors to students to non academians can publish information on the website. The open source encyclopedia has received mixed and failing grades. Wikipedia has become one of my favorite sources of information because of the timely information and trivia.
Wikipedia has editors that monitor the information that gets published on the website. Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac College performed an experiment on Wikipedia. He deliberately published 13 counts of false information on the website. With in three hours of publishing the false information Wikipedia had erased all of it. This shows that Wikipedia will catch false information. Not all invalid information will be caught by the editors.
The most famous mistake by Wikipedia is the case of John Seigenthaler Sr. A Wikipedia entry said John Seigenthaler Sr. was "thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother, Bobby." This false claim went uncorrected for more than four months. This false information reached other websites such as reference.com and answers. com. John claimed that this ruined his reputation. This case was very damagin to Wikipedia's reputation also
People who support Wikipedia look at the site as a brave new world where scholars can bump heads with the general public. People who are Wikipedia haters say the open source encyclopedia “devalues the notion of expertise itself.” The openness that makes Wikipedia so attracting to its contributors is exactly what turns off scholars. Scholars say the site is error prone. “Wikipedia's worst feature, the co-founder says, is the notion, held by some contributors, 'that non experts should be able to treat with disdain anything an expert says.'” Maybe Wikipedia should focus on quality and not on quantity.
Some scholars feelings on Wikipedia are “if you can't beat em, join 'em.” Other scholars are completely against Wikipedias objectives and one Wikipedian Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders launched a competing website that is strictly for experts

News ASsignment 3

JJ Cook
Mrs. Pemberton
LIB 103
October 28, 2008
News Assignment 3
Zimbra by Yahoo will be making their debut on Tuesday. Zimbra is a provider of a communication and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft Office and Outlook/Exchange. Zimbra manages all your mailbox content including messages, contacts, calendars, and attachments. Zimbras parent company is Yahoo. “Zimbra planned to become a host for on-demand versions of its suite, the company's co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj told IDG News Service in September 2007, days after Yahoo bought his company.”
Zimbra is using Yahoo’s data centers to become a hosting provider for customers in the education market that want to access the suite on demand. Previously Zimbra has only counted on third-party hosting partners to offer the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
“Most of the about 400 educational institutions that use the Zimbra suite have it installed on their own premises, said John Robb, vice president of product marketing and product management.”
The demand for Saas programs is growing among educational institutions. Educational universities like Zimbra software on their own servers for security and privacy reasons.
Since Yahoo has acquired Zimbra in 2007, Zimbra has doubled its installed base to about 20 million mailboxes. It now has more than 30,000 customers in over 80 countries. US$2 per year per mailbox without advertising is the price of the hosted suite for students and alumni. The paid option adds synchronization capabilities for I phones. Faculty accounts cost US$8 per year per mailbox including synchronization with Outlook and Blackberry devices.
Zimbra is a fast growing server. With their rivals being Microsoft Office and Outlook/Exchange this can affect students and faculty at educational institutions. With Yahoo being the parent company, Zimbra has potential to enter a lot of markets and affect the market share of Outlook/Exchange and Microsoft Office.
Perez, Juan C. Yahoo’s Zimbra Reaches for the Cloud. http://www.pcworld.com/ /businesscenter/article/152911/yahoos_zimbra_reaches_for_the_cloud.html. Tuesday, October 28, 2008.

Reading Assignment #3

Reading assignment # 3 I am guilty of being on the google diet. If I am doing research for a project or just need to find something on the internet I will “Google It.” Google has become the academic library's main competitor. Google are for “those who want fast, easy access to unlimited, full-text content using interfaces that require no critical thought or evaluation.” James Morris, the dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term “infobesity” describing Google research: “a junk-information diet, consisting of overwhelming amounts of low-quality material that is hard to digest and leads to research papers of equally low quality.” Providing access to the nutritious information that library holds in a manner that Google provides access would be genius. The answer to this problem might be commercially produced databases called aggregators. The databases will use Boolean searching and other features that will give better search results for people that willing to give the time. I feel like we should Google-ize are online library and databases. Students do find the electronic resource information very confusing. It would make perfect sense to googlize everything. Bottom line is we need students to stop using low quality information and start using high quality information.Bell, Steven. “The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer An Appetizing Alternative To Google.” Chronicles of Higher Education Vol. 50, 24 (2/20/2004).

reading assignment 3