So I added a link to a business using BrownBook.com. Everything says it is live, and it may be because I can find it using my account link to it, but not their search to it. So the search isn’t live in my first experience. [okay on edit, it was there ten minutes later ... so not bad really]

I clicked on claim this business and I could have it for a mere $10 it claims even though the video Scoble did kept saying it was $22. So maybe I’ll make $2 a year off of it someday. Which is it and where do you find it.

Last comment on them for the night, it asks for the companies email address … but it doesn’t explain if it will be encoded or otherwise protected from spam … will it gents? Or did I just doom this business to receive unwanted junk mail?

I do find this:

Ownership of data and your privacy

Business listings are compiled from a combination of publically available business listing data and user generated data. Brand names and trade marks that feature in business listings are used only in the context of correctly identifying those brand names, trade marks or owners to which they relate. They are owned by their respective owners and Brownbook.net claims no association with any of them. All data and information present and entered into the Service becomes and remains the property of Brownbook Limited for the explicit purpose of providing our Services. We don’t sell our data, and we don’t spam you with irrelevant junk.

Guess we may be getting some relevant junk too, eh?

So I’m checking out the Scoble interview of BrownBook.net.

They pay only the last contributor and only if the business in fact “adopts” their web page on BrownBook.net. Why would they not divide the payment between all of the contributors? The first man in would be the one who did the most work it seems to me.

What am I missing? Dave Ingram and Mark Lyne see something I don’t. Help me out!

I just added my first business, The Jant Group where I recently bought some great window stickers for a sports team. I loved the stickers and they were very affordable. I was actually able to simply give them away to the parents because they were so reasonably priced, so this business came to mind for my testing purposes. Maybe they’ll adopt their listing and I’ll make $4.40 a year off of it … or will someone else edit it after me and take the money? I also ordered some vinyl banners from them. Pretty cool business, so maybe they’ll benefit from a BrownBook.net listing.

They must have something going as BrownBook.net has only been on-line for six months and they have a lot of businesses already listed (”22,346,320 businesses and growing”). Maybe this is the new facebook … I don’t really get facebook either.

Note: In re-reading this it might not be clear what I don’t get. I get the business listing part and the ability to review (or pan) a business, and lots of people will probably use it for those purposes. What I don’t get is why the last person to suggest/edit a business is the one who gets paid if a business decides to adopt their listing.

I’m curious how many businesses do in fact adopt their listings. I’m guessing not too many on a percentage basis. But from their perspective I suspect it’s about how many, not what percentage.

I recently had occasion to order from Eastbay.com. There was a minor glitch in their website. They responded to my comments on the issue and made an appropriate adjustment. This is the second time I have had a customer service issue with them and both times they were prompt, appropriate and cheerful. This is a company I well definitely do further business with.

One really cool thing about their website is their sizing information that shows what sizes of a particular shoe are in stock. I really appreciated this feature once I caught on to it. It allowed me to quickly roll through several shoe models and see if they had the size I needed. I also found their information very helpful in regards whether a shoe ran true to size, or was over/under sized. Great info, great site as far as I was concerned.

I recently decided to create a quick and dirty php form to insert data into a mySQL data base. It seems simple enough of course (and I’ve done it hundreds of times). As with all programming issues, something goes wrong and it’s simple and yet you stare at it for hours! (That’s an exaggeration, its only been ten minutes but it sounds better that way).

So here are the steps I followed:
1. I created a database using php my admin and then created a table in it:
CREATE TABLE `databasename`.`tablename` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`title` VARCHAR( 100 ) NULL ,
`long` SMALLINT NULL ,
`lat` SMALLINT NULL ,
) ENGINE = MYISAM

I have already caused my own problem … but I don’t know it yet. Can you spot the problem? Read on to find the answer! Read the rest of this entry »

I just find Ebay difficult. Recently my kid bought an item on Ebay, a clear plastic phone case, and it was not what it was supposed to be. It just did not fit the phone, not even a little. We tried three times to contact the seller to request refund/return information. We heard exactly nothing!

What else can you do? We opened a dispute on Paypal and they eventually issued a refund for the item and we did return it. Of course they want you to return a $10 item in a fashion that allows it to be tracked … and of course it would cost about $8 to do that, so what’s the point really right? So we just returned it the old fashioned way, by mail.

Next, we get an unpaid item strike from Ebay because we didn’t pay for the item … even though Ebay clearly shows that the item was REFUNDED — hence it must have been paid for. Seems kind of silly.

They did remove the unpaid item strike, but they said this:

Thank you for contacting eBay concerning the Unpaid Item strike you received.

Our records indicate that this is the first Unpaid Item strike you have appealed. Based on your effort to contact us, and the information you have provided, we have removed the Strike from your file.

Of course you should remove the strike, it never occurred and if you paid attention to your own data, you would have known it.

I find dealing directly with sellers or buyers on craigs list to be ever so much more enjoyable to be honest and there seems to be a big trend to Craigs List and away from Ebay among my friends. At least there you don’t expect someone to be helpful to you. It’s too bad that ebay owns some of Craigs List (see very bottom - acquired 25% interest in 2004), because frankly, they might ruin Craigs List first chance they get.

Meanwhile if you are looking at an item by shoparound168 I hope you have better luck than I did.

I haven’t looked at a site for a bit in Internet Explorer. I just don’t like the program and since Firefox began, I have not used it except when working on a web page to see if it works well in IE.

Today I was working on my own site, Bestfoot.com — home of Bestfoot Web Design, and so I decided I better check it in Internet Explorer. I have not worked on my site in years. I have done many many website redesigns, but like the cobbler’s kids, my site had no shoes.

I redid the look a bit and thought, perfect, a new top banner that was crisp and clean — until I went to look at the site in Internet Explorer and it was pixelated and looked horrible. I had no idea I had changed settings a while ago. Fortunately I happened on to Ryan McFarland’s right away and it had the answer for me. Turns out my image was crisp and Internet Explorer was the problem.

Now people who need help with their web page may be able to see that I’m not stuck in 1998 with my former page that I had ignored for nearly ten years! The irony of this whole thing is my specialty might be described as taking your web site or pages that badly need to be updated and doing the job for you or your company. About time I did it for myself.

Great news! According to Net Applications Firefox has now crosses the 20 percent mark for worldwide browser usage.

Read more at the Mozilla blog.