When we first announced CoolTea Classifieds, it never occurred to me that we would also have to develop a backend admin system to help with the process of declining listings.

From the start, we knew that we wanted to keep our classifieds with high-signal and low-noise ratio thus avoid some of the noise you see from other free listing sites - e.g., all the condos for sale, sex hook-ups wanted, get rich quick schemes, etc.

We figured since our system stated “Business-centric por favor”, required valid email address to confirm and used captcha (graphics/numbers used for forms to deter robots), we thought it would be the occasional listing that would slip through that would be addressed via an occasional email from one of our admins.

But even I was surprised at the volume of people trying to post some of these listings. Not there is anything wrong with selling condos, looking to get some, or attempting to get rich, but there are other, more appropriate places on the web for those kinds of listings, especially considering our goal with CoolTea Classifieds is to hold a business-centric emphasis - one that benefits the artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses in our communities.

So shortly after launch, we developed an automated backend system to help people understand why their listings were declined and here are the reason codes as fyi:

• Code 01 - Missing Contact Information
  Your listing did not contain any viewable contact information - e.g., no phone number, email and/or web address to contact for more information. Note that while you supplied an email address when you created your classified listing, your email is never listed on the site unless you include it in the body of your classified listing description. Next steps - Create a new listing with contact info, and it will be promptly approved for publishing … FYI - If you do list your email address in your classified listing description, we recommend that you do it so spam robots don’t easily harvest your email address — hence showing your email as myname at mydomain dot com is better than listing it as myname@mydomain.com. Alternatively, myname [at] mydomain.com also works in making it easy to read by humans but more difficult for spam robots to harvest.
• Code 02 - Better Suited as Event Listing
  Your listing contained date-sensitive material and is better suited for Event Calendar Listing and not a Classified Listing. Currently, CoolTea currently provides free event listings - see http://cooltea.com/listmyevent/
• Code 03 - Real Estate Focused
  You can promote your real estate site and your real estate services, but you cannot promote properties. Exceptions can be made for studios and home offices on a case-by-case basis. If market demands grow in this dept, new real estate categories and/or dedicated property classifieds might be developed … to be continued …
• Code 04 - Multi-level Marketing
  MLM (multi-level marketing) listings are mostly prohibited because there are so many of the same kind - e.g., when we first announced CoolTea Classifieds we had dozens of similar listings for get rich quick, sell vacation condos, promote video emails, etc., that we had to create this Code 04 policy to insure that listings from artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses would not be overrun.
• Code 05 - Bad Debts
  The organization referenced in your listing has an outstanding debt with CoolTea, and we therefore cannot in good faith publish your listing.
• Code 06 - PPC Portal
  The web address you specified goes to a search portal that appears to be a PPC (pay-per-click) model, thus the links and content are thin and not likely of value for our customers. Furthermore, for the similar reason we decline MLM (multi-level marketing) listings, PPC listings are mostly prohibited because there are so many of the same kind - e.g., when we first announced CoolTea Classifieds we had dozens of similar listings for get rich quick, sell vacation condos, promote video emails, etc., that we had to create this policy to insure that listings from artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses would not be overrun.

Here is a link to a really nice article that recently appeared in Hersam Papers - kudos to Fran Sikorski, Scott Mullin, Sally Sanders, and team Ridgefield Press et al.

As an fyi, I thought Fran did an awesome job in looping the Dec 11th CoolTea Songwriting event, Frankie Vinci, Marc Huberman and Georgetown Saloon threads together.

I was also impressed by Scott Mullin’s photographic sensibilities - e.g., especially with his Nikon’s wide angle focus.

To be continued :>) cs

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to do an industrial video shoot - a documentary style video that shows a Connecticut metal fabrication company (50 people on shop floor; 25,000 sq foot facility) plus some really cool footage of the robotic welder I caught from dangling atop a 15 foot ladder overlooking the UV curtains.

As an added fyi, this is one of the first industrial films I’ve done outside of filming my own printing plant back in the late 1980s and early 1990s with VHS and Hi-8 cameras. In this case, I shot just under an hour of footage, and Ethan Winer edited it down to the 10 minute clip you see here on Youtube. Thus I plan to release some of the really cool machine and laser cutting clips as stock footage but to be continued in this dept …

One of the interesting things about this on location recording was that we did not use lav mics on the people speaking nor mics on overhead booms. Instead we used a hand-held direct to smartcard recorder to capture brilliantly clear sound - sound that dominantly captured the voice of people speaking yet also captured the background of their environment with a balance that sounds pleasing.

Note the robotic welder appears around 8 minutes 30 seconds into clip - it is akin to Terminator but better because you can make money with this robot!

In our ongoing effort to foster business connections, CoolTea is pleased to announce that our CoolTea Classifieds are now open for business and feature the following five business categories:

• Jobs Available
• Services Available
• Consulting - Freelance Opportunities
• Other Business Opportunities
• Things for Sale - Business

You can create your FREE classified listing 24×7 without a subscription, account, etc - all you need is a valid email address.

Follow this link to Create Your Free Classified Ad today!

Happy New Year Everybody!

Below is email thread forwarded from friend of friend … Accordingly, those doing instructional training videos might want to jump on this opportunity - I know I have! Cheers - cs

=== Email Forwarded From Friends ===
Hey guys - Sorry if this sounds like a commercial - it’s not, but it is such a great deal I wanted to pass it on.

If you have ever needed to make an instructional video by recording the action on your computer screen while you are talking, then you should check this out.

I use a program from the called Camtasia to help friends understand some of the less obvious features in Finale. Even more impressive, I recorded a visual scrolling score while playing the music.

The program I used, Camtasia Studio, normally goes for $299 US. The first time I saw it in action I was absolutely amazed at how cool it was. I’ve been using version 2.0 for awhile now. Right now, the publisher is offering a promo.

They encourage you to download a fully working, unrestricted copy of version 3.13 - in the hopes that you will want to upgrade to their newly released version 5. The publisher (Techsmith) is now promoting their “upgrade”, but version 3 works just fine and really does everything I need.

(Mac Users: This is a .exe file so I believe it will only work on PC.)

To get Camtasia Studio 3, follow these steps:

Download the free trial version of Camtasia Studio 3

Click here to go to a promotion page -> Complete your name, country and e-mail address … Techsmith will send you the software key to unlock the program …

Click here to see the company demo of the program made by Techsmith

There are so many uses for this software, I figured you had to at least know about this.

Saved you $299 too!.

Think of it as a Christmas gift from a frugal buddy …..

- fin -

For those of you who Santa delivered a Windows Vista machine, be sure to checkout this clip and my recommendation is to return your machine, get your money back, get a new machine with WinXP or maybe jump ship and get a MAC … ho ho ho!

BIG THANK YOU to those who participated with Dec 11th Songwriting Workshop with Frankie Vinci - a success on many levels and more songwriting deliverables coming soon …

Free Classified Ads and Job Postings opening in January …

Several New Blog articles on deck - e.g., How to convert a 1.5 gig DVD to 50meg streaming flash file that sounds and looks great on web; Is Your Rebate Killing Your Customer; Outlaw Inkjets Seeing Red; plus more …

Seasons Greetings, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and To Be Continued - ho ho ho! cs

CoolTea and Georgetown Saloon Presents:

Getting to the Soul of Songwriting Workshop

Featuring Triple Platinum Singer-Songwriter Frankie Vinci

Tuesday December 11th from 6-8PM
Followed by Acoustic Open Mic Night
Hosted by Marc Huberman

Follow this link for Event Details …

On some level I have to pinch myself and find it hard to believe, but log reports don’t lie - they are bits and bytes and tell it the way the server sees it (or gets hit by ip addresses), so here we go.

Unique visits and hits started to climb after CoolTea first introduced several Web 2.0 technologies in the Spring and Summer of 2007.

As the numbers started to climb, at first I thought maybe we were hacked, but security experts confirmed this was not the case and log activity was legit.

Then during sundry conversations with CoolTea friends, “Hey Chuck, What do you think is contributing to the growing site activity?” I started to delve into logs and ponder realities of increasing web traffic.

This is a multipart answer and most of which is technical - e.g., some of the increasing site traffic is based on upgrading from HTML to XHTML which is easier for search engines to index; Some of the traffic is due in part from RSS feeds per our new event calendars, and not much of it is in part to our natural good looks, but I digress!

Last night I had a lively conversation with Zuhair Suidan, a highly in-demand global strategist for some of the best brands in the world, and it was fun to catch-up as he is often on the road.

During our conversation Zuhair asked about why web 2.0 technology makes a difference and generates results we are experiencing.

Suffice it to say that I will not get into all the nuances of hits, unique visitors, RSS feeds, XHTML, meta tags, et. al., but at the end of the day, Zuhair and I were focused on metrics that convert - e.g., if I see trends in hits and unique visitors increasingly hitting a particular CoolTea store, I don’t really care too much other than to have a gauge, so if 80,000 people hit that store and only a handful converted to purchases, well then - that is a different story. In this case, given high volume traffic, is our message not right, is the price an obstacle, is the brand message up for being optimized in copy, graphics, terms, etc. ..??..

Otherwise, it’s great to have increasing traffic but back to noise vs signal concepts.

Personally, I love no noise and lots of signal.

To those who are concerned about a “global big brother” resulting from all our digital and global village connectedness, I say humbug and let the global standards roll forth.

I say this partly in jest as I believe there is already a Universal All-knowing being, one who is loving and graceful but really really smart and ever expanding who already knows everything there is to know about each one of us, and on a more serious grounded earthly level, I was reminded recently of the glory of universal standards that come from collective agreements among men.

This reminder came by way of processing international credit cards for Tele-Vision DVDs. Up to now, most of my e.commerce exposure has been with processing Canadian and US credit cards.

As running start fyi, early on most of CoolTea’s credit card sales were for event tickets, thus we didn’t care too much about what your billing or shipping address was as you had to come to the event to get the deliverable.

But along the way, Mastercard and Visa started charging bill backs for merchants who failed to run AVS (address verification system). One day, six months after a big event where we had charged $5,000 worth of tickets, I was aghast to see an additional charge to our bank account in the way of several hundred dollars.

I called my Merchant bank and said, “What gives - where are these charges coming from?” and as politely and professionally clean as any large institution can do, they did their best to explain that these were billback charges from Mastercard and Visa because CoolTea did not pass the billing address information to the banks during the real-time credit card transactions.

I tried to explain that CoolTea was in the event business, and the likelihood of some hacker buying tickets with a fraudulent card and then showing up at the event was very unlikely, but they just laughed at me and said, “Sorry - take it or leave it. If you want to accept Mastercard and Visa, gotta play by their rules.”

CoolTea had been capturing your address info just-in-case we needed to call you or send mail but had not been passing this info along during the transaction.

Okay, ouch to bill back lesson, and when we started passing the address info to banks, double ouch. Our customer service calls started to climb.

“Hey Chuck, why was my card declined?”

It turned out that most of the cards were valid but did not pass the AVS code verification - e.g., most of the time it was a simple faux pax by a customer in that they were at work using their personal cards but entered their work address; or it was the reverse - people working at home using their corporate cards but entering their home address. Most of this got cleared up when we changed our online forms and improved the language about billing address entered needing to match 100% with what is on file with banks.

I should also mention we were always getting your card’s three digit security code but Mastercard and Visa didn’t give us a break - they still wanted to see matching billing addresses, otherwise they would charge us more points.

There is nothing more frustrating than looking at accounting statements and thinking it was all settled and done, only to find a couple of months later that Mastercard and Visa decided to penalize us.

So fast forward and CoolTea has a wonderful e.commerce system, no more charge backs, almost no customer services calls, and all is good, until we ventured into the international scene.

First it was funny stuff like different characters for other languages - e.g., Norwegians have some funny characters, and no, I’m not talking about people, but literal text characters that are considered “high level ASCII” - you know, the E’s with the funny slants on top, the O’s with double dots, etc.

So these funny characters wrecked some havoc with our banking transactions. We got around this with some data scrubbing before passing the variables to the banks, but then AVS bit us again.

In particular, our German customers started complaining, “Hey I know my card is valid, my address is valid, my 3-digit code is valid, so why are you bouncing my card and transaction?”

This triggered my auto neurosis of “Now what have I done and missed” but alas, I came to find out after much technical digging with gateways and banks that there is no AVS with most of the international banks.

It’s not my fault that most international banking systems cannot confirm their customers billing address in real-time, so now what? Don’t do AVS and pay more points, don’t accept international customers, or ..??..

Suffice it to say we found a solution - some logic under the hood that says, “if US/Canada customer go this way, otherwise process it this way”, and now the international cards from around the world are going through the system without hiccups - at least for now until somebody changes the systems or rules, etc. - a reminder of the golden rule, “those with the gold rule” and since CoolTea is not on par with Mastercard/Visa’s gold, so be it and let’s learn to flow.

Which brings me full circle to standards.

The 1980s IBM PC is a great example of the explosion of growth that can occur when we collectively agree to open standards.

MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is perhaps the most profound example of benefits from standards, but unless you are musically inclined and want to gig and share your music with other like-minded creative folks, it is perhaps a tad esoteric for the average person who is not musically inclined, so let me jump to open standards we all can relate to.

Without the alphabet (e.g., here are 26 symbols that mean this) and grammar (e.g., here is how we arrange the alphabetic symbols) and other open source frameworks like musical chords, notes and scales, what kind of a planet would we have, and how enriching would our lives be?

Thus I say, standards, especially open source, collectively agreed upon ones, are a good thing - even a beneficial thing and necessary for free, open democracies that win with growing markets.

After all, and looping back to credit card processing, I am grateful for the service that Mastercard and Visa provide. I am mindful of the thieves, scoundrels, and risks that the likes of Mastercard and Visa endure. And yet I am committed to providing our customers with the most efficient shopping experience possible that balances et al.

In summary - viva the open standards enthusiasts - and back to my opening point about already being known by some other intelligence - double bravo to accountability and transparency!

Is this a great planet or what!