Why? Because a source has informed me that ‘Trade Fair Guide’ is the next planned name in a long line of business directory scams fromt the Cypriot stable that brought you Expo Guide among others. If that’s so, we need to get this post into the Google indexes early.

In the scammer’s naming system, ‘Trade Fair Guide’ is the holy grail of names for their scam directory because it’s the easiest one to piggy-back onto a genuine trade show or fair that a small business might be attending. The scammers hope that people assume the form for ‘insertion’ into their useless database is connected with the show they’re paying to attend or exhibit at. An earlier version of this scam, ‘Fair Guide’, did exactly that for those reasons.

So why use the name ‘Trade Fair Guide’ when it’s so close to ‘Fair Guide’? I suspect there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, for the reasons above – because the scammers can pass it off as connected to credible trade and business events. Secondly, because Google is already well-populated with documents with the keywords ‘trade fair guide’ because a trade fair guide is a document that most, if not all, credible trade and business events will produce for the benefit of attendees and exhibitors. The hope, from the scammers’ point of view is that these credible documents will act as a buffer, clogging up the first few pages of Google’s search results when someone like you tries to do some due diligence on this ‘guide’. The intention, of course, is to try to keep posts like mine – that cost the scammers money – out of sight.

Watch this space.

I’m not a great fan of apps because, like a lot of things online, they’re great at taking your money but often rubbish at customer support or explanation.

I bought Skrobbler’s Sat nav2 app and tried it out at home. Even on my ropey 3G connection at home, the map / route part of the app seemed quite able to locate me and plot a route from A to B without a problem. But hitting the ‘Navigation’ button (to use the app as a talking SatNav rather than as a GoogeMaps equivalent) just didn’t seem to want to work. The app repeatedly assumed that my location was the center of Berlin.

Now I’ve nothing agains Berlin but not very helpful if my SatNav can’t tell my start point. This plus the somewhat counter0-intuitive user interface had me swearing at Skrobbler a lot this morning.

A quick search online shows I wasn’t alone in this. A number of 1* reviews on the iTunes app store say the same. As do posts in the Skrobbler Support Forum.

Later, I went into town and tried the app out from there. To my surprise, it seemed to work. Except that it tried to direct me the wrong way to get home. Not completely wrong but petrol-wastingly-unnecessarily wrong.

That doesn’t inspire me to spend any more money on ‘offline’ map packs. I learned one thing today about buying apps and it’s this: when you’re in the iTunes app store, make sure you filter the reviews by ‘Most Critical’ first and read them all. I wish I had. I know it’s only a couple of quid but it’s still money.

Well, it could be that your drive is failing – requiring an expensive replacement.

Or it could be that it needs a bit of old-fashioned TLC.

Before you give up and take it back to the Apple store, try this simple trick:

1) Get a credit card and a fine, lint-free cloth – ideally the same as the cleaning cloth that you get with your eye glasses from the optician

2) Fold the cloth over the short edge of the credit card and smooth it out so there’s no lumps or bunches

3) Gently insert into the CD/DVD slot and move from side to side and in and out an inch or so (concentrating on the left side where the laser lives)

4) Remove and try to burn a DVD or CDRom

If the laser lens is dirty it seems that the software will return the ‘failed to calibrate the laser power level’ message. After all, it can hardly say ‘Hey, I think there’s some dust built up there over the last 3 years dude, give it a waggle with a credit card and cloth…’

Well, it worked for me – hope it does for you.

Yes, they do. This morning in my dad’s pond, I noticed this odd sight. A frog clinging tightly to a goldfish – a very dead-looking goldfish. It was riding it around the pond like a holiday inflatable toy and refused to let go of it even when I gently prodded it with a stick. The frog’s grip was obviously very tight and there were some ‘gizzards’ dangling out of the fish but generally, the fish looked as though it had been in good condition before its encounter with the frog.

So what happened? Well, it’s spring and the pond is currently full of frogspawn which leads me to think that the unfortunate fish was, in fact, loved to death by the over-amorous frog. A quick internet search revealed quite a few references to frogs killing goldfish by hugging them to death as well as larger bullfrogs actually eating them.

So if it happens to you and you find yourself reading this, rest assured that while it will be the oddest (and possibly the most disturbing) thing you’re likely to see today, it is in fact quite common.

I just went online to book a return trip from Plymouth to Paddington via the First Great Western website. As usual, I selected ‘Quiet Carriage’. And once again, I arrived at the point of purchase only to notice that FGW had given me a reservation in my chosen ‘Quiet Carriage’ (coach A) on my way up to London and given me a reservation in the VoloTV coach, coach D, on my way back home on Thursday night. Quite a few times before I’ve been caught out like this, ending up with a reservation in the VoloTV ‘entertainment’ coach on the way home.

Tonight, I stopped short of buying and canceled, closing my browser and starting again. I wanted to prove what I already suspected: that there are seats in the Quiet Coach on Thursday night but First Great Western has another agenda. I went back into the First Great Western website and bought two singles, one after another – each time selecting the Quiet Coach. Presto! Two singles, Quiet Coach both ways. In order to get what I (the customer) want, I am forced to pick up two sets of tickets in different locations. Thanks, First Great Western.

No matter how enthusiastic, committed and sociable the managing director of VoloTV proved to be in response to my initial feedback, I haven’t changed my view of VoloTV since the moment I first encountered it. A pay-to-view seat-back TV set (airline style) was, as far as I could tell, always going to be a losing proposition given the proliferation of personal media players (from MacBooks, to Androids, to iPhones etc) and the fact that they certainly weren’t going away. Put simply, VoloTV was always an imposition – a business idea pushed on the consumer, rather than a business idea that responded to consumer demand. And the fact that First Great Western is trying to force people into Coach D against their wishes (and has been doing this for at least a year) suggests I was right in my initial assessment.

I think it was a bad business decision, First Great Western. If you’re reading this, please amend your booking system so that I can choose the Quiet Carriage that I prefer when spending my money on your service.

Remember, I’m the customer, not VoloTV.

…except leave Facebook.

I just discovered this tonight by adding my brother to a ‘Stop Paypal freezing peoples’ accounts’ group that I joined. I fully expected Facebook to send him some kind of invitation, but no, it just added him without his permission.

No doubt my brother will see that he has become a member of this group and use the ‘leave group’ option if he doesn’t want to be part of it. But if he was one of those people who doesn’t log in every day, he could be a member of a group without knowing it for days, weeks or even months.

From a reputation standpoint, that might not be such a good thing.

Three years ago I posted ‘How to complain about Paypal in the UK‘ because I knew there was little or no information to help the thousands of furious customers out there unable to get their hands on their own money. I researched as hard as I could, but – apart from the Financial Ombudsman Service and (at the time) the Financial Services Authority, I drew a blank.

Since then, the list of complaints about Paypal has been steadily growing. What’s depressing is that each victim of Paypal’s outrageous behaviour tends to suffer in isolation. The stories are almost unbelievable and the sense of frustration and helplessness is overwhelming.

But recently, there’s been some good news, some really good news. Last September, this UK woman took Paypal to her County Court for holding her ‘frozen’ funds. Wow. What are you all waiting for!?

And not only that, other commentators report the Financial Ombudsman Service taking effective action and forcing Paypal to release their frozen funds. Wow again!

If you’re here because you’re having problems and because Paypal’s dreadful practices and lack of customer service is driving you mad, then please join the new Facebook group and help to put pressure on this monster organisation.

When it comes to online reputation, the single hardest thing for some people to understand is that everything you do online leaves a trace – and that people make up their minds about you and your business from the sum total of what they can find out about you.

As we all know, that sum total includes everything you say about yourself (your website, ads, press-releases and forum posts) and everything that everyone else says (blog comments, reviews, Tweets, Facebook comments) and so on.

Judging by the reputation management services you find online, many people think that preserving a good reputation is all about pushing bad reviews and unhappy (or malicious) customer comments of the first, critical, page of Google and replacing it with glowing comments that talk about how great they are.

This is borne out by the fact that most enquires I get about reputation problems are from people looking for a quick fix. These are the people who will end up paying a technical-sounding company to create a load of content to drown out the bad news in Google.  I don’t work with them for two simple reasons: firstly because you can’t guarantee driving stuff off the front page of Google and secondly (and more importantly) that efforts to do so always say more about you than the negative comments ever could.

Everybody makes mistakes. Most people forgive a business making a mistake and honestly owning up to it and looking to work with the customer to put it right. However, all my experience in online reputation and customer services shows that the one thing that customers won’t forget – that will drive them to actively look for ways to punish you – is not listening to them when things go wrong.

Trying to hire an offshore agency to ‘bury the bad news’ for you is a sure-fire way to communicate to customers that you’re the kind of person who will try to cover up your mistakes rather than face them.

In my experience, the smart move is to be genuinely transparent – and to do everything possible to convert the problem (there almost always IS something that you’ve had a hand in doing wrong) into a victory for you to demonstrate publicly how good you are at putting things right. Remember, your customer wants resolution and for you and him/her to be happy far more than they want to be in conflict with you. The smart way to preserve and build on your online reputation is to keep this fact in mind at all times – and to use it to your advantage.

Many people start blogs with the idea that they must join the blogging revolution in order to build a social media presence and create online rapport with their customers and prospects. Well, it’s a great, low cost way of doing this. A blog (whether self-hosted or provided by WordPress.com, Blogger.com or similar) is a user-friendly way of generating interest in your business. It offers you an inexpensive way to explore and learn about ‘search engine optimisation’ yourself – without paying expensive consultants.

Blogging can be quick, easy and remarkably powerful for a newcomer. It can also be a minefield for the unwary. Blogging will put your content into Google and sometimes right up there in the search engine results, no problem. But if you put the wrong stuff out there, you’re stuck with it – and before long, that’s what everyone will find when they go looking for your name, your products or your business. Some people seem to lose sight of this fact, choosing to rant and rave on their blog with views that come back to haunt them later on as prospects start doing their ‘due diligence’.

There are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot when you rush to join the social media revolution and get your business blogging. One of the most painful is let your blog fill up with comment spam. These are comments that pretend to be about your content but which, in reality, are just attempts to link from your site to their viagra / porn / fake watches site.

Typical comment spam looks like a vague attempt to massage the writer’s ego:

“Great blog, man. You really got to the heart of this issue in a way that few people do. I’m going to bookmark your site and recommend it to my friends” is a typical comment – designed to stroke your ego without actually saying anything about the post – because, of course, they’ve not actually read it.

More damaging, perhaps, than letting the occasional bit of spam through is the tendency of many new business bloggers to completely miss the ‘moderate comments before publishing’ option in their blog settings. When this is unchecked, the piles of porn / medication spam will build up on your site, and pretty soon it will look like the urine-soaked, rubbish strewn doorway of a shop in the high street that’s gone out of business. You get the picture.

There’s nothing that says “jumped on the social media bandwagon to broadcast my stuff but can’t actually be bothered to engage with it” better than missing that single, tiny check-box. Don’t make that mistake – set comment moderation ON from the start.

A news headline on the home page of Linked In took me to a report on the burtal oppression of Egypt’s Tahrir Square protesters that took place on Saturday. The story focused around the beating of an unarmed, defenceless woman and the pictures show close-up shots of her, half-naked, in the process of being beaten unconscious by hordes, literally hordes, of soldiers armed with helmets, shields, boots and batons.

For the report’s author, the image of the woman with her black abaya pulled up over her head to reveal her bare midriff and blue bra, is a shocking indictment of the regime now clamping down on the protesters.

I agree – but watching the video was, in my view, more disturbing even than this single image. The video shows something infinitely more awful that a woman being beaten and dragged around: it shows literally dozens of soldiers swarming like crazed insects around her, jostling for position, fired with a grotesque hunger to unleash violence on her. It’s the sheer scale of the violence against her, the hugeness of the cowardice of these frightened, uncontrollable, unconscious idiots in uniforms that is so shocking.

In the middle of that awful melee, I saw something that shocked me even more than the beating of the woman for its cold-blooded inhumanity – a soldier lining up on a man, leaping into the air and delivering a two-footed stamp with his full body weight on his victim’s torso.

Let these images haunt those involved and let them become symbols that catalyse change for the better.