Imagine, the capital of the country you are operating in, hundreds of thousands of customers being without their TV or broadband service by a badly managed outage,  but not being published anywhere in the news. But on the website there is a ticket outlining what the progress of a several day outage of these services for the whole of South West London is… here is just that detail

Updates

Yepp, day in, day out, every 4 hours, the same poor expectation management – your services will be up and running in 4 hours, then after 4 hours the same standard “we are looking into it and will let you know” message appears… Sky Digital must be laughing their asses off at this.

I managed to find myself an alternative connection for today… down the pub :)

So far there has been no Virgin Media broadband or Cable TV in all of south west London for around 36 hours and for the first 24 of it there was almost no communication available to find out when service was to be restored.

All this makes me far more likely to switch to Sky in January when our latest contract expires (we have been with VM for 5 years now) they seem to have some good offers on at the moment and I think TV would be better with Sky – better provision for HD content etc.

Throughout yesterday there were only two updates on the Virgin Media service status page so people could find out what was going on, when I phoned the customer services number (150) all I got to do was hear “Sorry we are unusually busy right now, to avoid waiting in queues please call back later” then immediate disconnection… that was the only infuriating part of this outage – how VM have been handling their customers.

So I can see myself changing to a Sky bundle in the new year where hopefully customers are treated better when things inevitably go wrong.

I have a few wordpress sites that are actually auto blogs, that is sites where the content is imported automatically from open source content providers. I got a copy of WPRobot from a fairly blackhat site where I got to play around with it for a while then found it so invaluable I decided to buy version 1.31 a few weeks back.

This week the developer released v2.0 that makes this really the complete package for automatically creating niche blogs which you can then put money makers on like Adsense and use other plugins such as AFLinker to automatically convert keywords in the posts to affiliate links where you can make more than with just Adsense.

With 2.0 you can now also…

• Strip links out of imported comments (yepp even the comments get imported)
• Cloak links so you don’t lose commissions
• Randomize your auto posts so they look more naturally posted
• There is a Yahoo News module so you can import the latest news from Yahoo.
• A great new RSS Module so you can scrape from any site with an RSS feed.

This is in addition to the great features that sold me on v1.3

• MIX feature, so you can automatically get a related image from Flickr added to your post from say Youtube, Yahoo Answers, or Articlesbase
• Ability to pull in related products from your favorite Amazon site and post them to the auto blog.

I run this without any problems on windows hosting, if you use apache it’s even easier and more flexible. WPRobot takes all the work out of content publishing by automating it 100% for any niche with a great mix of text, images, and products that you can fine tune and add an unlimited amount of keywords that you can match up to your categories.

Also, the cost is tax deductible as a business software expense so you have nothing to lose whatsoever, there are various packages available I went for the all inclusive Elite package but you can tailor what you buy to you needs if you only need some of the modules.

When you buy the full version, I have a special rebate coupon that saves you $30  the code “netevolution” can be used to get the full version of WP Robot v2.0 for $30 cheaper than anywhere else.

To make easy money online buy WPRobot today it’s the best auto blogging plugin for wordpress.

Looks like they have opened the floodgates again, I have 16 invitations available to send out, let me know if you want one.

Brad

Thanks to Avron for the invite, I’m now able to have a play with Google Wave, first thing I notice is that you can’t hook it up with your Google Apps account – and you need to come up with a new username just for the Wave.

Lets play!