WordPress says some one else owns it, I can’t understand how that could happen.

I first bought the domain through WordPress.com on Nov 23, 2006 and renew it annually.

This year I renewed on Nov 17 using WordPress.com’s PayPal link. PayPal transferred the funds to them on Nov 18 and Visa billed me on Nov. 19th.

That’s 4 days to renew my domain – an eternity for the automated systems that actually do the registration.

Through the rest of November and December things looked ok. In early Jan I went to post and PetesView was off line so I wrote WordPress support. Here’s what they said:

You purchased the credits on 2008-11-18 but the upgrades were not renewed. This happens if the PayPal transaction doesn’t clear right away. I’m sorry but someone else registered the domain and there is nothing we can do. You’d need to lookup the domain and contact the current owner of the domain if you want to attempt to buy it back from them.

Or as I read it: “It’s PayPal fault. You’re on your own”.

That doesn’t make sense given the financial tracking through both PayPal and Visa shows they had their money no later than Nov 19. And it doesn’t explain why a search of WhoIS shows that the domain is valid until Nov 23, 2009 – which would have happened if my Nov 18, 2008 renewal through WordPress occurred as ordered. And if it’s someone else’s why does it displays what appears to be an RSS feed of my content.

WordPress’s answer – refund my registration fee and wash their hands of it.

That’s not satisfactory for several years building a brand and domain. Surely 4 days is sufficient to register a domain. Surely a company focused on blogging recognizes the value of both the content and the links associated with a domain is more than the registration fee.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with WordPress.com domain registration?
Can anyone speculate what might be the cause?
Is the refunding the registration fee acceptable?
How can I get WordPress to correct this?

Looking forward to your thoughts?

Also at

http://otta-blog.blogspot.com/2009/02/wordpress-wheres-my-domain.html

This test is to see if content published on the peteview.wordpress.com displays immediately on petesview.net

1. Ottawa is losing its tech industry. Changes in several areas of government regulation and approach could have a huge stimulative effect by leveraging personal and institutional investment.
   1. Investment in start-ups must be encouraged. This can be done by decreasing the capital gains that are taxed if these companies are successful and increasing the capital losses that can be claimed if they fail.
   2. Change the SRED and IRAP rules to allow individuals to claim sweat equity contributions at a rate determined by their last paid position – and paying grants only on profitably (this allows the accrual of offsetting grants that can either “sold” for capital on the risk market or saved to offset tax payments or directed to commercial promotion.
   3. Remove tax regulations that put Canadian tech businesses at an international disadvantage. Examples include the way CRA values options at the time of grant instead of the time of redemption. (Options are used to confer value to key employees while preserving the company’s immediate cash position for growth, promotion or research.) They are unusable to Canadian tech companies because the downside risk in the current rules means accepting options if the companies stock could falls can (and has) bankrupt employees. This puts Canadian companies at an international disadvantage.
   4. Develop an Eastern corridor (Quebec City to Windsor) Tech Economic development agency to bridge and connect local centers and encourage the flow of ideas and personnel. To compete globally we must increase the population base for tech incubation, research and professional development to match those of our key competitors.  This means connecting regions – and moving beyond the Toronto – Waterloo corridor that is currently in fashion.
2. Examine and remove regulatory impediments to clean/green & tech industries, and develop legal frameworks to support alternative methods of service delivery.
   1. Regulatory obstacles or lack of legal frameworks hamper the conversion to many alternate technologies (hardware/software and process) and often serve only to protect entrenched companies and approaches. This issue applies to everything from green technologies to inner city granny flats that allow greater home care. Some years ago I spoke to an Ottawa manufacturer of solar water heaters. His biggest obstacle to expanding into the home market was that CMHC had not developed (and was not planning to develop) building code recommendations for roof mounted hot water systems of his type. Each sale required an engineers report to be filed with the building permit. Needless to say he is no longer in business – with the loss of an innovative Canadian technology and local employment. Similarly rules surrounding granny flats prevent them being usable in most cities where the need actually exists. More over there is no legal framework to allow temporary flats that is the desired solution to this problem for both care givers and entrepreneurs.
   2. Similarly CRTC inaction on SMS fees means that Canada is a development backwater for this rapidly growing alternative or augmentation to smart phone applications – limiting innovation, local company growth and methods of service delivery.
3. Encourage government to trial / buy early versions of company’s technologies, or provide grants/tax relief to companies that trial and invest in new technologies.  Early customers are critical to perfecting products as customer knowledge is critical in understanding and generalizing the problem set. At the same time investment in technology has proven to be a key component to the success and international competitiveness of businesses that invest in them. Increasing the rate of adoption and moving the entry point to earlier in the curve would have a huge effect on Canadian businesses allowing them a broader competitive footing internationally while encouraging tech company growth.
   

What other structural changes could the government take that would help Canadian and Ottawa tech firms grow and compete?

This may be the most important decision its members and funders make because it will set the direction for the organization during the coming critical years where Ottawa’s tech sector will either finally revive or fatally flounder.

It’s a time for vision, inclusion, activism and leadership.

So what should they look for?

First someone who thinks regionally. Ottawa is a mid-sized city for Canada but tiny globally. The reality is that we compete with areas that measure their economic hinterlands in tens of millions of people – and we need to approach that scale to compete. It is this economic and geographic connection between producers and consumers that ensures needs definition and fulfillment easily link, creates ready markets for initial test, insures a large pools of investors and management talent, and guarantees a rich education and employee pools for specialized skills as businesses grow. If Ottawa’s tech sector is going to thrive OCRI must make Ottawa a central part of an economic partnership that extends from Windsor to Quebec City.

Next the leader must be inclusive and strategic. A smaller tech community means smaller budgets – but the amount of work actually increases if “the current weakening trend” is to be reversed. OCRI must become an instigator when necessary and a coordinator where possible. It makes little difference to the strength of the community if The Code Factory mentors start-ups or whether OCRI does directly – except if the Code Factory handles it OCRI can focus on advocating public policy changes that few can address otherwise. Same goes for the Innovation Hub. Its fine in times of plenty to replicate MaRS in Ottawa but the budgets won’t be there for a number of years so let’s focus on delivering MaRS programs at University facilities’ using the telecom expertise Ottawa is famous for. Linking tech entrepreneurs within a university setting also provides (with some program support) a framework to bridge the commercialization gap that keeps so much Canadian funded research in the lab instead of the market.

The next bit of inclusion is that OCRI must reach out and address the needs of the thousands of small tech companies that are not currently it members or risk seeing its public funding attacked as this group develops an independent voice and representation.

The new leader must also be an activist. The problem of start-up investment or talent pools is not just a function of our size. We need substantial changes in out tax structures if we are gong to compete with the rest of the world. I’m not talking about lower corporate rates but of correcting the putative options regulations that mean start-up can’t attract world class talent with promises of future gain, and the write-off rules that reward people for keeping money out of high risk/reward investments like tech. We also need to look at federal and provincial programs that are sometimes so rule bound as to be meaningless. Lets make sure that if other levels of government understand the problem that their programs address it effectively. It is in developing the expertise here, and using our proximity to the federal government – that OCRi cements its leadership role to eastern Canada’s tech community.

This is a defining moment for OCRI. I hope they will consider these issues as they evaluate candidates.

After weeks, and weeks of reading – and trying lines of code that don’t work – and then searching and reading some more I’ve come some conclusions.

1. You can’t teach yourself! It ‘s simply too complex (inter-acting dependencies) and the syntax’s so strict that without a daily dialog with an experienced coder you never get enough lines written to really grasp what’s going on.

2. There’s a huge gulf between the myriad of simple tutorials and anything you’d actually want to do. As a non-programmer one need examples that are similar to what you’re trying to accomplish to learn. From the questions I’ve seen in forums experienced programmers sometimes do as well.

3. When choosing a platform – good documentation is critical. You’re going to need it some time and if it isn’t there – or the suggestion is read the source – move along unless you’re up for divining solutions.

4. Search doesn’t work for well for code. You can find lots of stuff but too often its a feast of links that are only marginally useful ( a lot of link reading to find what you need). And everyone uses slightly different nomenclature so each search has to be done repeatedly. It would be great to be able to eliminate specific sites from every search result, or forum questions without replies.

5. Forums are great but an active local users group is likely more important.

On one level I don’t feel too bad – because I’ve seen enough comments by experienced programmers who’ve beaten their heads against these problems – at another level I realize that something has to change if I’m going to learn.

I’m looking for a tutor familiar with Cakephp 1.2 and patient enough to guide a motivated neophyte to programming self-sufficiency. Interested? contact me.

Software was a black box of objects passing parameters and data to other objects. Conceptually it’s pretty easy to describe those relationships and feel comfortable throwing around names of API commands, discussing the merits of frameworks, and explaining how objects inter-related and the testing paradigms that proved them reliable. If you didn’t probe you might think I had detailed knowledge of the inner workings of these things.

I’m learning to code and discovering it’s not as easy as the concepts led me to believe.

Even for my simple purposes, a data driven niche media web application, I’ve had to learn 4 languages. And by learn I mean that if they were spoken languages I’d usually get coffee when I thought I asked for it – not that I could carry on a conversation. Add to that 1 framework that I know will make things easier and more scalable in the long run – but assumes you’re conversational already so speaks too fast and uses words you don’t understand. And before any of that stuff could work I had to install and configure 3 services for the development environment.

Each component interacts and has dependencies so you can’t produce anything without a rudimentary understanding these relationships. And I just know that in the future I find that elegance and performance comes from deep understanding.

Still it’s possible for me to attempt this because of the great resources and community that develop around each language, framework and component. I’ve used text and video tutorials, scoured forums and programmer blogs for answers to questions, and downloaded tools if they look to be useful. Slowly I’m beginning to make progress.

Of course I could have saved myself the effort and had someone who’s already fluent speak for me – but what fun would that be. It’s not just that I get to decide what this application does (assuming it progresses to the point it does something) its that software fluency gives me an increasing appreciation and understanding of how the services I see everyday operate, and how complex they really are.

Oh! And to all those programmers that I antagonized by asking “how hard can it be” when some business pressure meant a 90 degree turn in code – I apologize. I now know software happens at the level of details not concepts.

What’s happening is that the world (I’ve heard similar things from the London, Leeds, and Manchester) is beginning to recognize that if we are ever going to upset the dominance of Silicon Valley – an area that treats the world is as its innovation hinterland – we have to build on the strength and diversity of our regional communities – rather than surrendering the best to American investors. 
 
What I mean by regional is a strategy based on communities co-operating and upper levels of governments enhancing that co-operation with connectivity and funding.  Why for instance should Entrepreneurship 101 not be broadcast throughout Ontario using funding to enable web casting and a local partner to provide local instructional support and facilitate inter and intra community interaction? This builds local and regional community, entrepreneur’s knowledge while at the same time building a network of organizational relationships at the regional level. The same thing could be done with OCRI and Communitech programs – as well as DemoCamps and other industry events. The alternative is to spend $500.M of public money duplicating MaRS in Ottawa – an idea that lies at the heart of Innovation HUB proposal. 

We need to develop a sense of extended community that allows people and businesses to identify partners and opportunities outside their geographic area. This is important because economic benefit occurs is where problem knowledge, technology application and business insight intersect. At one time it could have been argued that this was the domain of cities – because of the density of interactions – however the emergence of community around blogs/forums/video has shown that technology can serve as an intermediary for connection instead of geography. At the same time the scale of competition has increased dramatically. Countries like China and India have massive population advantages that statistically increase the probability that it will be them, not us, who discover and exploit new opportunities. A single city is no longer big enough to form a global competitive advantage.

As I see it we these trends will guide many new business models.

- cheap and rich communication
- the adoption of networked business models  (outsourcing being but one example)
- a decrease of vertically integrated companies
- more innovation occurring at the intersection of fields of knowledge
- globalization (competition for customers & innovation) reaching into smaller and smaller market niche
- rising energy and carbon offset fees increasing the costs for physical travel and shipping  

They also provide a framework for regional economic development that can rival the world’s mega cities in terms of the diversity and connection – while being economically efficient, providing program excellence and diversity, and serving every company type – even if the threshold in a local are doesn’t warrant local provision of that service.

Of course the devils’ in the details, but the place to start is to explore how pervasive broadcast of local events through the broader region builds community and connections that wouldn’t occur otherwise.

I’d be the first to admit that OCRI does many good things – but it has core structural problems that prevent it from being what either the city/province or itself want it to be – which is THE ONLY funded representative of tech business economic development initiatives in the Ottawa.

All levels of government have allowed OCRI to blur the lines between its member’s interests and those of broader tech community it receives funding to serve. That’s where I have a problem – the approx. $1.3 M of city money and potentially the equivalent in provincial funding that this “member based organization” spends in the name of businesses that are not members. This is a fundamental conflict. In OCRI we have an organization that must serve members interests first, deciding how public money should be spent to support all local businesses. To me this is no more right that the partial franchise (vote) was right it its day. It can’t work because it is not representative by its very nature.

And take a look at its membership. Of Ottawa’s approx 1819 ‘knowledge based’ companies only 35% are OCRI members. A closer look at OCRI’s membership shows that something like 42% are service providers (lawyers & consultants) and a further 21% are government agencies. Remove them and only 13% of what most of us consider ‘knowledge companies’ are OCRI members. And one has to ask how services designed for Ottawa’s largest taxi company, the British High Commission and Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, numerous Ottawa hotels or the Greater Peterborough Regional DNA Center (all members) jell with the needs of the far more numerous small tech firms that are not members but are expected by public funders to be served by it. It makes no sense.

This wouldn’t be so bad if other groups were getting funding – but if you’ve approached funders (which I have) the answer is always the same ‘have you spoken to OCRI?’ It’s the strangle hold on funding and program delivery that’s the biggest problem because it stifles program innovation and stops underserved groups getting an organized voice to offset the ear of funders OCRI’s members have. I would argue that it’s this funding stranglehold that led to the death of the Ottawa Life Science Council and its eventual decision to merge with OCRI. I’d be interested if any Life Science companies reading this think are they better or worse served since the merger.

Lets take a look at how OCRI supports the community. Sure there are a lot of events – but the preponderance of them are fee based, and fees for non-members are typically 80% higher than for members. This could be to encourage membership, or alternatively to discourage the participation of non-members. Either is a logical stance for an organization interested in serving its members, but I would argue neither meets the community serving objectives implied by the large public subsidy OCRI receives. 

It’s gets complex too. OCRI is a major advertiser, particularly to the two local tech focused papers. Whether this affects coverage is anybodies guess but I don’t believe the discrepancy between OCRI’s stated size of the Ottawa tech community (81,900) and the Conference Board of Canada’s numbers (46,000) got the coverage it deserved – especially because the size of Ottawa’s tech community gets to the core of the effectiveness of OCRI as the delivery and strategy vehicle for Ottawa’s tech economic development. It’s time we understood why these numbers are so different – and considered what that means for our economic development funding. 

Finally the notion that only a few people with ‘sour grapes’ have these concerns is simply wrong. I didn’t make the above list of issues up – I heard them from OCRI Partners, obliquely from previous and current OCRI managers, and from not a few small tech businesses. The issues are a lot more substantive than sour grapes.

If there were no public money involved these criticisms would be moot. As there is and it’s both fair and right to ask if we are getting the best value and the outcomes from the public investment we put in.

Actually the call is for a much broader inclusion of person to person or person to group communication in Internet services – direct discussion between people using a site and between users and the posters of content. Talk.

One of the things all sites do is to attract people who share a common interest. From time immemorial this has formed the basis for personal discussion and connection. It is how we meet other people – through a shared activity.

The internet has introduced a new type of shared activity that mimics its predecessors –while removing the requirement for temporal or spatial connection. In doing so it has both enriched some aspects of our social lives while leaving others unsatisfied.

It is hard not to believe the rise of services like Twitter and newsfeeds on social networks from FaceBook to Linkedin, which send out a stream of deeply human but typically mundane activities, is not a reaction to an unmet desire to connect around the ordinary activities that consume most of our lives.

For myself I cannot stand in line at a store, or contemplate some types of purchase without engaging in discussion with those around me. And it’s not just me who relishes in chance encounters. On the radio this morning a store owner was recounting how his store grew out of his interest to share his knowledge with customers. One of the things he regretted with the Internet store that remains was his business was reduced to availability and price.

It doesn’t need to be like this – the ability to personally connect either with individual users or connect users with each other is both easy and cheap. More importantly it provides a means to develop the rich personal connection between people that real time voice allows.

One easy way to start is to consider adding conferencing as a regular activity related to your site.  Check out Iotum’s free conference service as an example of one service to speak to multiple site users simultaneously. Use it to educate, understand, or to explore a specific topics and tangents. It reintroduces the personal onto your site.

Want more continuous connection? Add click to call buttons – but if you’re a small organization consider integrating with find-me applications so you’re not tethered to a desk. This is a great way to add value – especially if the goods, service or cause the site is dedicated to are based on something unique where sharing insights and discussion enriches everyone.

In time I love to see infrastructure that would notify me that other users were on the same page I was – and if they were open to a spontaneous discussion. Of course in this scenario Web shopping can again become the shared activity around which people meet which it is for many in the physical world.

In the end adding voice to an Internet site re-introduces temporal connection to the relationships they build – making them more concrete and meaningful.

A few days ago Maggie Fox released her company’s version, providing details of the internal lay out and the elements that should be included. That engendered quite a bit of insightful discussion (here, and here).

As a template Digital Snippets hit all the right core content notes – it includes extensive RRS feeds for easy dissemination of updated information, and interestingly includes embeddable widgets for the true fans to add to their sites. Each page includes contact information to corporate communication people giving story writers the contacts if they want to expand a story through a specific line of questions.

All this is good – but at I can’t help thinking that while this makes corporate PR more effective – it still treats PR as a separate part of communication strategy – at the very time that consumers are integrating messages where ever they find them – sometimes across brands. Just look at what is happening with Unilever over its AXE and Dove brands. (here and here)

It also doesn’t appear to leverage the knowledge of social media firms to design creative that builds on their understanding of viral transmission and social sharing. While it’s fine to centralize creative developed elsewhere for social media use I believe that the true value will emerge when social media releases can create their own creative to both tell the story and encourage viral spread.

While not developed as PR its hard not to think that creative like the Travelers IQ Challenge developed by Ottawa’s TravelPod (and seen on hundreds of blogs, papers and social network sites) hasn’t been contributed to stories about the company (it has) or driven traffic to both their brands.

It also would be nice to see these sites more fully integrated into the sponsor’s web properties – rather than echoing them as they do now.  Social media sites should also being promoted with conventional promotion techniques.

Finally having real time components such as live conference or video calls included would add to the immediacy of a release and creating urgency around spreading the news.

All of this is to say that by dealing with media releases as system – which the social media release and Digital Snippets does is an important step. The real value though is going to come from building the specific skills of social media experts into corporate communications – and empowering them with the tools and creative to tell the story in new ways and across more platforms.