I am the person who put up the Murray motors web site. Today, 15th April 2010 I am very happy to say that the garage owner Phil resolved all my issues and exchange my car for another car. I have to say that I am very impressed with Phil’s actions, which I think are very honourable, especially with all the difficulties car dealerships are having. Well done Phil and thank you very much.

Patrick Skelly.

PS. I have permanently taken down the car web site as this matter is resolved to my satisfaction.

I came across this very interesting web site about a guy who bought a car from Murray Motor Company t/a Castleknock Car Centre and doesn’t appear to be happy about the car. http://www.philmurraymotorcompany.com.

He seems to have a valid complaint and the garage in question appears not to be addressing he complaint. I admire his approach although I am not sure I would take the same approach.

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2007/01/26/selling-a-bunch-of-interesting-irish-general-domains/

perfect!

Our site provides tools for people to write structured reviews to their blogs and facilities for others to find and use those reviews. We believe as a matter of principle that your opinions and expertise belong on your own blog building your reputation and not on one of a million data silos scattered around the web.

To apply it to the task at hand, if you registered your blog with our site and reviewed customer service at Eircom Broadband, that review would be published to your blog and you would probably use tags like “Customer Service” and “Broadband”.

Users can then find your review on our site by searching for the relevant terms or browsing to the relevant tags and read the review on your blog.

Alternatively your readers can start on your blog, read your review, click on the “Customer Service” tag in the review and get sent to our site where they can see all similarly tagged reviews and drill down through the various associated tags.

See this blog post for an example:

Review of Roam4Free

Comments are written by readers over at the blog themselves as usual. Users can rate the review on our site enabling the quality content to bubble to the top of the search results. This system also enables low-readership bloggers to build a reputation through the quality of their reviews.

When we fully launch, all users will be able to build up collections of bookmarks of reviews on particular topics e.g. “Broadband Providers” and share that out for others to use, saving them the hassle of finding them all.

The use of blogs, to some degree, provides “identity” for the reviewers and avoids a lot of the anonymous libel that can happen. We control what blogs appear in our system, it is not a random aggregator.

If you are interested in trying it out, please sign for the pre-launch test phase over at our site. We won’t be sending out the bulk of the invites until after Feb 16th when the second release of the site is complete and we are closer to full launch.

All feedback would be greatly appreciated.

What ever mechanism might be constructed – people need to take responsibility for their own content. On a simple level – you have no way of validating my experience of a particular company and I have no way of validating yours.

At the moment if I am CEO of Company X and have consistently good (or bad) customer service I can punch my company’s name into Google and realistically I will only get the well known bloggers or those with considerable traffic. This won’t be the whole picture of the conversation regarding my company. More importantly it disadvantages bloggers who are early in their blogging careers and who have a really great story of their experience because they don’t have the rankings to qualify for the first few Google pages.

So I guess I would like to see something that would collate original content (I guess this would mean a common tagging system? See, I told you I am illiterate about this stuff:) so that when Company X punches their name in (or one of their customers is checking them out) up comes a site which is driven by the collective experience of blogging community. I think this offers other media outlets the opportunity to pick up on issues using individual posts or posters etc etc. I am less interested in going the route of a new mechanism with all the attendant legal stuff and more interested in how we can highlight content that is already out there and convince bloggers to write more

Also the problem with blogs is that they are one persons opinion and not organised. Maybe a page on IO could aggregate the blogs (a blog ring setup where everyone adds their URL’s and tags them) but the problem is average Joe that does not use blogging or any other kind of system needs to be given a voice.

Another problem is the numerous review sites being setup online at the moment for Irish broadband which isn’t really productive either. A one stop location would be much better IMO where all information could be collected instead of several sites each trying to do the same thing and none achieving it as there is realistically very few Irish broadband users posting reviews online (be it because they don’t know where to start, couldn’t be bothered or are happy with their service). Maybe an aggregating page for these review sites would be a good idea too.

Basically the information is disorganised and hard to find and by spending a little time organising, it might make the process of writing about Ireland’s broadband problems a little easier for journalists which would lead to more articles on the problem (hopefully) or at least a knowledge base of Irish broadband providers viewable from IO and readable by Irish users.

Even something as simple as a link exchange with the broadband review sites would help out a little for users trying to find information. I’m sure the sites would agree as it would drive traffic to their sites. Also a working speed test link to help users find out if they are getting what they are paying for etc… Overall the current IO site is actually very pleasant to navigate so adding these few things could help out a few people.

It was something that was discussed at some length and dismissed as most interested parties were used to the boards.ie forums. Anyone not able to use boards.ie could always send a mail to info at irelandoffline.org.

One thing I learned from IOFFL is that the gap between people who complain saying “someone should do something” and those who actually do something is vast. And by do something I mean even contribute an opinion.

And unless you get a lot of vocal people together who are willing to continually voice their opinion both online and face to face you are wasting your time.

As for agendas etc, it’ll happen even in an open community like bloggers. X says something Y takes it up and expands. 200 more jump on the band wagon because its the “in thing”.
Mind you the “volunteers” agendas aren’t hidden, more like shouted from the rooftops. And “Campaigning For Affordable, Unmetered And Broadband Internet Access In Ireland ” pretty much covers the agenda

Wouldn’t an aggregator type thingy be capable of covering blogs dealing with complaints? or tagging?

Still, it would be nice to be able to go to a dedicated website and have a moan in the company of like minded individuals.