Tuesday article links: a new feature unveiled

As I've been blogging here for the past couple of months, I've often run across articles that I think would be interesting to pass along. Sometimes, I don't get to immediately discuss the subjects in depth because of my time constraints.  But rather than not mentioning them at all when I come across them, I thought I would post references to interesting subjects that I find for our readers.  Some of these subjects will warrant further comments from me at a later date, others may not. But this way, you can get some suggested reading material on subjects that interest you and feel free to post comments on them.

So, starting today, I'm going to start posting links to articles that I think are "must reads." I may or may not agree with the assertions made in these articles or blog posts, but I do believe that they either merit consideration or they're just plain good reading. 

So, in that spirit, we'll start today. . .

Comcast's Use Of Twitter Continues To Fascinate [Broadband Reports]
Broadband Reports links to a Boston Globe article that profiles Comcast's monitoring Twitter in an effort to improve customer service. I'm glad to see another cable operator receiving attention for following up on customer service issues on blogs and social media.  We've been doing it for years with terrific results.

The Facebooker Who Friended Obama [The New York Times]
This is a fascinating story on how important the Internet is becoming in American politics.  Want to know why Barack Obama's supporters "look like Facebook?" Read about the new job one of the founders of Facebook has with Obama's presidential campaign.

Opinion: Ever feel like cell carriers and ISPs don't like you? [ArsTechnica]
Don Resinger vents on ISP content filtering and bandwidth caps.  He definitely is advocating more government reguation over the Internet and ISP's and seems to discount the intensity of competition between cable, telephone and wireless companies.  I disagree that there is a cozy relationship between the FCC and the cable industry (which was lumped in with all industries).  Frankly, to understand how bad it is, you just have to add up the unprecedented number of legal actions the cable industry has pending against recent FCC actions.  And our track record is pretty good.  So why aren't there dozens of choices when it comes to broadband?  Money.  Big money.  It costs an awful lot of money to build out one of these networks.

Internet addressing agency loses its addresses [Associated Press]
Oops. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (the agency in charge of Internet addresses) was hacked last week and lost their domain names for a period of time.  Hey, stuff happens.

Expect Court Date Return Over Local Franchising Rules [Multichannel News]
Multichannel reports on the likelihood of local governments to appeal the FCC's recent court victory on rules that would aid phone company entry into the cable television market.  Local governments are pretty unhappy about losing control over their franchising rights.  Frankly, I'm not in favor of the cable industry pursing an appeal of this one since we're already competing in video against at least two other companies -- DirectTV and Dish and in some markets competitive cable operators and phone companies too.  For me?  Let's just get on with winning the customer's loyalty! 

Comments

[Angelica]

I am a comcast suisbrbcer for basic cable at this time. I feel they already charge twenty to thirty dollars too much per month for the package I got which includes phone, high speed inet, TV basic cable. Their customer service has long been poor though they are now advertising improvements. Having them take control of a TV network is threatening to my wallet. I am a football fan and if they take football off basic cable I will likely become a Direct TV customer and use a cell phone. They need to realize that we are their bread and butter and not mess with us consumers as you have indicated they most certainly will. We do have other options other than comcast. If they gouge me for more money, I am gone. Tell them that.

[A]

To avoid the redirection, stop using Insight's DNS servers. Switch to OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com ). They have a "typo correction" feature that will route you to a search page if the typo can't be corrected, but you can easily turn off (or customize) this feature.

[Donald]

Hello. I am a business customer of insight, and recently typoed a URL in my browser, and got redirected to some yahoo page shoving advertisements at me. This upset me because I have several services that my customers use that require NO DNS redirection. So I click on the about at the bottom of the page to "opt-out". Now at this point I am thinking GREAT they thought of people who actually know what they are doing and can handle a mistyped URL without having to call support. But nay this "opt-out" simply sets a cookie and you get a fake Internet explorer error page. Now i can understand the insight is in business to make money and while home users might find this slightly annoying it does not really impact them that much. However I believe this is unacceptable on a business account. Irun a web hosting and design business and switching to level 3's servers will solve my problem however there is a latency issue sometimes with using those servers as they tend to get saturated. In the hosting business your severs need to respond very very quickly and using level 3's DNS serves have increased my page load times by about 500 MS. This is alot. To solve this issue I would recommend Insight should set up a couple recursive DNS servers that do no use DNS redirection.