I won’t ever claim to be as knowledgable about the science of blogging as some of the pros, but one thing I’m sure of is that if your desire is to alienate your readers, the best way to do that is to attack them when they disagree with you.

I had my first blog feud today with Adie Cooke of Net Business Blog. He posted about how one of his clients had a logo redesign to go with their new ecommerce site. I had my misgivings about the post because I felt the information was a bit lacking and the arguments he was making were, well, wrong.

Let me state for the record that I have been a subscriber to Net Business for awhile now and he typically has some really informative pieces. I’m not really sure why it is, but I’ve never commented there before, but since this particular post dipped into my area of expertise, I figured I’d chime in.

I tried to be as constructive as possible with my comment and avoid making any ego driven comments. I’m not the greatest designer ever, far from it, so I wanted to come off as knowledgeable and helpful but humble. Unfortunately, Adie didn’t take it that way.

I always subscribe to comments when I’ve commented because I never know when I will learn something, but when I got a message with Adie’s response, I was honestly taken back. I wouldn’t say his response was caustic, but definitely not happy. His first comment I chalk up to being a miscommunication, but his second comment was definitely passive aggressive, calling me ignorant in a round about way.

Now I’m a pretty easy going guy, but if you call me ignorant, especially on a subject I feel I’ve fairly knowledgeable on, I’m going to stand up for myself. So I responded, still professional, but definitely telling him what I thought about him and his comments. Once that was posted, I was done with it… or so I thought.

I then got another email, this one an automated response to my first comment:

Hello Dave Conrey,

Thank you for posting a comment on this Article…

If you haven’t already, please sign up to our full RSS Feed

Now I’m pissed off. So you want me to subscribe to your feed? Why? So you can attack me again in another post? Reading this pandering auto email after that exchange made me reject him completely, and I let him know in a response email. Then I went to Google Reader and unsubscribed myself.

So, if you’re a blogger, but tired of all your trusted subscribers, follow Adie’s example.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Today Seth talked about the changing relationship between Canada and the US because of our deflating dollar. The Canadian dollar is no longer the second-class citizen to our currency and its time we started making adjustments. Now, instead of us going north for a good deal, the Canucks can fly south and we should embrace that because we need all the commerce we can get right now.  However, not everyone gets it.

A directive ran through the company last week. Normally we would design 2 separate covers for our magazines, one for the newsstand and one for subscribers. The newsstand version had the prototypical US/Canada pricing difference of about $2.00. This made sense a few years ago, but not anymore. So you’d think that we’d be changing our pricing to compensate the economic change in order to not alienate our frosty neighbors. Yeah, not so much.

The directive that went through the company said we will now be producing 2 separate covers for the newsstand, one for the US and one for Canada. Are we lowering the Canadian price? Nope, just deleting the US price from the cover so Canada doesn’t feel taken advantage of when the see the pricing difference. But it gets better for Canada.

Today a second directive came down for my magazine. How about a $1 increase in pricing Canada? They won’t mind. Are we raising the US price? Oh no, we couldn’t do that to our citizens. We only need to rip off those outside our borders. But it gets better.

How about we reduce the actual size of the magazine in order to save money on printing? We’re also going to cut the amount of pages as much as possible because ad revenue isn’t what it used to be. Oh, and did I mention that we’re reducing the quality of paper to something that resembles grayish toilet tissue.

Now Canada, don’t you worry about all this. With all your new found income, I’m sure you can afford the price increases. You should feel good about buying our overpriced, reduced quality magazines because we’re doing our part to prevent global warming. We recycle!

It’s almost comedy how foolish the company acts under pressure of actually making a few dollars (or a few dollars more, rather). We depend on the enthusiasts to keep buying our mags yet we do everything we can to not give them their monies worth. Thankfully I work on a magazine where quality content is the most important thing we can do, but as our pages get cut month after month, it gets harder to deliver the best stories. As the book gets thinner, so do the stories, so readers lose out even further.

I’ve written before about magazines and newspapers going the way of the Dodo, but consented that niche magazines would maintain longer because we speak to specific readers. After a conversation with a company veteran, I realized that we’ve been losing ground for years. The internet is quite possibly the single most destructive force in the demise of publishing and its getting worse every year. We still sell the same percentage of magazines, but we’re putting fewer copies out on stands. Advertisers are realizing that they’re losing money by placing ads with us, or breaking even at best, which is as good as losing. Of course these factors are apparent to the higher-ups, but instead of innovating and coming up with new ways to answer the problem, we cut pages and cut budgets and charge more for our services.

For the first time in awhile, I feel like my days as a magazine art director are numbered. What will I do when magazine publishing is dead?

I watched about 15 minutes of the new Bionic Woman on NBC tonight with its 100% beautiful cast, industrial “24ish” agency headquarters, flashy special effects and a shiny veneer, but I’m still left wanting. The original show from the 70’s did more with a slow motion camera and some bad sound effects than this new show could in a dozen seasons.

The Bionic Woman and her male counterpart, The Six Million Dollar Man reached cult status. If I asked you what you think of when you think of them running, you would answer with one simple sound.

Nananananah!

You won’t find any of that happy reassurance in the new show. Even the current lead actress leaves you wishing NBC would bring back the young Lindsay Wagner to show the new chick how it’s done. I had a feeling they were hyping this show a bit too much from the start. If this show lasts more than 2 seasons, I’d be surprised, and that’s a shame because I like Miguel Ferrer.

I’m writing this as my patiences slowly erodes from trying to contact one of the worst online organizations on the web. Register.com has been around for a long time. The first domain I ever purchased was through Register.com. At the time it was cheaper than Network Solutions by a few bucks, so I went for the bottom dollar.  I soon found out why they were charging less for domains when handling what I deemed simple customer service transactions were frustrating over the phone and near impossible online.  Within a few years, I transferred all my domains to another registrar.

I’m losing my mind while I sit on perpetual hold. When I called Register.com for support, I was shocked to have an actual human answer the phone. I told him what I needed and he forwarded me to customer service, but not before he tossed in an estimated 45 minute wait time, please hold, click. My heart sunk, but I didn’t hang up while I was greeted with the most horribly garbled hold music ever. It’s like listening to scratchy AM radio underwater at high volume.

I should also mention that this is my 3rd attempt today because not only was their website down for several hours, but they decided to cut their phone lines as well. I’m hoping they had a major power outage and lost a lot of really important data like reoccuring billing dates so they forget to charge people for their terrible service.

I hate this company right now and I’m really bent about having to deal with them again. I wouldn’t be doing this if not for one of my clients who had a couple domains with my arch nemesis. I’m at critical mass when I finally stumble upon a link in their customer service area that directs me to an online chat option. I eagerly launch it and pray that it works. It does and I’m blown away, but I immediately disconnect my phone call because the music has finally bored a hole into my eardrum. I wish it were all that simple.

The perpetual hold seems to carry over into the chat service. Accept all I’m seeing is some text telling me its waiting to connect. There’s absolutely nothing telling me that it’s actually working. At least deadly hold music on the phone alerted me to know I hadn’t been disconnected. At this moment, I’m in the nether region of customer service and I have no idea where I stand.

After waiting for 15 minutes, Leslie calls me to dinner. I reluctantly close the window while I go eat, but I’m almost grateful to her for pulling me out of this purgatory. We’ll try again later and I’m filled with a sense of dread at the notion. If anyone wants to by my surrogate, I’ll gladly pay you in a bowl of my homemade vanilla pudding.

I finally had a chance to sit and watch the finale of Entourage’s 3rd season. Leslie and I are avid fans ever since the end of the first season. If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s basically a modern day rendition of the Three Musketeers & d’Artagnan where actor Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier)makes it big in his first movie role and pledges to take his two best friends and his brother to Hollywood with him, all for one and one for all.

Leslie’s favorite character is Johnny “Drama” Chase (Kevin Dillon). I lean more toward Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven). In fact, there’s a lot of great personalities in the series: Turtle - the loyal servant, Walsh - the eccentric auteur director and Lloyd, the loyal and oft-abused, gay assistant to Ari Gold.  Unfortunately, the main character, Vince, who is painfully affable when he’s not brooding over some woman or not getting his eggs cooked in the morning. But even when he’s being less than pleasant, he’s still milktoast. He doesn’t get really angry. He doesn’t get overly excited. He stays right about middle ground all the time.

On top of that, he’s shown over and over that he’s a terrible judge of pretty much everything. He breaks deals with studio execs, praises terrible films, compliments when he should be criticizing, repremands when he should be grateful. Overall, he couldn’t save himself from drowning in 3 feet of water. Perhaps that’s why he brought his best friends to Hollywood with him. Perhaps he realizes that he completely sucks at life (can’t drive, so he buys all his friends Mazeratis) and wouldn’t last 3-seconds in Tinsel Town without them.

Will I still watch Entourage next season? Absolutely! I may not appreciate the main character being a pussy with terrible judgment, but the support is right on.