A Consuming Experience

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Saving money online - shopping deals etc

I notice that ClickCashBack.co.uk, which offers members cashback for online shopping have got rid of their annual admin fee and will be trying to make money just from ads.

They offer deals from retailers and manufacturers you've heard of (like 2.5% cashback from the Apple Store when I looked, and discounts for Dabs, Dell, HP etc products), which is good! I haven't tried buying anything via them yet, but I plan to.

Separately but in a similar vein, I hear that Yahoo have recently launched Yahoo! Deals for the USA (still seems to be Kelkoo in the UK), which they called:

"the first website to provide daily deals, online coupons, grocery coupons, local coupons, store circulars and exclusive deals all in one place"

Also:

In a recent Yahoo! survey, 43 percent of participants said they are using coupons more since last year. They also cited that easier access to coupons would motivate them to use coupons more often, a sentiment stated by 76 percent of women. That said, the majority of people polled feel that there are not currently enough coupons for things they want to buy and nearly half actually think coupon hunting is a chore. Less than a fifth of consumers have a "go-to" online site and almost 80 percent think the process of finding coupons is difficult.

Yahoo! Deals even have a Twitter feed for realtime offers / deals.

Both interesting signs of the times, but it can all be only good news for us consumers.

Monday, 17 August 2009

Opera by Twitter

For anyone who hasn't heard of it yet, you can contribute to the Royal Opera House's experiment to engage Twitter users to help write a new opera. The BBC's covered it.

"We’re investigating how short, 140-character contributions can build upon each other to create a non-linear narrative – like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or a game of Consequences"

If you've not contributed yet, there's still time - just tweet your line with the hashtag #youropera or else tweet it to @youropera (someone else will be setting it to music, so they only want only contributions of lyrics, or should I say libretto, not music).

A very clever way to get publicity and promote the Garden! Kudos to their PR/advertising people - anyone know who they are?

Now if only ticket prices go down...

Not yer average privacy policy (& what about third party cookies / web beacons?)

Hot on the heels of starting a couple of new blogs (A Health Experience, A Human Experience) on topics not related to consumer technology in order to keep this blog more targeted, I decided I ought to revamp my privacy policy and extend it to all 3 blogs, and make the link much more prominent (see the right sidebar).

Here's my new privacy policy.

It's a bit tongue in cheek but hopefully more readable for non-techies and non-lawyers than most, and hopefully it's also accurately compliant with both English and US requirements.

If anyone thinks otherwise or has any other comments, please let me know.

In fact I think it's more compliant than most because I decided I needed to factor in the use of blog widgets, in my case MyBlogLog and Delicious tagometer, as well as Google AdSense, Google Analytics and Statcounter of course. And the use of Google / Blogger for search, and logging in for comments.

(With thanks to Out-Law's cookie laws and data protection guides, the ICO's privacy notices code of practice and privacy policy, and the EFF privacy policy - I figured if anyone has tight privacy policies, the ICO and EFF will!)

The third party widgets issue - cookies / web beacons

It's an interesting question how you can write a proper privacy policy or privacy notice for your blog or site when you include third party widgets / Javascript which plant cookies or web beacons on your visitors' computers.

Your privacy policy needs to cover their cookies or web bugs. But - you can't control what their scripts do!

Some of them provide enough information about what info their widgets collect and what use they make of that information, but others don't, or don't do enough - e.g. Google AdSense is fine (except for being unclear about web beacons - do they or don't they?), but Yahoo only give info about MyBlogLog's Recent Readers widget, not the click tracking, and nothing at all about the Delicious Tagometer. For more details about this lack of clarity, see my new privacy policy. (If anyone from Google or Yahoo! is reading this, maybe you could get it looked at?)

If the third party widget provider doesn't give you, the blog owner, enough info about their data collection, all you can do is refer your visitors to the third party's own privacy policy. But if theirs is incomplete, who is responsible by law, who gets lumbered with the swingeing fine?

Hopefully it'll be them, the third party widgeteer, not you, the mere blog owner. But if you voluntarily chose to include their widgets on your blog, could you be held responsible?

Maybe the safest, least risk-averse approach would be simply not to include third party widgets from any site that doesn't properly explain their widgets' personal data collection and use, even though that would really limit the features on your blog.

I really don't know the answer to that. If enough bloggers ask Google, Yahoo etc to clarify their widget usage, maybe they will? We can but hope.