the tindog coffeehouse

Michael Dell cares about you. OK, maybe not. But he does care about his company’s online reputation, so much so that he’s going all “Web 2.0″ to try and fix it.

The company has been logging on, reaching out to potential customers, and trying – sometimes awkwardly – to listen to them. And it’s using social media to do so. That’s right, Web 2.0 isn’t just for college sophomores anymore. Apparently you can use it to patch up a $37 billion PC business too. …

It has a squad of 42 employees who spend their workdays engaging with the communities on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. What is this Team Web 2.0 learning? One important nugget: that potential customers spend 99% of their time on the web doing research and just 1% actually buying. So the company has tried to dial down the hard sell and become – or at least appear to become – more helpful.

OK, Mike. You wanna be my friend? You want to “at least appear” to be more helpful? Then here’s a suggestion: hire qualified tech support staff at the Enterprise level. When I, as a network admin, call in to get a replacement part for a dead Latitude that’s still under warranty, just send me the part–the right part, please–without treating me like a 5-year-old. And don’t route my call to four different queues, all of which end up in Bangalore.

Is that too much to ask?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Dell (the company or the products–or the man for that matter), but I’ve seen the quality of their support decline rapidly over the last several years. When I worked at Microsoft, we dealt with Enterprise-level support engineers at Dell all the time, and they could always be counted on to deliver top-notch service. Nowadays, though, it’s sometimes painful calling in for support. Even after I’ve done the requisite troubleshooting on my end, they still sometimes refuse to admit that their hardware could be faulty.

And it’s not just me. The Unisys techs I talk to–the ones that Dell sends out to perform on-site service–admit they’re just as frustrated.

Write something about Dell online, and chances are the company will know about it in an hour or so. Dis the company in a blog or a Facebook group, and someone from a crack response team may even chime in, if only to let everyone know that Dell cares.

Really? OK, I look forward to it.

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the creation of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense agency that would give birth to what is now the Internet, Vanity Fair has attempted to compile an “oral history” of the Internet, from ARPA to today.

So how’d they do?

Al Gore aside, they did pretty well, at least at a high level, interviewing pioneers such as Paul Baran (the inventor of packet-switching), Vint Cerf (the inventor of the TCP and IP protocols), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Larry Page (Google), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

It’s mind-blowing to think that something so basic as a computer network wasn’t always so obvious, and how technology that we use every day and take for granted could very easily have never existed but for a few brilliant minds.

However, while quite lengthy, the article certainly isn’t a comprehensive history. There are a lot of things not covered in the article, some of which seem to be rather glaring omissions (for example, no mention of Cisco at all).

Some other missing pieces:

• Xerox PARC
• CompuServe and Prodigy
• Other protocols: Gopher, Telnet, FTP, Wi-Fi, Wimax, Bluetooth, IPv6, AppleTalk, Frame Relay
• IIS and Apache
• HTML, XML, Perl, PHP, Java, ASP, Ajax, Flash, Photoshop
• The breakup of AT&T in 1984
• The reshaping of the Baby Bells into the major telecoms of today (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest)
• The role pornography played in driving consumer Internet usage early on (whitehouse.com)
• Canter & Siegal (a law firm which posted the first commercial mass advertising online [on Usenet] in April 1994)
• Intel and AMD
• HP, Compaq, DEC, IBM, Dell, Gateway, Sony
• ICANN
• Instant Messaging and SMS
• P2P (Napster) and Bittorrent (The Pirate Bay)
• RSS and Podcasting
• Other browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock
• “Irrational exuberance” (Alan Greenspan, explaining the dot-com bubble)
• “It’s a series of tubes” (Senator Ted Stevens, describing the Internet)
• Peapod and Webvan
• Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com)
• Wardriving
• Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Newsvine, Last.fm, Pandora
• Tech blogs and reporting: TechCrunch (Mike Arrington), Ars Technica, The Register, Slashdot, BoingBoing (Cory Doctorow), Rocketboom (Andrew Baron), Robert Scoble
• TechTV, CNET, and ZDNet (Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton, Tom Merritt, Chris Pirillo)

And what about the dark side of the Internet?

• Privacy and security risks (phishing, identity theft, government wiretapping, adware/spyware)
• ISP packet-shaping and bandwidth-throttling
• Copyright infringement paranoia (DMCA, DRM, RIAA lawsuits, Allofmp3.com)

What else is missing?