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Thursday Apr 20, 2006
AOL censorship
I was going to have a go at McDonalds, but since Sam beat me to that I'll throw out another dig at our second favourite company round here.
The Guardian is reporting that AOL has been blocking emails to its members that contained links to a website that was critical of their service. The site in question, DearAOL.com is a website dedicated to stopping the suggested AOL policy of charging companies to send emails to its members without running anti-spam filters. Essentially it's a pay-to-send policy that's already come in for some criticism on this blog and others, not to mention an open door to spammers and conmen if people can pay to ignore anti-spam filters.
It seems that if an email was sent containing the DearAOL.com link then the email wouldn't make it through, if it didn't contain the link it would go through fine. Now the problem, it seems, is that the very anti-spam filters that AOL is willing to ignore for backhanders had identified DearAOL as spam and was blocking the messages. The problem was fixed within 24 hours but it raises a number of serious questions.
How could an organisation the size of AOL make such an obvious mistake? Given that the organisation was blacklisting a website critical of its own policies you'd think someone would have been checking this didn't happen.
The other question for me is the nature of the ban. AOL has blacklisted a company because their link was appearing in a large number of emails, not because it was spam - as any investigation of the messages would reveal this.
It's a double whammy for people sending emails, even it seems those involved in campaigning - if you get popular and you get mentioned in a lot of messages then AOL's system appears to automatically add you to a blacklist, with no manual checking. Then, in the future, the only solution to this would be to sling some grubby fivers in their direction to be allowed to send your messages.
So AOL's vision would seem to be - 'only the rich will be heard'.
Posted by Jim Valentine ( 3:00 PM ) Link to this post Comments[2]Poor old McDonalds
The Observer published an interesting article last weekend on the Ethical Index published by The Fraser Consultancy. The index surveyed over 1,300 consumers, asking them to rank UK and overseas brands according to their 'ethical profile'.
To my mind there weren't any great surprises (although, interestingly, Camelot came in at number 8), with McDonalds topping the list.
As The Observer points out, the Index suggests that public perceptions are often based on past controversies, rather than current initiatives and efforts by companies to change the way they do business.
I'm strongly committed to consumers encouraging (forcing?) companies to adopt ethical, responsible business practices, but I also think it can be all to easy to blame the 'usual suspects', without looking into what these companies are doing to change.
For example, the McDonalds CSR blog doesn't exactly seem to be packed full of challenging comments from consumers. Is this because we can't get past thinking it's all spin, or because it's just easier to take a pop at evil Uncle Ronald without engaging in open and honest dialogue with them?
(Or is it just the slightly scary Terms and Conditions of the blog - they don't exactly encourage open debate!).
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 12:41 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]Guidestar runs into problems
According to Professional Fundraising, more than 450 charities have questioned Guidestar about the details held about their organisations, with 150 of them querying the way their financial information has been presented.
Some charities have expressed concern that the analysis of accounts published on Guidestar differs to the analysis published by the Charity Commission for its Standard Information Return.
It's important to remember that Guidestar is a massively ambitious project - the site contains 32 million pieces of information on over 167,000 charitable organisations, so there are bound to be some teething problems as organisations and the public get used to using it.
Of course transparency and accountability is vital in the voluntary sector, but surely this should begin with clear, consistent reporting by the very bodies that give the public a window onto the how charities use the money they raise?
I sometimes think if it's this confusing when you work in the voluntary sector then what must it be like for the average donor in the street?
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 10:07 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]Submit ideas for mySociety's next project
Civic/community website builder, mySociety, is inviting proposals for new projects.
It's two and a half years since our last call for proposals, which led to us building four projects including PledgeBank.com and WriteToThem.com. At the time we had almost no funding and could only promise to try and raise money to build the projects. That worked, and now we've got a little bit of a surplus (charity language for a profit) left over from our government support.
The time has come to open the call for proposals up again, this time with one difference: we pledge to build the winning project, using a combination of some of the leftover cash and the help of any willing volunteers.
Even if you're short of inspiration for your own ideas, you can read and comment on other people's proposals.
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:09 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]