Companies and blaguing

 

One of the major frustrations that I have experienced in the past 30 years working on international data is the level of ignorance of basic geography which permeates companies holding international data and those people employed to manage that data. Worse, there are too many companies claiming to be experts in validating and managing this data who take the approach that they only need to know a little more than their prospects to blague them into becoming customers. I’ve experienced this in teaching, too – as long as you’re one page ahead of the kids, it’s fine.

I see a lot of this ignorance in plain sight on company websites. There are those claiming to validate addresses for 300+ countries and territories, for example. (Even with the most generous interpretation of “country or territory”, and even including uninhabited rocks with their own ISO 3166 code, you’d be hard pressed to get far beyond the 250 mark). The unfortunate aspect is that their customers don’t have the knowledge to realise that they should probably avoid working with or trusting these companies.

I was looking at the website of Postgrid (https://www.postgrid.com/) and noticed this address for their United Kingdom office on their “contact us” page.

Where do I start? First of all, the time is long gone when you could use “England” to refer to the whole of the United Kingdom. The union flag is used – England uses a different flag. Worse, though, is that the address is in Edinburgh. That’s Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Not in England. I mean, tone deaf or what?

You don’t have to look far for other red flags. Their address validation list (https://www.postgrid.com/global-address-coverage/) includes the usual unpopulated rocks, but also faux pas such as listing “Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of” – it’s only been five years since it changed its name to North Macedonia.

Postgrid were contacted for comment. They have not responded or change the information on their “Contact Us” page at the time of writing.

I’ve also always wondered about the lists of “customers” many address validators proudly display. From my own experience I know how hard it is in a large company to get official permission to be publicised as a customer; and if Amazon, SAP and Microsoft were running all the different address validation software that are claimed in their names – about 30 each – it would be chaos. Is this just a cheap marketing trick? It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Oh well. There are some good companies out there dealing with international data. But do your homework – if you don’t learn yourself about the data you’re holding, you can’t expect to be able to assess the best partner to help you to make the best of it.

What does a man have to do to cover his costs?

 

I stopped charging for access to the Global Sourcebook for International Data Management (https://www.grcdi.nl/gsb/) in November 2014 – almost ten years ago. I wanted the information to be made as widely available as possible, and administering the paid version updates was laborious - I hoped instead to be able to cover my costs and continuing workload through sponsorship and donations. After all, I watched how Wikipedia raked in millions each year, and their international data information was, and is, poor, contradictory between pages and languages, and, in some cases, years out of date. My resource is by no means perfect, but by comparison it is 4500 pages of pure gold, pared, pruned and improved for over 30 years. Surely it would be no problem to get funding, especially as some customers were concerned that I would stop updating the resource without subscriptions, so they’d be the first to contribute.

Right?

Wrong.

I detest advertising on so many levels, but if it must be, surely rather advertising which reflected the information shown on the webpage rather than that which was “personalised” through pernicious spying and stalking. So I approached companies in the world of international data management and quality. People viewing the pages of the Global Sourcebook would be a perfect match for their services, and association with this respected resource would surely be a plus for any company in our sector. Alas, there was little interest – they preferred to trust their luck with Google and co. And as for donations … well, though the link for donations had around 1.5 million page views in those years, the number of donations was a disappointing. One, to be exact, providing a total income in that decade of 2 Euro cents per month.

OK, I get that business users are less likely to contribute – they have to go through overcomplicated internal processes to get access to even minor amounts, and the one contribution was from another sole trader – but the extent of the disinterest is still rather sobering. Finally, I had to give in and activate Google AdSense for the Global Sourcebook. I chose the least  pernicious options I could – no personalization, no tracking, no this, no that. And yet still I receive a few cents per day from those ads, more than I received in any given year when relying on voluntary donations. Why people would click on those ads is a mystery to me, but much is a mystery to me when it comes to my fellow man.

The bills continue to come in. The resource is used and admired, but nobody wants to support it with cold, hard cash. What does a man have to do to cover his costs? Answers on a  postcard please ….

Finally defeated by social media?

 

I must finally admit defeat – social media has got the better of me.

It was never going to be easy. Neurodiverse and social are never going to be comfortable bedfellows, added to which is an inbuilt stroppiness that won’t allow me to follow the crowd or to pander to algorithms.

Social media based on photographs was never going to be an option. Nobody photographs me, even my better half, who thinks that the cats are far more interesting, so why would I assume anybody else would feel some compulsion to look at my girning mug with any regularity? I don’t get it anyway – why do people want to see repetitive images of cloned plastic people standing in ways that break various rules of physics in order to stick one or other part of their anatomy closer to the camera? And why would you allow these people to influence you in any way whatsoever?

Beats me.

Twitter seemed ideal. I needed a platform where I could provide updates and news about international data management and quality – I’m by nature an information provider - and my number of subscribers finally stuttered to a halt at around 543. Hardly ground-breaking, considering the hundreds of thousands of people who need to deal with international data every day. But par for the course because 99.99% of those people will never be persuaded that their data is anything other than stagnant and just an extension of their own country’s data. Don’t understand the naming convention? Don’t know where to place the postal code? Don’t know why those numbers keep ending up truncated? Can’t work out what those dots and dashes on a letter mean? Just wing it. Or, better, just look the other way.

Which may explain my current very concerning lack of gainful employment.

Hint hint.

But even before the arrival of Clueless Musk things were not going well at Twitter. My posts increasingly seemed to be disappearing into an empty void. If anybody was there they weren’t really paying attention. Even the tumbleweed didn’t turn up to answer any questions that I posed.

So it wasn’t a hard decision to move across to Mastodon, a much more active, useful, pleasant (though more techy) environment. I boosted, I posted, I hashtagged. And my subscriber number ground to a halt at 13.

Hmm.

Maybe it’s the subject area. In a parallel life I have a passion for analogue planning and stationery, and a fellow sufferer suggested I create a YouTube channel. 47 videos later and I have amassed 359 subscribers. My videos are hardly professional, but they almost all get 100% approval ratings and are praised in comments for being useful and honest. Which is gratifying, because, again, information provision is what I do. Let’s just check some of the other reviewers. Yes, they have better and softer lighting, and they utilise the ubiquitous and carefully curated bookcase background along with the guitar leant up against a wall with studied casualness. But many are being paid to spout only the marketing blurb of the manufacturer with no honest comments at all. In many cases you can bet your bottom dollar that they haven’t even used the product. My subscriber number: 359. Theirs: hovering around 4.5 million.

Hmm.

Perhaps it’s time to admit defeat! I’m never going to “get” social media, am I? Perhaps that’s a good thing. I’ll have to think about that...

If you’re interested, I’m still plugging away on Mastodon at https://mastodon.online/@grahamrhind