Gmail, or 'Googlemail' as it's known in the British isles, has offered up another of it's clever features to me today. Not only is it by far the cleanest, most usable web email out there but they also let you do weird and whacky things with your mail address.

First up - periods/full stops are ignored on inbound emails. For the longest time I thought that someone else had grabbed '' and I wanted it, turns out I already had it because I'd grabbed ''. How stupid did I feel when I found that out? Yes, pretty stupid. So what does this mean, other than I can now have a better formatted email address? Well it means you can register at websites multiple times from the same email address for one thing, which means next time I build a user management component I have to think about filtering Gmail addresses differently. On the flipside it means you can register for sites you think might be annoying by using a variant of your name with random dots in ('' anyone?)

Secondly you can add tags to your username, for example '+note@gmail.com' and then you cna create a filter inside your mail to keep everything neat and tidy. Although apparently many mail servers don't handle this as well as they should.

What's really interesting about this is that it reminds us that email is just a related set of protocols that we happen to use in a certain way. There's no reason why sending an email shouldn't control something, or behave totally unexpectedly - we're just used to the end result being an email in someone's inbox.

That said Google's mail is sometimes annoying. Emails are all grouped together in a conversation thread when you talk back and forth, so sometimes you can't immediately see an email you know should be there because it's been 'hidden' underneath a newer mail in the thread. In the old days you could turn this off to have a traditional mail view, but now apparently not - to which the obvious question is.. why not any more?

This morning, as I prepared to burn my usual morning cheese & ham on toast, I was struck by how important appearence is to how much you enjoy something. This line of thought was triggered by the ham, thinly sliced from my local deli and nicely wrapped in a plastic sheet. Originally these ten thing slices existed in a large rounded lump, I presume, reconstituted and reformed from smaller lumps of meat as I'm pretty sure pigs don't grow in that shape. Now if I had to eat directly from that lump, cutting off mouth sized pieces, then I would probably feel a vague sense of nausea. Worse still the thought of biting directly into the bulbous ham lump makes me feel sick to the stomach. Luckily I've already eaten my breakfast as I write.

So then what happened? The lovely lady at my local deli took this lump and sliced it thinly, about 1mm thick, then put it into greased paper. The ham is still the same ham, but now I can happily go into my fridge, grab a slice and put it between a couple of slices of bread to make a sandwich that can really be enjoyed. Definately not the same as eating the large gelatinous lump. That simple transition in terms of presentation and also volume, means that I now have something I really want.

Then there's a third stage - the slices of ham are a bit too large for me to make cheese and ham on toast without the ham hanging over the edge of the bread. So to rectify this situation a slice of ham is taken, ripped raggedly into strips and then placed on the bread before a slice of cheese is added. This simple action creates ham that is emotionally beautiful, more natural and, yes it's true, tastes better. There's a fine line though, if a strip is pulled off that isn't of the same proportion as a wide piece of bacon then it starts to feel more like that earlier lump of ham again. Unnatural and less tasty, even once it can't be seen through the melted cheese.

So what have I learnt from this? Well aside from never to enter a ham eating contest if they require you to eat it straight from the package, it also demonstrates the importance of presentation. The first bite is with the eye, literally in this case. Taking something basic and packaging it in the right way can make all the difference. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the personal hygiene products market, no longer can you buy just a simple block of soap coloured peach or pink and wrapped in clear plastic. Now, probably the same block of soap, but coloured clear or a murky translucent brown, will be wrapped in thick brown paper tied with a simple, modern bow and have be labelled with retro print block style type. This simple addition of a few cheap 'ingredients' will transform the soap from 50c to $3 with no problems, and probably more if you sell it in the right boutique. Plus they make great birthday gifts.

What is it with Blogger & Google? I've been happily using Blogger for many a year now with a Blogger username. No problems there. But now Blogger's upgrading to have a spiffing new labels feature, which would let you tag your posts sensibly and all sorts of nice stuff that they should have added aaages ago, but to get it you have to use a Google login.

So surely that's fine and dandy? I have a Google login already. So surely Blogger can just transfer my account from their old system over to the new login, I log in with my Google account and everyone is happy.... Surely?

Well apparently not. For the last few weeks, every time I log into Blogger I'm accosted by requests to try the new Beta signup. Every time I say 'yes' I'd love to I'm then told I can't. Way to go UI designers. Ask me to do something I can't - and then ask me that every single time I log in going forward. Wow. I know Google aims to 'do no evil' but constant annoyance can be pretty damn evil if you ask me.

So today it looked as if my dream had come true - the signup process implied I could link my Blogger account with my Google account and all would be good. Again, alas, no. Now I have two Blogger accounts - one with all my stuff in, and one that's locking down my Gmail username. Great. And of course with Google's pervasive login (aka, let's watch what someone's doing all the time) every time I go into Blogger I'm already in under the wrong username.

So Blogger & Google folks: please get this sorted out before I'm forced to migrate somewhere else just out of principle that I don't like to support companies that rely on forcing actions & annoyances to get people to sign up. This doesn't seem like you - so maybe I'm interacting with the mirror universe yous that have goatie beards or something.

PS, Addendum: in reading the Blogger help forum it seems that the main problem is you can't transfer Blogs that publish via FTP to somewhere other than Blogspot. Not good news as all my blogs are FTP published. I would imagine this is because they are dynamically generating all the pages & label searches on the fly from the Google servers - rather than publishing a static page out to the FTP site. I guess that explains why I was misled in this situation - would have been handy to inform us of that on the way in maybe?

A little while later...

OK - so I've only been using the new Blogger UI for a few minutes and, although it in general seems exactly the same - and possibly running faster than before which is good, I have a couple more quick gripes

Firstly, having gone through the rigmarole of getting me to sign up with my Gmail account - why the heck can't the system already know that I'm in EST not PST? Duh.

Secondly, being used to Flickr's tagging mechanism of spaces seperating the labels I'd typed in "google blogger" instead of "google,blogger" as I should have. My bad I appreciate - RTFM and all that. So having noticed my mistake I went into the post to try and edit the labels, but now every time I type 'google' and then press the comma key, it autofills "google blogger". Nice. Really nice. Eventually I ended up typing the list of tags I wanted to add in textpad and then cutting and pasting.

More gripes as they come... Oh, and if you're interested - this post is repeated at my test Beta Blogspot site

As a slight addendum to the last article on Amazon - I'd just like to say a couple of things about Blogger's UI again.

Firstly, thumbs up for correctly identifying that I'm on a French coomputer aand localizing everything. Of course since my French is limited I'm having trouble working out what 'Enregistrer en mode Brouillon' means (something about soup?) but it's great to see it in action.

Secondly a gripe. I'm using Mac OS X with FFirefox and for some reason - as I trype my entry every other letter is getting cut in half. It's just like using your granny's old type writer, not that my gran has one. So you may think you're deleting a letter that the cursor is over - but in fact you're deleting a letter eithe rbeore or after it. To illustrate the point I've not spell checked anything in this article after I typed it. See anything wrong?

Amazon is well considered amongst every web industry as one of the top, if not the top example of how to deal with your customers. Through the many years I've used Amazon there has never been a reason to dispute that status. Any complaint has been dealt with efficiently and effectively. Refunds have been offered without a second's questioning and customer service has been superb.

So it came as a surprise recently to find that even Amazon can make 'mistakes'. In this case, with their Wish List feature.

The Amazon Wishlist is very simple - you, as a registered user of Amazon, can record items you'd like to purchase, or more accurately , that you'd like other people to buy for you at the usual gitfting times (Christmas, Hanukah, KaKwanzaa, Ramadan, your birthday, your dog's birthday, secretary day, and so on). In this case it was my birthday - I was 27 again if you want to know - and being an absent minded 27 year old I'd forgotten to tell my sister what I wanted.

My sister has always been more organised than me - so it came as little surprise to find that she had discovered my wish list and ordered me some things from it. The surprise came when I found out that my mailing address was set as somewhere the UK for some reason.. I guess I'd set it to that during one of my times back in the UK, but of course I've been back in the US for two years now and ordering from Amazon for all that time.

Now this may be presumptuous of me, but it seemed reasonable to expect that Amazon would notice this and question me on my choice of wishlist address when I'd updated my default address to be in the US. Unfortunately this was not the case. So now my sister has paid for shipping to the UK, and, at some point, will likely pay for shipping back to the US so I actually get the presents.

So the concept of a wishlist is strong - but the question of how to update the information it holds becomes highly relevant. In this case not only was my address out of date, but also the wished gifts - some of those gifts had been on there for four years since Wishlist was first launched. Do I still want them? Not all of them that's for sure!

Perhaps it would be useful for Amazon to alert users, either before the fact or when someone tries to order something, that their wishlist has been accessed and was their information all up to date? Admittedly this would ruin any surprises but better an expected unexpected gift than making your friends & family pay out for something you don't want, or sending it to somewhere where you're not.

By the way; if anyone really wants to buy me a surprisse present then Amazon.com vouchers are always welcome.