Creativity is not neat, nor is it usually expressed by your up-tight citizens like myself. It is messy and often expressed by those with "way-out" views. In other words, by people like those G20 protesters driven out of Toronto's Queens Park a year ago today.

I am your usual capitalist who believes in enlightened self-interest. I also believed that the police have a difficult job to do, even at the best of times, and I supported them fully. This belief changed during the G20 meeting in Toronto.

While I was alone and not part of any protest, I was at Queens Park when the police drove peaceful and legally gathered protesters out of the park using riot gear and mounted units. I saw police with hundreds of tie-downs in their belts ready to incapacitate hundreds, even thousands. I did not see any violence on the part of the public gathered to protest the waste of money spent on the G20 meeting and the disruption it caused our city. What I did see was the police acting like armed thugs. Their behaviour was unacceptable then, and now.

This week Chief of Police Blair's issued a report on why the police acted as they did. But, it did not acknowledge the complete disregard for the protesters' right of assembly, right of lawful arrest, right of legal representation, human rights, or police brutality. Blair missed the big picture: he and his officers are here to protect the rights of all our citizens and residents who are acting lawfully. His reasoning states that finding 30-40 Black Bloc agitators in a crowd of thousands justified mass arrests and police abuse and brutality. Whatever happened to the concept that permeates our laws that it is better that a thousand guilty go free rather than convict an innocent man? He and his officers and men brought shame on us all.

Canada is not some third-world dictatorship. Violence in Canada is a very rare occurrence. However, the police thuggery showed how thin our line of protection is. Our legal system, our rights, and common decency where not enough to stop the abuses that occurred.

Toronto is one of the ten largest cities in North America. At any given time, there are dozens of violent incidents. Nowhere in the Greater Toronto Area are riot police needed or used. Yet we had 10,000 to 20,000 police armed to the gills in riot gear to handle 10,000-20,000 protesters. By one estimate, there was one policeman for every two people in the crowds. To put this into proportion, our annual Gay Pride parade brings in about one million people. I would be surprised if there were more than five hundred police for the whole parade and events. Therefore, the threat posed by a group of 30+ amateur anarchists is a bogus excuse for what happened.

Last week in Vancouver, thousands of drunks rampaged through the downtown area burning a half-dozen cars and causing several million dollars of damage. In total, just over 100 people were arrested. In the morning, the residents of Vancouver voluntarily put up a "wall of shame" and apologised to those harmed by the rioting. Vancouver police were not in riot gear.

By contrast, in Toronto, over 1000 peaceful people, some not even protesters, were arrested and detained in squalor and suffered abuses for more than 24 hours. This was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history! Subsequently, all charges were dropped against all those arrested, except for half-a-dozen and I expect those will be dropped also.

We believe in the creativity of human beings. It is what drives us at WizOf.Biz. Therefore, we support the right of people to peacefully protest. It keeps our society alive and vibrant. Repression, as shown by Blair and his officers, destroys that essence of democracy and creativity.

As a footnote, the police are not solely to blame for the G20 mess. Premier Dalton McGinty and his provincial cabinet passing regulations at midnight the day before the G20 meeting that helped set the stage for the police overreaction. Lastly, there was no rational excuse for Prime Minister Steven Harper hosting the G20 meeting in downtown Toronto. The core of downtown Toronto is not suited in any fashion for large scale security operations. Prime Minister Harper could have used some creativity in selecting the place for the G20 meeting. Any other location he could have chosen would have cost far less than $1+ billion dollars.

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Something unexpected happened recently. One of our members was having a problem deciding which of five graphic designs they wanted to use for their new corporate logo. Since we do provide review services for logos, they asked us to help them choose the best one. To do this, our expert reviewer summarized the various designs, chose one that they believed was best based on three criteria: the intended audience for the company's logo; good design principles; and comparison to the other designs. The resultant review also rated the chosen design.

Comparing designs and choosing the best is a new use of WizOf.Biz's review process. However, there is a trade-off. For each type of submission, the reviewer has allocated a certain amount of time doing the review. If the submission involves more than could reasonably be expected, such as asking for comparison of five logos instead of one, then the reviewer needs to divide their time amongst the designs. This is equivalent to the member asking for a number of reviews for the price of one. In this case, the result is that chosen design had less than the normal amount of time that would have been spent on its review.

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I have been wrestling with the idea of encouraging users to complain about the WizOf.Biz site, its design and/or contents. Here are my reasons for encouraging complaints: 

1. I learn much more from complaints than I do compliments.
2. This is a new site and we want to be as open as possible. (also see my previous blog on gaining credibility.)

Then, there is the downside of doing this:

1. There might be too much information to take in, which I hope is my biggest problem ;-).
2. We will receive a lot of rants with little useful information.
3. We might be spammed — a lot.
4. Others may use this as an opportunity to generate "link love" (where a seemingly meaningful comment's sole purpose is to contain a link to another site).
5. Security may be compromised by allowing unrestricted comments.

And, the technical issues include: 

1. Does the commenter have to be logged in?
2. Why not just use the comment form?
3. What types of controls can we impose?

For our site, which charges for professional reviews of users' submitted material, there needs to be a measure of trust that we can deliver what we promise and do it for a reasonable price. Openness helps gain this trust. Then there is the "elephant in the room" — "Did you get your money's worth?". I know that most other sites don't ask this question. I feel that we have to and making complaining easy is one way of keeping us informed if we are failing to deliver.

At this time, I do not believe we will be overwhelmed by complaints. We will have plenty, but our staff should be able to handle them. When the load increases, besides us being in trouble,  we can use a more structured complaint form that has predefined category of complain, including "other". For example, types of complaints might be site look and feel, site omissions, pricing, the complaint form itself, etc. You get the idea. Of course, if we get too many complaints, we have done something really wrong and we may need to consider how to proceed next.

Spamming we can handle to a certain extent by asking users to complete a CAPTCHA before sending in the complaint. Those trying to gain "link love" dishonestly will have their complaint deleted, have their site placed on our blacklist, and be reported to spam lists. To top that off, all lnks can be sanitized so links will be readable, but not live. We can also limit the size and type of content for a complaint. Doing all this should also add to our security and to the security of the information our users provide. These measures can be taken by any site. 

In encouraging complaints, we need to separate the wheat from the chafe. To do this, we may give a weighing factor to complaints so that those coming from registered users have more weight than those that come from anonymous users. This begs the question of why not exclude comments from anonymous users? The answer has to be the threshold that users have to cross in deciding to become members. We need to capture the reason that they decide to go elsewhere. That is, we want to make our site better and reduce our "bounce rate". 

We already have a publicly available comment form. Do we need a complaint form? Only experience will tell us for sure. However, we can foresee the case where the complaint form could ask for more detail or more explicit information than the normal comment form which is pretty free-form.

Lastly, there is the question of using the word “complaint”. We want criticism while we do not want to belittle the writer, which may be the impression that the word complaint gives. Perhaps a word like “critic” would be better.

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I have been exploring ways of making information more visually appealing and more easily accessible.

For example, I wanted to put simple dashed lines under text to indicate that there was a tool tip or definition available. You have probably seen this in word processing programs like OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or in help files. In HTML, you can underline any piece of text, but it is always a single solid line. This is called a "text decoration" and by convention it is used to indicate that the text is a link to another place in the site or the Internet. However, there is no text decoration for dashed lines in HTML. What I found was that I could use a box border for creating dashed underlines.

The following small sample program shows how to do this using CSS: 

	/* This script tests the use of dotted underlining of text */
	<html>
	<head>
	<style type="text/css">
	.du1 { /* class for 1px dotted underline text */
	    border: none;
	    border-bottom: 1px dashed red;
	}
	.du3 { /* class for 3px dotted underline text */
	&   nbsp;border: none;
	    border-bottom: 3px dashed red;
	}
	span { /* color all text within <span>...</span> blue */
	    color: blue;
	}
	</style>
	</head>
	<body>
	<div>This line contains <span class="du1">a 1 pixel-wide red dashed underline with a blue</span> piece of text</div>
	<div>This line contains <span class="du3">a 3 pixel-wide red dashed underline with a blue</span> piece of text</div>
	</body>
	</html>
	

The output of this program is:

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by Reg Charney, March 20, 2011

I know that WizOF.Biz is a new web site. It will live and die based on its credibility. We need to convince new users that we will deliver on the promises we make.

The normal way to do this is to have believable testimonials, references, reputation, buzz, profits and high Google rankings. Well, we may have the Google rankings nailed in at least one way: using our simple tag line, “Expert feedback and advice”, puts us at the top of the first page of any search by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However, we need help broadening our SEO terms so that we can be found with more than just these four words. That is the reason we have contracted with Rapport for assistance.

As for the rest of it, to gain and keep credibility, we have done the following:

• Our site is only accessible using secure communications and we have a certificate posted on the site.
• What we do and how we do it are open to review, excuse the pun. We have extensive FAQs, guidelines and videos to explain what happens on the site.
• Everything on the site is free with the exception of the reviews. Since these reviews are done by professionals, they earn the right to be paid.
• Before any reviewer can see a client's material, the reviewer needs to agree to a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). A client can supply their own NDA or use one of ours.
• While the site has all its necessary components in place, we need to “re-skin” our site to look more professional.
• There are no ads on the site. In this way, we avoid conflicts of interest.
• Depending on when you read this, we will/have already published our pricing list for professional reviews of all the types of submissions we accept.
• We have tried to keep the language we use as simple and clear as possible.
  During our initial launch, we will be gathering testimonials.

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