Like I said, nice idea
OK. I wrote about this website a few days ago and they didn’t like what I said because they thought I crossed the line between business and consumer (as well as making some errors). So, this time, I’m going to review the site from a consumer point of view only. All of the information I am about to present you with is in the public domain – either on the website concerned or by following links from it – and what I say about it is my opinion as a user of the type of products featured.
The premise of supplementscompared.com is that they help the health conscious consumer to make an informed choice between all the myriad varieties of nutritional supplements that are on the market. According to the site, there are approximately 24,000 such products available; what they intend is that their site will review them all and compare them against benchmarks that their panel of experts has come up with. This panel, which includes some respectable names from various areas of health, is chaired by singer, radio personality and lifestyle author Janey Lee Grace.
So far, so good. It’s an attractive website and presents the information in a way that’s easy to find; products are broken down into various categories and then the products in each category are compared to the benchmark and an opinion given. This is where the site starts to go awry for me. As a comparison site (supplementscompared.com), I would expect to see common information for each product; for instance, as they are giving a value rating, I’d expect to see the price. As these are health products, I’d expect to see a full ingredient list (not just the actives, but all the inactive ones as well) along with allergen statements (wheat free, lactose free, etc). An indication of whether the product is suitable for vegetarians, vegans or anyone on special diets would be good, too. Finally, how many tablets or capsules are recommended each day?
Given all that information about each product, I would be able to discount those ones that I don’t think are good value, or ones that I can’t take because I have food intolerances, or ones that are animal-derived, if I follow an ethical diet. By having standard information about each product and presenting it in a standard fashion you would help make the comparison of products easier. The site isn’t trying to make the choice for you, after all, but to give you enough good information on which to base a decision.
I’ve been taking a look at the products in the Glucosamine category. There are 11 listed, from suppliers like Tesco, Superdrug, Healthspan and Asda. Not necessarily brands that the discerning health product shopper would choose, but it’s early days. Hopefully, their ‘fast track’ review process will bring more suppliers online quickly. Of the 11, seven are listed as “Best Product” and an eighth is listed as “Worth A Look”. So right here I’m confused; those seven “Best Products” have varying “Overall Ratings” and varying “Value for Money” ratings – meaning they can’t all be the same, so how can they all be “Best Product”? I would have thought that within each category, there could only be one “Best Product”?
But perhaps all these “Best Products” are the same? Taking a closer look at two that do have the same ratings shows a number of differences: one uses the hydrochloride form of glucosamine, one uses the sulphate form. One supplies 100% of the glucosamine RDA, the other 133%. [Interesting side note here: RDA's (Recommended Daily Allowance) are set by Government for various vitamins and minerals. There is not an official RDA for glucosamine, so I assume what they're saying is this is what their experts recommend - but by using the term RDA I think they are being misleading]. There is no indication of price, no list of ingredients other than the glucosamine sulphate / hydrochloride content, no explanation of what the difference is between sulphate and hydrochloride, no indication of how much actual glucosamine is provided. So how do I choose? As a health conscious consumer, perhaps I’ve heard somewhere that one form of glucosamine contains more active glucosamine than another. But which one? I might have also heard that one form of glucosamine is suitable for vegans, because it doesn’t come from shellfish. But which? And is the one that gives more glucosamine? I don’t know and supplementscompared.com doesn’t tell me. So I’m no further forward with trying to make a choice.
There are also errors in the information shown; the Asda product is described in the text as being 750mg of glucosamine sulphate, when the ingredient list shows it as 750mg glucosamine sulphate 2KCl – which is not the same thing (glucosamine comes from glucosamine sulphate which comes from glucosamine sulphate 2KCl). You can probably put that down to poor proof-reading, though. At least I hope you can. I would hate to think that the panel of experts are making basic mistakes like that.
There are other inconsistencies, too. The Tesco product (which is low strength) has a “Value for Money” rating of 4 (out of 5), yet in the descriptive text is said to be “quite expensive”. Surely, then, it doesn’t rate a top 20% rating for value? There are products in the category which have value ratings of one or two, yet seem to be stronger products so wouldn’t that make them better value? But they don’t tell me what the prices are so I can’t judge it for myself. There are links to the suppliers sites, so I can go and look them up myself – but if I have to do that anyway, why would I bother to use supplementscompared.com?
The site has already been criticised by the National Association of Health Stores for launching with products that are so biased towards supermarkets and Channel Island-based mail-order operators; they feel that the site should be encouraging people to go into their local independent health store, where they should be able to get a more personalised service and helpful advice. To be fair to supplementscompared.com, they have not said that this is their aim and they do give a summary of the different places that supplements can bought and the varying levels of service that might be available from each. In addition they do have a list of what they describe as independent shops (even though some are internet-based).
I think they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, really. If they are actually going to review all 24,000 products it will take years – by which time the market for supplements may have changed beyond recognition. Offering their ‘fast track’ review service to suppliers that are willing to pay to have their products listed doesn’t seem in keeping with their public stance of being an independent review site. Nowhere is it suggested that the payment of a fee will produce a certain type of review, but by inviting suppliers to ‘fast track’ then it seems reasonable to assume that only the suppliers that can afford it will be on the site for the foreseeable future.
And I’m sure that it’s purely coincidence that one of the “Best Products” in the Joint Health category is produced by a company that shares the same PR company as supplementscompared.com, and who’s “leading nutritional expert” is the same man who “devised and established” supplementscompared.com. As Bill Hicks once said: “There is no connection.. and you’d be a fool and a communist to make one.”
My “Overall Rating” for supplementscompared.com? Two out of five; a good start but a number of problem areas that need to be addressed, along with a general tightening up on things.
And another one
After my post the other day about being requested to remove a post, I realise today from reading this story that perhaps I got off lightly. A blogger has been fined £150 and ordered to pay £364 costs for a blog post in which he “let off steam” about his treatment at the hands of the police and supposedly made comments that “any reasonable” person would find “menacing”.
The news article gives one quote from the post which seems to have been the line this whole thing hinged on, but it doesn’t seem particularly menacing to me. Unclearly written, perhaps, for the point he was trying to make but not menacing. Sadly, the post in question has been removed so I can’t go and check out the rest of it to see if, as claimed, “the context of the whole blog” makes that line more menacing or not.
What we seem to be moving towards though with this case and others is a that, far from being a place where you can have your say about the world around you, a blog is becoming a place where you have to make sure that you are towing the party line. Woe betide you if you cross that line.
Was a line crossed?
And if there was, who’s line was it anyway? (see what I did there? No? Oh well). Let me see if I can explain what I’m talking about.
Avid readers of The New Wolfs Howl (I know there are a couple) may notice that there’s a post missing from the site at the moment; check your feed reader and you should be able to work out which one I’m talking about. It’s a post that I wrote about a new website that is related to the industry I work in. We’ve been having some dealings with them at work, and after various correspondence that’s gone back and forwards between the two organisations, I wrote my post about how I didn’t think that what they were saying to businesses tallied with what they were saying to their website users.
Now, there’s something I would like to make clear at this point. The post I wrote on this subject (indeed, all of the posts that I write, whatever the subject) was my own point of view and, as such, cannot be said to be the opinion of the company I work for, nor endorsed by them. But, the content of this particular post was informed by the correspondence I’d had at work.
Today, the PR company behind the website concerned emailed me at work, asking for the post to be taken down because by putting it up I had breached (for want of a better phrase) professional etiquette, in addition to making factually incorrect statements. We’ll come back to that second bit in a moment, but let’s take the issue of professional etiquette first.
I think it’s an important question for bloggers and I know that there have been some famous cases in the not too distant past where people have been removed from their jobs for what they’ve written on their blogs. I intended to write a post about what I perceived to be a conflict between the private face and the public face of a particular website. As a consumer, I would normally only see the public face but as someone who works in the industry, I got to see the private face and to me they didn’t gel. So I wrote about it – from a consumer point of view – to make other people aware. Perhaps I didn’t write in a particularly complementary way, perhaps I should have written to the website company first, perhaps I should have got the OK from my employer first. Whatever I should have done, I went ahead and wrote the post.
What’s interesting to me now is whether, by asking me to take down the post, the website has censored this blog – or whether I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed and they have every right to request it be taken down. I’d be really interested in hearing your opinion.
Of course, by asking for it to be taken down they get no opportunity to correct the factual errors that I may have made. It also gives them no opportunity to respond publicly to the opinions that I put forward (yes, they’ve done so privately but surely better for them to do it publicly through the comments?). For any facts that I got wrong, I apologise (but the information I had available at the time indicated that my facts were correct) but please don’t ask me to apologise for my opinion.
Now I’m REALLY confused
At work, we’re running a customer information database that uses an Access database file with a user-friendly Visual Basic front-end. Part of the set up is integration with postcoding software, for address verification. It currently runs on a Windows 98 system.
We’re looking at upgrading the hardware, so at the moment we’re trying to ensure that the database will run on either XP or Vista (we’re not yet in a position to also be able to upgrade the software). We know that the database will run on XP, as we’ve got an XP laptop that it currently works on. The problem is that we can’t recreate that result; none of us have been able to get the database running successfully on XP. The usual result is that we can get either the database to work (enable customer searches, add orders, etc) or we can get the postcoding software to work. Not both at the same time.
My latest attempts are even more confusing; run the database and it opens up without problems. Run the routine to print an address label and it will let you do that – and let you use the integration with the postcoding software to verify the address – but do anything that requires searching for a customer and you get a “Runtime 91″ error, which is what you normally get when the Access file can’t be found.
I’ve been trying to do this on an XP installation on the BootCamp partition of my Mac, and I’ve got nowhere. Today, I loaded a trial version of Parallels, the desktop VM software that allows you to run Windows without having to re-boot your Mac. I told it to use the BootCamp installation of Windows (couldn’t be bothered to try and re-set everything up) and everything seemed to work well. Just for a laugh, I thought I’d run the database program.
And guess what? It works perfectly – exactly as it’s supposed to. Yet I’ve changed nothing about the installation. The only difference is that it’s running in a VM window. I wondered if something had changed, so I re-booted into BootCamp and no, it still doesn’t work there.
Which is why I’m REALLY confused; what is the fundamental difference between Parallels and BootCamp that is making the software work in one and not the other? Any tech-heads out there able to give me any clues? Please…
Wish I’d thought of that
Watching Dexter the other night, it was revealed that he has a scar on the side of his torso*. One of his girlfriend’s** kids asked him what it was: “Sword fight. I won.”
Why is this significant? I was burnt by boiling water as a toddler (my own stupid fault, apparently) and spent nine weeks in intensive care. I don’t remember the event at all (one of the good things about human memory is that it doesn’t really kick in until relatively late) so I just have a bunch of scars to commemorate the event. Most are hidden from everyday view – I was lucky that my startlingly handsome good looks were unaffected by the accident – but there’s one on my right arm that isn’t easily hidden.
Growing up, this meant that the one question I heard more than any other was “What did you do to your arm?”. If you get asked one question enough times, you start to develop a bit of a complex about it and by the time I hit my teens I had developed a rather sullen response (something along the lines of “Fuck off” if I remember correctly). Watching Dexter the other night, I was thrown back to those days and spent the rest of the episode wondering why I couldn’t have thought of something as witty and clever when I needed to.
And that, in turn, got me thinking about how things change as you get older. As I went through school, every year it was new class, new classmates and the same old question. I think pretty much every kid I went to school with asked me that question. Towards the end of secondary school, though, things started to change. First, by then as a student you’ve pretty much met all the new people you’re going to meet at that school. On top of that, people became more reserved about asking; you can see the question form in their head, but something (politeness, revulsion, who knows) stops them asking. Some people still ask, but they are very much in the minority. These days it’s only really young kids or really old people that ask.
The strange thing is that I miss it. I hated that question when I was a kid, but I can’t now remember the last time I was asked and I do, I miss it. Which is weird.
Actually it’s not only Dexter that’s got me thinking about my scars this week (I’d post pictures, but you really wouldn’t like them); Waking The Dead showed a scene where a man got a kettle full of boiling water poured over his legs, right around the area where I’ve got one of my scars. I normally like Waking The Dead but I did have to stop watching for a bit.
I don’t know why it is (as I said I can’t remember the event) but whenever I see anything about someone being burnt – whether it be truth or fiction, and no matter how they get burnt – I can’t take it. I can happily watch Tobe Hooper chop people’s heads off with chainsaws, or Clive Barker pull people apart with hooks and chains, but if someone gets burnt, that’s it I’m outta there. I once had a blazing row with a girlfriend who was watching a news story about a six-year old girl who’d been burnt in a fireworks accident and I turned the TV over; she insisted on watching it and I had to leave the room. (Equally, while I applaud all that Simon Weston has done for soldiers injured in combat and other charities and I identify with his situation, I can’t watch him on TV. I just can’t.)
As you can maybe tell, I’m quite conflicted over my burns. On the one hand, I can see how the scars that I have could be seen as freakish and off-putting to people and they are part of the reason that I’m quite introverted. On the other hand, I’m proud of them in a way. I don’t remember life without them, they are part of who I am and I’m not sure that – given the opportunity – I would give them up.
*For some of you, this episode probably aired months ago. What can I say? We’re backward here in the UK.
**His girlfriend is played by Julie Benz and is it just me, or do you want her to vamp out just once?
Wolfs Helpers
