We all know why we don't email help@whereever.com: they don't write back. Its a simple transaction. You piss into a blackhole, the end. However, I've got something called faith in several internet companies. I have faith in google - I believe in google's mission, I believe in their desire to bring order, and reclaim knowledge out of the internet. I have faith. I believe in that. I believe that amazon will deliver my books in reasonable time. I believe that if I wrote to amazon's helpdesk that I would an automated reply very quickly and a generic reply sometime later. I believe that, I have faith in that being the case. I believe that microsoft will never produce a good piece of software by design. I have faith in their desire to make money. I believe that apple makes highly desirable objects, and that they are a more-or-less virtuous company and that they are very charming when they are at their worst. I still believe.

Flickr, I believe in too. I believed in flickr so much the other day that I wrote to their helpdesk. I wrote to to help@flickr.com or something equally anonymous. And I got a reply within a few hours, and, it may begger belief, but I also got a question in that response. In other words something asking for further communication. Which I did and which resulted in further communication and in me learning something that I did not know about google too, to whit:

you can preface a google search with the argument 'link:' for example, 'link:flickr.com/photos/andrewatkinson/3075041/' which will search for sites citing that flickr link.

In other words reverse bibliographies for the internet. Very cool. Well, useful, and possibly fun for those of us who have a website up and running...