During a summer job in the late 1980’s, I was introduced to a book called Creating the Service Culture in which author Stanley Brown argued that products were becoming increasingly homogeneous and that real business success would ultimately come from a commitment to service. A series of events in the last two days have demonstrated that the open source software movement and members of social media have embraced, perhaps even defined, the service culture.

It started yesterday when I stumbled upon a problem that prevented visitors of several of my blogs from downloading episodes of my podcasts that were older than thirty days. I thought the problem originated with Libsyn (monthly rates of US$5 through US$50), so I contacted their support team. Within ninety-minutes I received a response that demonstrated they had done some troubleshooting and had isolated the problem to a specific misconfiguration on my end. They were right! I was puzzled why something that had worked properly for about a year suddenly stopped. No matter, I thought, the problem is now solved.

Later in the day, I checked out the Technorati status for one of my podcast sites and found that Technorati (free social media tool) thought I hadn’t posted to the site in 301 days despite having made at least three posts a week since last summer. I sent an email to support to report the problem and three hours later received a response that they had identified a problem and fixed it.

Today, I discovered that that same podcast had a broken feed. I did some quick troubleshooting and isolated the problem to the latest version of podPress (free open source application). I contacted Dan (creator of podPress) using GChat and he responded immediately, working with me to troubleshoot and solve the problem in real time! It’s worth noting that this was not the first time Dan has helped me out in a pinch in this way.

If you’re looking for the service culture, it’s alive and well in the grassroots community.

For those of you who were patiently waiting for PodPress Player fixes (including the 100-day graph bug) and features, your wait is now over. Dan released PodPress v6.9 earlier today.

About a month ago, Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he has discontinued development of his popular Counterize WordPress plugin, a plugin that summarizes and presents statistical information about a WordPress blog. Fortunately, he offered a solid alternative, the relatively young FireStats plugin by Omry Yadan.

I installed FireStats on two of my WordPress sites today. The installation was typically easy and the interface is slick with a collection of important statistical information. Even so, one of my FireStats installations came up with nice tabbed navigation interface, the other did not. I posted a comment on the FireStats Blog to report the problem. Omry was right on top of the post - he replied within fifteen minutes. The issue appears to be with the way the Sociable plugin applies javascript to the WordPress administrative interface, and Omry is tracking the problem as issue 51 in his ticket system.

If Omry can add a graphs tab that provides graphical representations of hits and visits by hour, day of week, day of month and month of year (current, average and running totals for these graphs would also be great) I would have no reason to operate any other statistical plugins. For icing on the cake, I would love it if FireStats had full featured statistical gathering for the PodPress plugin since PodPress has some unresolved bugs and development efforts seem to be stagnating.

I need help!  Two of my Podcasts are no longer being updated in iTunes… Electric Sky and Just One More Book.  According to Feedburner, the errors reported in my RSS file won’t affect iTunes because it ignores the tags in question.  I haven’t received any fresh insight from the PodPress forum.  iTunes hasn’t responded to my support request.

Can anyone help??!!!