Every month, the road outside our office fills with small groups of people looking like they are off to a wedding. All are dressed in their best clothes and walk up to the front doors in pairs or family groups. The callers are from the near-by Kingdom Hall and are basically trying to sell their latest newsletter but sometimes they don’t tell you that for a few minutes.

Being somewhat experienced at this monthly event we have a variety of ways to discourage the callers, ranging from outright lies: “We are Pagan Communists who worship Lucifer, how much for your little girl?”; through the placatory brush-off: “Sorry, can’t talk now I’m on the satellite phone to Kathmandu”; to the outright naff off: “I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas and I don’t read books written centuries after the events depicted in them”. This usually does the trick.

In the same way, we’ve all grown good at dealing with cold-callers who telephone, with the possible exception of double-glazing salesmen who are quite at liberty to call and give us a quote to remove the brand new windows we installed in our newly modernised home and office.

Not all cold callers get the brush off
There are one group of cold callers I sometimes listen to. These are the ones who give free listings on their websites. We’ve never actually had any work from such a listing but there is always the chance. The one thing I’m never interested in is their extra-special listing which will “only” cost “this” much. One offer I did take up this month came from BT, giving me a free chunk of their cyber-shopping arcade, called Tradespace, here.

Tradespace is where photocopier salesmen mix with Jill’s Office Solutions and the Dorset Tourist Board. BT intend it to be an online community bringing small businesses and individual sellers together with potential customers to do business. It includes blogging, space to show off photographs and videos of your products and ways to plug special events or offers. All done via a web-based control panel. Then there are the RSS feeds, automatic mapping to show potential customers your location, comments and ratings sections and FREE phone calls.

BT giving away stuff for free
The best way to learn more is to take the tour offered in the URL above. BT say they are going to actively market the Tradespace and as their budgets are far larger than my own, this can’t be a bad thing. This is the second free-bee we’ve gratefully accepted from BT. The other is DigitalVault, here, 2GB of free on-line storage that we use extensively for the transfer of large files. They may upload at a paltry 86Kbps, meaning a gigabyte takes 3 hours to send but the system “just works”. There is also a free trial of 20GB on-line space, usual price £4.99 per month.

The one feature we always find with BT’s way of doing things is that it is unwieldy to use and completely unintuitive. This may be because, as Mac users, we have grown accustomed to an elegance and simplicity in software. But BT’s seems to go about things in a totally unnecessarily complicate way. Or maybe the systems are designed by Microsoft, in which case that explains why they won’t let you use FTP and other long-established protocols. Microsoft wants to create its own “standards”.