Brown Paper Tickets is one of several alternative online ticket vendors for anyone hosting a ticketed event. Might be a ball, a fundraiser, a race, a concert, or an exhibit. At Long Now we've used them and can recommend them highly.

Brown Paper Tickets bills themselves as "fair-trade" ticketing. What that means is that they offer a fair deal to both the consumer and the venue. BPT provides the lowest consumer fees on tickets (99 cents and 2.5%), with no add-on overcharges, and free first class postage. For hosts setting up an event, they offer fantastic 24/7 live-person phone support, a clean usable website, and cheap (10 cent) printed secure tickets. They offer venue hosts other goodies too. You have control over when to stop sales, how to customize the ticket, ways to manage multiple events, means to offer media tickets, assigned seating, and so on.

Plus, they give you real-time sales, and pay up promptly! Try that with Ticketmaster.

Now the bad news: you can't use an up-and-comer like Brown Paper Tickets unless your venue can, which makes the whole issue rather academic for now. What you can do is make sure your favorite local venues know about BPT so they can look at it for themselves.

Brown Paper Tickets: Fair Trade Ticketing [Cool Tools]
(Photo: Jakob.Enos)

In the Charleston SC area we are fortunate to have local a internet / phone / cable provider called Knology that has made customer service an art form.

Over the last few weeks I have been reconfiguring my home network and have contacted their customer support several times to change my settings, each time I was greeted by a competent employee who handled my request with ease. I finally settled on using an Apple AirPort Extreme and placed one final call to set it all up.

Now, because I am a lifelong Mac user I expected to hear "What is a Mac?" or "We don't support Apple products." Instead the customer service rep said it wasn't a problem and even shared some geeked out fact about the router that I didn't know. He made the changes needed to the account, I didn't even have to touch my keyboard or mouse. At the end of the call he offered to have a technician follow up with a call in an hour to make sure it was working. One hour later the technician called while I was happily surfing the web over my new wireless connection.

An amusing postscript to this story. Right after I had finished setting up the connection, an AT&T salesman comes to my door and I was able to give him an ear full of what I thought of his illegal wiretapping company. It was like icing on the cake. : )

In New York, customers tired of Time Warner, Verizon, and Cablevision can look to independent DSL providers like Bway.net. Frustrated residents of other cities can use DSLReports.com to track down their own local alternatives.

Local (Mom & Pop) ISPs [Broadband Reports]
(Photo: dailyinvention)