The Internet is filled with companies offering all kinds of services, and one of the perks is that the majority of them are free. What happens, though when these free services let you down and you have no real recourse for complaining because, after all, you aren’t paying for it.

You’ll notice that there was no episode of Braindead Techcast last night. It wasn’t because Steven or I didn’t show up, because we both did.  We did our usual pre-show rituals (i.e. coffee was needed), and I went to set up the show as I always do.  What took place was 15 minutes of hell as neither Steven or I could get Talkshoe, the service we use to record the show, to load.  We tried multiple browsers, and seeing as we we are in different countries, we also knew it wasn’t a regional problem.  There simply was no logging into the service.

Now, it is difficult to really complain too much about a service we don’t pay for, but we have both said on the show that we would be willing to pay a monthly fee if it meant we could get better access to the service.  The only subscription they offer is to remove advertising from the chat room, which is something we couldn’t care less about, but there is no way for us to give this company money.

We also looked into switching to Blog Talk Radio, but, alas, after weeks we still have never received our confirmation e-mail to allow us into the service.  Even after Steven wrote a post about this, and got a comment from someone at the company saying they would look into it, but we have gotten nothing back from them.

Free is great, but there also comes a time where you have people who would be willing to pay you so that we could get more reliable service, and they just seem to have no interest.  Hopefully we can do Braindead tonight, but that will rely on Talkshoe actually letting us into the site so we can even attempt it.

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