Reading Roars!

The writer behind the influential I Hate First Great Western blog has had enough:

at the risk of making myself blogless, this year I’m going to channel my energies towards working from home, and leave the world of First Great Western behind.

It’s a shame. For us, I mean. The blog, I’m sure, prompted the creation of two FGW-affiliated blogs with similar-sounding names: In Defence of First Great Western and I Work For FGW.

For anyone interested in FGW, these last two blogs are astronomically important. They are of greater value to me than the very corporate-looking First Great Western website. I do not see fancy Flash and polished corporate-speak on these blogs. Instead, I see real FGW personalities eager to connect with us, the customers, writing informally and without restraint. They have names and they invite comments. It’s much less “talk to the brand” and more “talk to Ollie”.

Ollie is the FGW staff member responsible for I Work For FGW. He said a few days ago that his employer “appears” to like that the blog is running. Me too. His blog displays prominent links to sites critical of FGW, such as I Hate FGW and First Late Western, as well as (ahem) Reading Roars!, and yesterday he revealed that he knows what visitors are interested in and that he is responding to their needs:

Based on some pieces that people search for I am planning on making a ticket page available with some decent information, as a fair amount of visitors have come after searching about Goldcards and ticket prices. I won’t be able to list all prices, obviously. I will however provide some information to try and make the ticketing process easier.

God bless bloggers everywhere.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 2:28 am and is filed under Transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.