When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipediaās abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform.
One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, and was probably deserving of a page detailing his notoriety. Cross, as I detailed in May 2018, is a person or entity that is anti-Jeremy Corbyn and favourable toward right-wing figures. He ‘has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.’ Wikipediaās reaction? Delete the page, and subject its creator to a lifetime ban. Then, any record of the Philip Cross page was scrubbed cleanāforget page histories. The story is detailed at Off-Guardian here.
In other words, Wikipedia was complicit in biased editing. I’ve been saying Wikipedia was questionable for over a decade, but to actually protect someone who engages in what some might call libel?
It’s entirely consistent with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’s attitude to the whole thing, as Craig Murray detailed at the time.
After five years of Cross’s inputs to Wikipedia, he was finally discussed by Wikipedia by a principled editor, KalHolmann, though not without opposition (KalHolmann was initially “punished” for even bringing it up). Like all big sites, Wikipedia decided to show people that it has some form of governance only after it had been outed (including a BBC World Service radio story that went out during the arbitration process) for allowing abuse.
And by means of a postscript to these events of mid-2018 that I missed till now, George Galloway, a regular target of Philip Cross’s Wikipedia activity, claims he has identified the man, and knows the background behind him.
Iām wondering whether itās worth carrying on with Feedburner. Over the last few years Iāve rid our sites of Facebook gadgetsāthat means if you āFacebook likedā something here, youād have to go through the Po.st links above (which Iām hoping are visible on the mobile version), rather than something made by Facebook that could track you. Itās not been 100 per cent perfect, since Po.st doesnāt pick up on likes and shares that you get within Facebook, so if this post manages a dozen likes there, the count you see above wonāt increase by 12. Itās why well liked posts donāt necessarily have a high share count, which renders the figure you see here irrelevant.
I suppose itās better that someone understates the share figure than overstates itāas Facebook does with its user numbers.
But I dislike Google’s tracking as much as Facebook’s, and since I have de-Googled everywhere else (one of the last is shown below), then I’d like to get rid of the remaining Google tools I use.
I signed this blog up to Feedburner when the company was independent of Google, but I see from the gadget on the full desktop version of this site there are only 37 of you who use its feeds from this blog. This is a far cry from the 400-plus I used to see regularly, even 500-plus at one point in the late 2000s.
I checked in to my Feedburner stats lately, and was reminded that the drop from hundreds to dozens all happened one day in 2014, and my follower numbers have been in the two digits since. Check out this graphic and note the green line:
Itās entirely consistent with what I witnessed over the years. There were indeed days when the Feedburner gadgetās count would drop into the 30s, before rising back up to 400 or so the following day. I never understood why there would be these changes: in the early days of Feedburner, before the Google acquisition in 2007, I had a slow and steady rise in followers. These peaked soon after Google took over, plateaued, and just before the 2010s began, the massive fluctations began.
I canāt believe thereād be en masse sign-ups and cancellations over a five-year period, but in 2014, the last fall happened, and it remained low. And, to be frank, itās somewhat demoralizing. Is the fall due to Google itself, or that Feedburner decided to run a check on email addresses and found that the majority were fake one day, or something else?
Given that the fluctations were happening for years, then I want to say there was a bug that knocked out hundreds of subscribers, but I actually donāt know, and I havenāt read anything on this online, despite searching for it.
Perhaps Google cuts back the dissemination of your RSS feed if youāre not using their Blogger product, but we know why using their service is an exceptionally bad idea.
It reminds me of Facebookās decision to kill the shares from a page by 90 per cent some years back, to force people to pay to keep their pages in the feed.
If youāre getting this on Feedburner, would you mind leaving me a comment so I know itās still worthwhile? Otherwise, I may remove my accountāIāve de-Googled everything elseāand if you still need Atom and RSS feeds, they can be had at jackyan.com/blog/atom/ and jackyan.com/blog/feed/ respectively.
Looking at the stats, I can predict that Autocade will comfortably serve its 17 millionth page view in the first week of October 2019.
The growth in page numbers has slowed compared to the first few years, though it is continuing. At the time of writing, itās at 3,884 model pages, with the new Land Rover Defender (and the correct cubic capacities of the JLR Ingenium engines, natch) making it into Autocade.
We havenāt cracked three months per million views yet, but having another period on four is still pretty rewarding, given the relatively few additions weāve made since June. At the time of the last blog post on this subject in June, we had 3,813 entriesāso weāve only increased by 71. We’d have to credit search engine results and regular readers over the growth of the database. For those few other than me who care about these numbers:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
I know someone else has come across this before, since there’s a page on it here.
The very same thing has begun happening on Autocade, whenever the Facebook link is clicked. I’d love to blame Facebook, but I don’t believe it’s them.
I’ve contacted Sovrn (formerly Viglinks) as the discussion board participants identify them, but ShopStyle may know as it’s their API being used.
Here’s what I asked ShopStyle tonight, but if anyone has an idea, I’d love to hear it.
I do not know your company, but the Facebook link on one of my sites (http://autocade.net) is being altered to https://api.shopstyle.com/action/apiVisitRetailer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fautocade.net&pid=uid7424-7742368-93&pdata=k0jgi6bfn30122110msza whenever someone clicks on it, and they wind up at https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/deals/?ref=affiliate_external&referral_story_type=daily_deals_rakuten.
When I go into the source code on our server, the link is correct. The change is happening elsewhere, and I canāt figure out where. From the link and UID Iāve given you, are you able to tell? We do run ads and a Disqus plug-in on our site, as well as a Po.st sharer, if these help narrow down the possibilities.
Iām sure youād want to kill the account of whomever is misusing ShopStyleās APIs to earn referrals.
Here’s the page I wind up on when I click the link. It has no useful content.
I’ll report back if I discover more, as there may be a dodgy ad network out there, or Disqus or Po.st aren’t as honest as they used to be. Disqus is clunky anyway, and once we reach a certain payment threshold, we may remove it from all our sites. Autocade was the one place where comments were really good, so it’ll be a shame to lose it.
PS.: After looking through the inspector, it appears to be Disqus, using Viglinks. One has to turn off affiliate links in the Disqus set-up.
P.PS.: Both ShopStyle and Sovrn were really helpfulāShopStyle’s Rasheka even went so far as to include screenshots and links.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonāt name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iāll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
ā¢ have forward-thinking policies;
ā¢ appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
ā¢ frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canāt advise how to win since I didnāt. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
ā¢ Use rose-coloured glasses;
ā¢ appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
ā¢ resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
ā¢ suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnāt do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
There are a few TV shows I get anorak about. Alarm fĆ¼r Cobra 11 is probably the one most people have seen me post about. I probably have some claim over The Persuaders, The Professionals, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Pointman. But there was one that was a staple for us as a family, that I don’t have any anorak status over, yet I seem to know more than a lot of people who write about such things professionally.
It’s The Love Boat, where there are a few claims that go round the ānet.
There are many pages and videos about the ‘original cast’ of The Love Boat, and the names are familiar enough: Gavin MacLeod, Bernie Kopell, Fred Grandy, Ted Lange and Lauren Tewes. Even documentaries on the history of the programme make this claim. But, as many know, this particular combination was the third cast, although Kopell, Grandy and Lange showed up in the second pilot in 1977, with Quinn Redeker as Capt Tom Madison and Diane Stilwell as Sandy, the cruise director.
The original cast actually saw Division 4ās Ted Hamilton as Capt Thomas Ford, Dick van Patten as Dr O’Neill, Sandy Helberg as Gopher, Theodore Wilson as Isaac, Terri O’Mara as Gerry, the cruise director. Joseph Sicari, as a steward, also appears in the opening title.
There’s also an internet fiction on a lot of websites that The Love Boat II, the second pilot, had Bernie Kopell play Dr O’Neill, and not Adam Bricker. I’ve no idea where this surfaced, and it also appears on IMDB. Sorry, internet, Bernie Kopell is introduced as ‘Lt Dr Adam Bricker’, the military title with its origins in the back story that Capt Madison, Dr Bricker, Gopher (YN1 Burl Smith) and CPO Isaac Washington all served together on the USS Chadway in the US Navy in Vietnam. In peacetime, they wanted to sail together. Here’s the scene in a Dutch video cassette release, though Bricker is misspelled:
Hopefully, one of these days, these errors get corrected online. Though based on what I see on Wikipedia, I’m not holding my breath.
The second cast wasn’t too bad, but most of the stories left something to be desired. The producers (and, for that matter, MacLeod and Tewes) were lucky that ABC commissioned a third pilot, The New Love Boat, and the rest is history.
We had a 20 year old girl post a lengthy negative review on our Google Business Page because we wouldnāt ship her a replacement product for free. As a result, she proceeded to have 16 other people leave 1 star reviews in rapid fire succession on our page. Iām talking within minutes. We have sent cease and desist orders, we have consulted attorneys, we have contacted Google. The fake reviews are still up. The only way we finally got some control over the situation was to mark the page as āClosedā. If you do that it removes the ability to review. The whole situation and fact that one person can damage your brand so easily, and so quickly with no support from Google for days on end is totally ridiculous.
Google My Business a total joke. Worst customer service experience I’ve had in a long time.
Having issues with Google My Business? You are not alone, not in the slightest. I can tell from all the posts on this forum as well as from personal experience that there is no ‘customer support’, just a bunch of people that answer the phone to tell you that they can’t do anything.
Our business listing suddenly disappeared and was replaced with the name of one of the employees. So I click on a few help pages and find a support line to which they are supposed to call me. I get the call, it connects, I say hello, then they hang up ā¦ What a great start.
I call again, and finally get somebody I can barely understand who apparently doesn’t know anything about anything, and can’t actually do anything either. I’d kill for a job where I can just tell everyone who calls me that nothing can be done, and then hang up on them. The great part is feedback is only available AFTER the call, so if they hang up on you, you can’t leave any feedback so they can’t get in trouble.
So I tell this lady my issues, and she says she’ll look into them, then I get hung up on again.
The next day I get an email with NO SUBJECT, that looks very spammy but lo and behold it’s actually a legit email from Google My Business. The geniuses over there don’t understand what my question is and want me to clarify.
What do they want me to clarify? They apparently looked at our website, and because one of the employees name is on the website, then the deletion of our listing and replacement with just an employee name and nothing else is justified.
Get this, in order to fix it, they want me to DELETE our staff page on the website. Make sense to you? Not to me either.
So I call them again. I get hung up on just after I gave them my email, again. Call back AGAIN and finally talk to another ESL guy who I can at least mostly understand. He goes on to tell me he is also powerless, but if I want I can talk to his supervisor, who ‘can’t do anything either sorry’. Our business listing ‘won’t be on the google’ for ‘several weeks’ because I made the HUGE mistake of trying to correct our suite number to match USPS standard formatting. Oh, and I made the cardinal sin of updating our profile to show that, as a medical clinic, we don’t do deliveries. I’m so sorry Google, I really am. I didn’t know you wanted us to falsely advertise our services and get sued. I’ll never do it again so can you please restore our listing?
Oh, by the way, I opted to hold for the supervisor and got hung up on again.
I think we should just give up, Google has made it pretty clear how much of a priority their customers are. For my part I’m pulling the $2k adwords we’re doing every month. Probably a pittance in Google’s eyes but hey, it’s all I can do to protest their pisspoor service.
Good luck everyone!
Wow. Just wow.
I found a lot of similar reviews, and those who promote it in a more positive light appear to be SEO specialists. How convenient.
I might leave it for now since I’ll never see these My Business boxes, and I just hope that if we do get piled on, they’ll have fixed the bug that prevents us from deleting listings.
I had a call from a nice gentleman working for Google called Shabhaz today. No, he wasnāt about to tell me that I wasnāt on the āfirst page of Googleā: he worked for Google My Business, where they want to verify businesses and suck them into the ecosystem, complete with dashboard and social features.
Iāve always ignored the postcards that come and the one time my curiosity was piqued, the blasted site didnāt work anyway. I canāt remember the specifics now, but I recall my usual reaction: āWhat Google says and what Google does are entirely different things.ā You come to expect it from US Big Tech.
I suppose if you ignore it for enough years, the Big G phones you.
I proceeded to tell Shabhaz all the reasons I hated (actually, thatās not strong enough a word) his firm, but kept repeating, āIām not angry at you, only at your employer.ā And words to the effect of, āA man has to make a living, so I donāt have a problem that you work for them, but this is a firm with highly dubious ethics.ā
He did say, āIf I had that experience, Iād hate them, too,ā and I had to correct him and expand on the stories: āItās not just about my experienceāitās all the things Google does that violate our privacy, not just mine, but everyoneās.ā
Nevertheless, you canāt stay angry at a guy who has had nothing to do with his bossesā incompetence, greed, avarice and tax avoidance, and is only trying to collect a pay cheque, so I agreed to help him out.
Of course, it didnāt work as planned, as updating the address leads to this:
The house has only been there since 1972, and Google Earth has it, but then we all know that Google Earth operates in some kind of parallel universeāparallel to even Google My Business, it seems. One day, I suspect Google will catch up with houses built in the 1970s.
But seriously, with three businesses all linked to my email address (Heaven knows how) I wonder if anyone has ever got any business through Google My Business.
Iāve been on Linkedin longer than most people I know and Iāve never received any work enquiries from it.
And Iāve yet to have anyone tell me that they found my business through Google, so Iām tempted to delete the listings for Jack Yan & Associates and Lucire from the My Business dashboard.
The thing is, I donāt want to read your reviews about my businesses on Google. I donāt want to risk getting piled on by unethical actors, which totally can happen in this day and age. If you want to reach us, thereās a good contact form with all the addresses on our sites.
So whatās the prognosis out there? Since I actually donāt use the site except as a last resort, and have little desire to, your experience far outweighs mine.
On a related note, this also made me wonder about competence.
Iāve never given my permission to be in the Yellow Pages. And the fact that Lucire does screen printing is news to me. Who makes up this bullshit and tries to pass it off as authoritative?
A Tweet to them is so far unanswered, so I may get in touch with them to have this listing removed. This one I can answer: since Iāve never been in the Yellow Pages, I can say, hand on heart, that Iāve never had any business from them. By the looks of it, theyāll never send me anything relevant anyway.
In summary, today’s thought about Google:
With any other business that screws people over this badly and this often, weād avoid it as much as we could. Instead, most go to Google, pull their trousers down, and bend over.
Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.
Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on the news, they’ve more than covered the fine on the rise alone.
Bob writes: ‘The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland andāwho knows?āa jolly good way to boost share prices.’
There’s something very messed up about this scenario, particularly as some of the US’s authorities are constantly being shown up by the EU (over Google’s monopoly actions) and the UK’s Damian Collins, MP (over the questions being asked of Facebookāunlike US politicians’, his aren’t toothless).
The US SEC, meanwhile, has released its report on Facebook, showing that Facebook knew what was happening with Cambridge Analytica in 2015ā16, and that the company willingly sold user data to the firm. SEC’s Stephanie Avakian noted, ‘As alleged in our complaint, Facebook presented the risk of misuse of user data as hypothetical when they knew user data had in fact been misused.’ You can read the entire action as filed by the SEC here.
Woah this was 12 days before US elections. Facebook employees knew stuff was going on but their DC office appears to have frozen them. Consumers were deceived and harmed through their personal data likely in order to protect Facebook's reputation and share price. pic.twitter.com/rTpSYptVPG
As I have been hashtagging, #Facebooklies. This is standard practice for the firm, as has been evidenced countless times for over a decade. The settlement: US$100 million. Pocket change.
Iāve found some forum entries about this, but they date back to the beginning of the decade. I alerted Jetstar to this in March, and the problem has worsened since then.
Basically, I canāt book online, and I donāt know why. Consequently, I booked one flight with Air New Zealand and only managed, after huge effort, to get the other (for a colleague) with Jetstar.
Back in March, I couldnāt book with Vivaldi, but I was able to switch to Firefox. I let Jetstar know.
Now, this strategy does not work.
Before you suggest it, cookies and caches have been cleared.
Hereās what happens after Iāve selected the cities and the dates, and I go to select times. Letās begin with Vivaldi on Windows, which is based on Chromium (which, as we know, is what Chrome, the browser Jetstar suggests you use, is based on):
Switching to Firefox now results in this:
Switching to Edge on the same PC gives this:
Fortunately, I also own Macs, so hereās what Firefox for Mac returns:
The only browser that works with the Jetstar website: Safari on Mac. As I’ve sold my Ubuntu laptop, I was unable to test using that OS.
Not many people would go to that effort, and while Jetstarās Twitter staff (after some pushing from me in DMs) said they would refer it on, I donāt expect anything to happen. Maybe Chrome would work, but Iām not ever going to download it to find out. Why invite Google on to your computer? But if that is the case, it seems foolish to limit yourself to such an invasive browser. My experience is that whatever is blocking me from booking with Jetstar (some may argue that this is a good thing), it is expanding across browsers.
