My good friend Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and it’s been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and I’m sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefan’s writing style, humour and thinking. I even hope this will pave […]
Read More… from Stefan Engeseth’s Sharkonomics out in China with a new edition
I know we all get these emails from time to time, but they still annoy me. If ‘Peter’ had visited this blog, he would know that every single post since 2006 has been my own, unpaid, unsponsored thoughts. Why would I change that now? You may say it’s a fair question, and […]
Read More… from I don’t do paid blog posts here (so don’t ask)
Reddit, uploaded by GameAlex2005 Holly Jahangiri shared this link with me on Twitter yesterday: Facebook is asking people to upload photos of themselves to prove they’re human. Good luck with that, because most of the bot accounts do have profile photographs, so this won’t solve a thing. Of the many bots and fakes […]
Read More… from Why in 2017, joining Facebook is a bad thing
Techcrunch broke the news about Bahtiyar Duysak, the German who worked for Twitter who, on analysing one of US president Donald Trump’s Tweets, considered that he had broken the website’s T&Cs, and shut it down. This blog post isn’t going to go in depth into the rights or wrongs of this. What it does […]
The Murdoch Press has rightly kept its pressure up on Google, with a cover story in The Times, ‘Adverts fund paedophile habits’ on November 24 (the online version, behind a paywall, is here). Say what you will about its proprietor, but Murdochs have been happy to go after the misdeeds of Google: the earlier […]
Above: We boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday—then my other half got a cruise-themed video on YouTube. Hat tip to Punkscience for this one. My other half and I noted that her YouTube gave her a cruise-themed video from 2013 after we boarded the Norwegian Jewel yesterday for a visit. Punkscience found this article in […]
Above: Good news, Newsroom and The Spinoff are there in Google News. Further to my blog post last night, I decided to look at Google News to see who had the latest on our PM, Jacinda Ardern. Feeding in her name, the above is the results’ page. I had thought that I had […]
Above: The Intercept is well respected, yet Google cozying up to corporate media meant its traffic has suffered, according to Alternet. There’s a select group of countries where media outlets are losing traffic, all because Facebook is experimenting with moving all news items out of the news feed and on to a separate page. […]
Read More… from Saving the internet from itself—Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees the same dangers
Above: Just another regular day on Facebook: find more bots, report them, Facebook does nothing. A friend asked today, for an article he is penning, whether we were close to quitting social media on his Facebook (I realize the irony). Here was my reply (links and styling added). What are your thoughts? Are the big […]
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the ‘Ford CE14 platform’ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipedia’s inadequacies, […]
Read More… from Wikipedia corrects serious error after 12 years