Semrush, LLMs (or “AIs”), and Google: a three-headed misinformation hydra?

It turns out that Semrush is likely responsible for the misinformation regarding my name. When Shahid Jafar first encountered the fake topic of a new Google algorithm named for me—and apparently created by me—he mentioned he had seen 8,000 references to it. I couldn’t, but it turns out—thanks to another blog post that has incorporated […]

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First customer copy off the press

They’re out there in the wild now. Stewart Sims was our first Autocade Yearbook customer and he’s just posted photos of his copy on Mastodon. Thank you, Stewart!     PS.: Flâneur over at that other site had also posted his copy. Thank you!   You may also like Introducing Autocade in print Autocade is […]

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As Mastodon starts to mainstream, welcome to the end of social

My Mastodon feed is full of US politics and American football. I could use lists or mute keywords, but neither seems to be an ideal solution. I thought it had been agreed by most users when the influx happened that political posts would have content warnings, because there was a desire not to re-create OnlyKlans. […]

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NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing

How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]

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A long time ago, in a newsroom far, far away …

  Star Wars fans with a sense of humour will love Chris Barker’s Deathstar Express, which had been popping up on social media this year. He’s put almost all of his mock front pages on one web page. When you think about it, and I’m sure Chris had, how do you keep the population in […]

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Testing the big three occidental search engines on site: searches again

Thanks to a conversation on Mastodon (which was going quite nicely till the other person lost their temper and concluded that anyone who criticizes Duck Duck Go must be a Google shill) I wanted to see if Bing had recovered on the group of sites I used to run through the search engines. It’s been […]

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It’s harder for humans to add stuff to Facebook than it is for bots

This is why you should let an automated service post to Facebook and not do it yourself. I am reminded of this each time I try. I go into Autocade’s Facebook page and now have the extra step of having to “become” Autocade in order to post. (This came in a few years back.) Secondly, […]

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Lucire unplugs from OnlyKlans, and we find more Wikiality

  I guess whomever wrote this in Wikipedia is being helpful, but the second pronunciation shown is not how you pronounce Lucire. It may be how you pronounce lucire, the quaint Romanian word, in Romanian, but it’s not the pronunciation of the magazine’s name. Maybe the Lucire Romania crew adopted this pronunciation when dealing with […]

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Meta is grabbing your content for its ‘generative AI’—hopefully this opt-out form works

Meta (including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and presumably Whatsapp) is taking user content for its ‘generative AI’. I don’t remember signing up for this, but then I stopped using these sites regularly. Allegedly you can opt out of this. I opted out of ad preference collection there and it made no difference, but in case it […]

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States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans

Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]

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