Twenty years of blogging

First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal.   Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]

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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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Miscellaneous images from the US

A bit of a clear-out of a downloads’ folder on my computer. This has been sitting there since 2016 and I’ve no idea of its origins, but let’s say that Americans do understand irony and whomever claimed otherwise was wrong.     This was from The New York Times in the early 2000s. Dave Barboza […]

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More evidence that contextual advertising is better than creepy, programmatic behavioural ads

Cory Doctorow posted a link to his collection of links at Pluralistic for August 5, 2020. The first one’s heading piqued my interest: ‘Contextual ads can save media’. It’s worth having a read, especially about the BS behind behavioural advertising (i.e. surveillance advertising) and the ‘real-time bidding’ that so many ad networks have been trying […]

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With Facebook, the dots are really easy to join, so why haven’t more done so?

Bob Hoffman always has great stuff from the advertising world, especially on Facebook. My criticisms have come from the user’s perspective and the very obvious BS Facebook peddles, while Bob reads the US press and combines it with a professional’s knowledge.    In his latest newsletter, it’s a familiar tale: Facebook realized misinformation had greater […]

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Is the death of expertise tied to the Anglosphere?

Foreign and Commonwealth Office Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.   I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.    There’s a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know it’s not an exclusively […]

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Developer creates a tool to expose bigoted, fake Twitter accounts; Twitter bans it

In theory, one of the positive things about social media should be the fact that a company has as much chance of succeeding as an individual. Another is that it shouldn’t matter who you are, you have the same opportunity to get your word out. No one should get special treatment.    But, on Twitter, […]

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Secret “Asian” man (with apologies to Tak Toyoshima)

Matt Clark Above: Driving a silver Aston Martin. I’m citing the Official Secrets Act when I say I may or may not be on the tail of Auric Goldfinger.   Oh dear, I’ve been outed. I’m a spy. Actually, Walter Matthau and I prefer ‘agent’.    You can read between the lines in this New […]

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Getting ready for global

I’ve known of this for some time through Medinge: the globalizing of The New York Times. This has meant the retirement of The International Herald–Tribune name, one which brand experts are divided on.    On the one hand, the NYT doesn’t have it wrong. There are global newspaper brands already, namely those that have taken […]

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How brands fool us

The Google experience over the last week—and I can say ‘week’ because there were still a few browsers showing blocks yesterday—reminds me of how brands can be resilient.    First, I know it’s hard for most people to believe that Google is so incompetent—or even downright corrupt, when it came to its bypassing Safari users’ […]

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