If corporate America says it, it’s probably untrue

Le dernier.   I see the Le Snak range has now left us, after its US owner PepsiCo cited a lack of demand. I call bullshit, since during 2021 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find them on the shelves. Throttling distribution is not the same as a lack of demand, something you see time […]

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Kissing that Disqus advertising money goodbye (webmasters beware)

I’m going to have to write off what Disqus owes us. No response to this thread, and no response to a DM I sent at their request. Please DM us your account name and site shortname and we will be happy to look into this for you. — DisqusSupport (@DisqusSupport) July 8, 2022 I assume […]

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Pirate sites, content mills and splogs exist because of Google

In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it weren’t for Google, there’d be no incentive to do content mills or splogs. I replied: ‘People really are that stupid, and itʼs all thanks to Google. Google doesn’t care about ad fraud, and anyone can […]

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Send out warmth, get it back

I’ve had a nice resolution after reaching out to FashioNZ over their Instagram tagline and a claim made on their website. There was a delay in their response due to the site being sold to its fifth owners (I must be out of touch, as I never knew who the second and third were!), but […]

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Bing Webmaster Tools: how to make sure you vanish from a search engine completely

With my personal site and company site—both once numbers one and two for a search for my name—having disappeared from Bing and others since we switched to HTTPS, I decided I would relent and sign up to Bing Webmaster Tools. Surely, like Google Webmaster Tools, this would make sure that a site was spidered and […]

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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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Musings for today: back on Facebook, untracked ads, Autocade rankings

It’d be unfair if I didn’t note that I managed to see a ‘Create post’ button today on Lucire’s Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today. Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which […]

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Switch to HTTPS, lose your number one and two search-engine ranking

One annoying thing about switching the majority of our sites to HTTPS is losing our positions in the search engines. We were always told that HTTPS would lead to rises in search-engine ranking, and that being a mere HTTP would lead to Google downgrading you. The reality, as I’ve witnessed since we completed our server […]

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The end of Facebook pages?

Some of the articles in Lucire are still manually designed in Dreamweaver, and those need to be added to the social networks in a similar way. There we use Zoho Social to update things. In practice, we only do Twitter, as IFTTT then takes care of reposting our updates to Facebook. Today, I noticed that […]

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Stefan Engeseth gives away his book, One, in the interests of peace

I always thought One: a Consumer Revolution for Business was one of Stefan Engeseth’s best books, if not the best. He recently posted on Linkedin: ‘readers have told me that the book can lead to a better understanding of people and society (which can end wars).’ In the interests of peace, he thought he’d give […]

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