I decided to block threads.net from my Mastodon account, which really doesn’t do much if there are determined bad actors, but it’s a small initial step to keep Meta in its place. Just as I never linked my YouTube account to Google back when I used those legacy 2000s websites, I really don’t need to […]
Category: media
Discussions about the media, journalism and news.
Autocade turns 16
The latest model on Autocade: the second-generation Ssangyong Rexton, now the KG Rexton. Last week, Autocade hit its 16th anniversary, and how different this one looks from the last. Now there’s a print counterpart, and some very nice readers have offered their reviews, too. We’re nearing 5,000 models on there, and the last several […]
The crunch time media face is nothing new
Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]
My real expert opinion on Google, SEO, and the mess that’s to come (not the LLM junk)
Skry being right on the money: Still those web pages about me being a Google SEO expert or having an algorithm named for me are being indexed and prioritized by Google, all because Semrush hallucinated (or was there a malicious hand in this?), told a bunch of people (in south Asia, predominantly) about […]
Is Google hiding content critical of itself—while losing the spam battle?
For a while I enjoyed getting some of the hits from the unwary searching for my name in association with the misinformation that Semrush allegedly generated. After all, it’s my name, and I should enjoy the hits for Google SEO jackyan in order to set the record straight, rather than have the unscrupulous among SEO […]
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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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A full day on Autocade with Cloudflare switched on
It appears that Cloudflare hasn’t affected Mediawiki’s stats (at least not hugely, from what I can tell). Overnight we had about 19,000 views, according to Mediawiki. Cloudflare, meanwhile, reports 5,420 visitors in that same time—three to four pages per visitor sounds acceptable. I realize Cloudflare might count search engine bots, too. I’ll have things […]
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Autocade reaches 35 million page views, the latest million in 41 days
Autocade hit the 35 million mark two days ago, in well under two months, buoyed by days of over 60,000 page views per day. I saw other jumps in the 20,000-a-day mark, even 50,000 on some other days. The last two days alone saw 43,000 page views, bringing today’s total to 7,402,333 since the server […]
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Why web pages are becoming homogenized
Dan York in Vermont referred to Mia Sato’s article in The Verge today, on how Google has driven the bland, same-again websites out there. It does lay the blame at netizens more, and fairly so here, given that the desperation behind SEO has led many to employ certain tricks in order to make a buck […]
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 […]