Richard MacManus’s Cybercultural I’ve mentioned as a must-read if you want to explore the history of the web. And today, Stephen Judd showed a collection of links, among which was this 2017 entry by Amy Hoy, ‘How the blog broke the web’. Hoy traces the origins of the blog back to a web diary (web […]
Category: technology
Technology, futurism, blogging and related matters.
This weekend: Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
Happily, Curlie is back in action: I was able to log in without issue yesterday, and everything is back to normal. We definitely need human-curated indices on the web, sorting the human from the machine-written. Curlie (and its forerunner, the Open Directory Project) had forbidden content mills early on: sites that churned out only content […]
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Why should any server resources be given to SEO?
Vindication of yesterday’s decision to block Alibaba’s bots on Autocade: it’s attempting to access load.php with a huge string, not one that would normally be available to a casual web user As Autocade’s visitor numbers surge to over a million a month today, we are continuing to make sure the bots are blocked (and, […]
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Weekend thoughts: farewell, Ian Crawford; online disinformation; Alibaba and Amazon scrapers
It was sad to read of the passing of Ian Crawford, the former TV producer, whom I got to know through Lucire in his post-Crawfords career. I never pressed Ian about Crawford Productions and preferred to keep things on topic about his Pacific resort. It was out of respect as I had the sense (rightly […]
Excuses, excuses
You’d think ChatGPT would get details about itself right. I wanted to check something out after adding more anti-bot rules to Cloudflare for our highest-traffic websites. (I had to do this manually as Cloudflare’s own method appears to block a few legit bots, like Huawei’s Petal search. That’s another story.) I know this goes against […]
Autocade’s top 20 leaderboard, three years since the reset
Interesting to see the Autocade leaderboard as it was in 2022, as there are some differences today: The first image in the 2022 post was before the site was shifted to a new server. The second was from a couple of months later. There is some jostling around but at this rate, the […]
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The frauds of online advertising, and blocking sign-up bots
Bob Hoffman has his book, Inside the Black Box, available on his website as a free download. It’s a fascinating read about how online advertising is largely a con, with lots of ad fraud, made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), and opaqueness, he explains. Bob is critical about programmatic advertising (25 per cent of programmatic ad dollars are […]
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Some of the feeds are frozen
It looks like Feed Informer (formerly Feed Digest) is frozen, though this is not a complaint. When someone offers a service for free for years, and hasn’t enshittified, then being down once a year (the last time was January 2024) for a few days is hardly worth getting upset about. Last time it was out […]
Über gives up rides, website now specializes in puzzles
Every once in a while I try this Über thing everyone’s talking about. I’ve never been able to get the “app” to work but you can theoretically use the website. Except I believe Über is no longer doing rides and is now principally a puzzle website. Trying to get one for my partner from a […]
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The Barnum effect of chat bots
Here’s a post that summarizes generative “AI” quite well. Hat tip to Brian Krebs, posting this on Mastodon. I can’t embed the post here—maybe he has his embedding turned off. The original that Krebs cites, by David Gerard, can be found here. Like the social media websites concocted by the graduates of Prof Fogg’s class […]