Rupert Murdoch has it in for Google more than I ever could

Monika Flückiger/Creative Commons And people thought I was de-Googling my life or being mean to Google. What about Mr Murdoch and his entire firm?    We all know his comments about how he wanted to block Google News’s bot and had spoken out against that. While little happened on that front with the exception of […]

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All it takes is someone to care

Thank goodness for Boris, who commented on one of my Firefox posts here. Since he’s been on here, he’s asked me to file a new bug report, and he’s now getting a bunch of Mozilla boffins to investigate the font display error that I’ve been having since I’ve begun to download the v. 4 betas. […]

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No surprises as Firefox 4 reaches Beta 10

Tried Firefox 4 Beta 10 on another computer altogether—the new machine in the office. No font management software on this one, which rules out anything that could have been doing. I don’t need to say much more. The font problem is the same as on Betas 7, 8 and 9; and the fact that Google […]

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Mapping friends on TouchGraph

Although my piece on Social Media NZ about my scepticism toward Quora was published today, written while in a mood of being “virtually socialized out” (one that has not totally passed, incidentally), I did get a buzz with TouchGraph, which is an app that my friend Laura used on her Facebook in 2009. I only […]

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Jack tries another Firefox beta—we all know what happens next

Title says it all. Except this time, it’s not just the fonts. No link in a Google results page is clickable: in fact, Google hangs the entire browser (though I can still scroll up and down—yay). The program, after clicking on the close icon, stays in the Task Manager for at least 10 minutes (I […]

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All I wanted to do was to say, ‘Thank you,’ to Telstra Clear

I seem to be to computers what Frank Spencer is to life.    Long-time readers will know that in 2009, Vox locked me out. We went round and round for months, with the company suggesting all sorts of solutions, usually putting the blame back on me or the ISP.    I had tried logging in […]

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Users upset over YouTube–Google linking, and is Google showing greater bias in results?

I found out a day after many netizens: Google is now forcing all YouTube account holders to merge their accounts with their Google ones.    As part of my de-Googling, I won’t be following suit. Instead, I plan to stay logged out of YouTube: it makes very little difference to me.    So I won’t […]

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Facebook’s profile change benefits Digg

Earlier today, while sorting out revisions to a piece I’m submitting to the Journal of Brand Management, I discovered that the new Facebook profile layout no longer has my collection of links.    Once upon a time, you could save your links to Facebook and they’d all be there, in a list, shown just below […]

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Spam commenters are losing their minds

Despite the smaller visitor numbers, this blog seems to leave way more spam in the Akismet queue than the other Wordpress installations we have. I had wanted to write a post swearing at some of the dumb comments that come in, as all of these are automated, but three of the first ten today are […]

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Civility is a good thing

Baidu Talk, which launched in September, has netted 1 million users already, according to PC World. Michael Kan reports that thanks to the service’s insistence that no aliases are used (registered users’ identities are verified with the People’s Republic’s government) ‘this has led to more “civil” discussions between users on Baidu Talk.’    It shows […]

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