Tonight, I removed every single blog I followed—including my own—from Blogger. My de-Googling continues. I’ve also taken myself off as an author on some Blogger blogs as of tonight, as an intermediate step of ending my association with Blogger altogether. I had hoped that deleting my Blogger reading list would get me off the […]
Category: USA
Posts relating to the USA.
Google might have signed you up to stuff you never asked for
I was getting annoyed at Google for the services it counts as part of my ‘products’, but that was minor compared with what Harriet Jacobs has gone through with Google’s new Buzz service—which appeared to have put her personal safety in jeopardy (hat tip to Simon Green). From what I can tell, Buzz shares, […]
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Toyota’s troubles stem from forgetting its principles
I was surprised to learn that Toyota still has not issued a worldwide recall of its troublesome Prius NHW30 model, even though one had gone out in New Zealand. In layman’s terms, the brakes allegedly don’t work when you want them to. In more complex terms, the software has trouble distinguishing between different types […]
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Best quotation on the Howard Stern–American Idol tie-up
The best quotation in the American media this week? In my opinion, it would have to be this: Howard Stern is being considered to replace Simon Cowell when he leaves “American Idol” after this season. Apparently Satan was out of Fox’s price range. From Tony Hicks in the Contra Costa Times. You may also […]
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Steve McQueen, advertising spokesman, 1980 to date
Found on Pete’s Tumblr today. Can you believe it’s been 30 years since the man died? A few weeks later, John Lennon was murdered. Very enjoyable, though I still like the old Ford Puma ad from a decade ago: My American friends prefer a later Steve McQueen ad promoting the Mustang: I still think […]
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Vox cars’ group crosses 100
Even though I am no longer blogging on Vox, I have some good news there: the cars’ group that I founded got its 100th member today. It’s actually the third time we’ve crossed 100, but on those previous occasions, it was sploggers that got us over that number. And each time I’ve had to […]
A tribute to those special Ks
I believe we have all the basic Chrysler K-cars of the early 1980s on Autocade as of today. Older readers might remember that at the dawn of the 1980s, Chrysler was in terrible shape and needed loan guarantees—as opposed to a bailout—from the US Government. With Chairman Lee Iacocca at the helm, the company […]
As the 2010s dawn, there’s a vacuum on the internet
Rick Klau’s action today in restoring Vincent’s Social Media Consortium blog got me putting things into perspective. We know sites like Blogger and Vox are free, but what happens when they fail? Vox, the Six Apart blogging service, had been where I had put my personal posts—as well as a bunch of private […]
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Google’s Rick Klau restores Social Media Consortium
All it takes is finding the right bloke and hoping they would do the right thing. At the end of the day, that was the lesson in getting Vincent Wright’s Social Media Consortium blog restored. Yesterday, Josh Forde Tweeted me about an article he had read, where John Hempton’s Blogspot-hosted blog had been […]
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What we needed was our own Felix Salmon
Fascinating, isn’t it? If you happen to have a Blogger blog that was wrongly deleted, and one of your readers is Felix Salmon of Reuter, then of course Google is going to come to your rescue within a day. (The link, and an important detail below, was found by Josh Forde and Tweeted to me […]