Originally published on my friend and international branding guru Stanley Moss’s blogs, What Is a Brand? and Endless Road, as he requested this piece. Jaguar Land Rover announced some time back that it didn’t see Land Rover as a brand any more. It would rather we think of Defender and Discovery as brands, […]
Tag: 2024
Autocade reaches 5,200 models
We’ve arrived at 5,200 models on Autocade, after catching up on some more recent Chinese brands. The 5,200th model is a crossover, but at least it’s rather more stylish: the Luxeed R7. We’ve had the earlier S7 there for a while, and now we’ve completed the Luxeed line-up. In fact, we’ve completed the current line-ups […]
Classic Car Catalogue closes over copyright claim
One of the reasons Keith Adams sold AROnline, a site that he put decades into, was someone alleging he had infringed copyright over a photograph. So he paid up. But for long-term survival, he turned to the team at Great British Car Journey, who had deeper pockets, as AROnline was in danger of closing down. […]
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New Zealand’s 3G switch-off: you might be fine despite the warning messages
I had been concerned that I was getting messages from One NZ (formerly Vodafone) telling me to change my phone because 3G was being killed off. The Australian 3G switch-off made things more concerning, since there are Aussies with virtually new phones being cut off, and the one thing they have in common is that […]
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Keep your corner of the ’net clean
There is a lot of disinformation when it comes to politics—and now you know why it was important for me to get rid of the disinformation about me. No, it’s not because anything written about me could have affected an election. But it is about a medium that takes effort to stay clean and usable, […]
How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web
I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]
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A bronze at Best
I’m proud to say I had a small part to play in Pīwari te Kaitiaki, which took out a bronze in the Social Good category at the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand’s Best Design Awards. My role was helping realize the translated version in te reo Māori, and it was an absolute joy to work […]
Google doesn’t have to be terrible—it just chooses to be
Do Google results have to be so terrible? No, because here’s GMX, who licenses Google results, and their top 10 results for site:lucire.com. There are some framesets (which regular Google loves), but more of the pages in the top 10 are top-level and current. One note: turns out some of the framesets were […]
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The new disinformation posts may have stopped, but there’s tidying to do
In the businesses I’m actually involved in, there aren’t that many unsavoury people. Maybe in the early to mid-2000s I came across some hangers-on in the fashion world. But SEO, wow, there’s a great deal of unscrupulousness. I’ve seen their con-merchant emails since the late 1990s—all the more reason that being grouped as one of […]
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Semrush’s continued dishonesty, and potentially one fewer outlet to expose them
Is this why Search Engine Land refused to run our release about Semrush? Because now, Semrush is their parent company, and they would have known that the deal was happening when they received the release. We also now know that I was right about what was going on—and the biggest names in the search engine […]
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