Above: The Intercept is well respected, yet Google cozying up to corporate media meant its traffic has suffered, according to Alternet. There’s a select group of countries where media outlets are losing traffic, all because Facebook is experimenting with moving all news items out of the news feed and on to a separate page. […]
Read More… from Saving the internet from itself—Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees the same dangers
My complaints about Google over the years—and the battles I’ve had with them between 2009 and 2014—are a matter of record on this blog. It appears that Google has been making enemies who are much more important than me, and in this blog post I don’t mean the European Union, who found that the big […]
Read More… from Google collects more enemies—we haven’t been critical enough of it
One thing I love about New Zealand is that we’re not mired in an election cycle years before the event. We’re three weeks or so out from our General Election, and only now am I feeling things are heating up. It’s not that we haven’t had drama. Weeks ago, Metiria Turei was co-leader of […]
Facebook sent me a survey as one of our businesses has bought advertising with them. I’ve detailed my responses below, with a few notes. I’ve included Instagram in this, since their own advertising platform allows us to reach that. What is the most important thing that Facebook can do to improve your advertising experience? Some […]
What an honour it was to appear as one of the first batch of people in the Human Rights’ Commission’s Give Nothing to Racism campaign. Taika Waititi, New Zealander of the Year (and a Lucire feature interviewee from way back) introduced the campaign with a hilarious video, and it was an honour to be considered […]
Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too. Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front. First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]
Read More… from Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016
As of today, I’ve sent off my evidence to the US Better Business Bureau so they can continue their investigation of Facebook. The DAA was too gutless to investigate but the BBB, by contrast, gives a damn. Let me note here that I have nothing against Facebook making a buck. I just ask that […]
Read More… from Facebook’s ad targeting: evidence now filed with the Better Business Bureau
With the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the German TV show Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, a fan group I run—the largest unofficial community on Facebook for the series—has been the subject of a Blitzkrieg by RTL. Trailers, which made up the majority of the uploaded videos, are indeed copyrighted material, but have […]
A few years ago, I discovered that Google was monitoring and gathering user preferences even after one had opted out. Google would initially put an opt-out cookie that went with your browser when you first opt out, which is exactly what every other ad network does—but, then, within 24 hours, it would replace it with […]
This is by no means a blog post in favour of the Republican poll front-runner, although this graphic from Vox (not the old Vox that I used to be on) was very interesting: Jeb Bush's operation appears to have set $32.5 million on fire pic.twitter.com/dziA85tUAz — Vox (@voxdotcom) December 11, 2015 When I ran […]
Read More… from Trump a creation of the media, not of ad spends