How many Facebook bots do you see in an evening? I count over 250

Last month, I Tweeted Facebook, asking them to raise the reporting limit for bots. Right now, you can report around 40 bot accounts before a warning box comes up asking you to slow down. If you do another 10, you are barred from reporting any more for 24 hours—even though you are trying to help […]

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Caveat emptor: Facebook’s click farm problem is worsening

Many people will remember this video, which exposed Facebook using click farms to inflate customers’ likes (I would have used Veritasium’s original, but YouTube won’t show embedding codes at the moment):   Facebook Fraud Exposed: Does Facebook Advertising Lead to Fake Likes? from Reputation911 on Vimeo      I won’t repeat what they exposed, as […]

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Google Plus is about to turn three: will media remember the hype?

As Google Plus nears yet another anniversary—I believe it’s its third next week—it’s interesting to reflect back on the much-hyped launch. Or, more accurately, on the number of people who drank the Google Kool-Aid and believed this would be the biggest thing since Facebook. Have a glance at the cheerleading: a handful of links I […]

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Ford spoofs Cadillac with a more realistic commercial

First up, the Cadillac ELR TVC, with actor Neal McDonough boasting about the US’s consumer culture and past glories:    And now, Ford parodies it with a far more down-to-earth and realistic message about what we should be praising in the occident, starring environmental advocate Pashon Murray, who runs Detroit Dirt, a composting company:   […]

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The real privacy policy

Documentaries such as Terms and Conditions May Apply (embedded here) and Doc Searls’ The Intention Economy got me thinking about our privacy policy.    We have one for our company, but how do we really use your private data? It got me thinking.    Since we’ve been online for longer than most people, we have […]

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Upset about needing Google Plus to comment on YouTube? Here’s a radical idea: don’t

There were a few upset people in November because Google compelled everyone who wanted to comment on YouTube to have a Google Plus profile. Even a co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, objected.    But it’s been a long time coming.    In 2011, Google combined, as is its prerogative, YouTube accounts with its own. While […]

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Facebook pages are broken

While my personal Facebook page and profile continue to have good reach and engagement, the Lucire Facebook is down, especially compared with this time last year.    We’ve increased fans and, on our site, readership, but it’s becoming more and more evident that traffic isn’t coming via the Facebook fan page.    It makes you […]

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Someone has it worse: a site, clean since April 7, that Google still blocks

One last post on this topic for now, since this entry is pertinent for a complete picture of what is happening with the Google malware bot.    Let’s just say for argument’s sake that I’m wrong, and the combined minds of the Google hive are right. An entire company of boffins must be smarter than […]

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Webmaster sees Google blacklist his site for two months

  No matter how bad you think you’ve got it, some poor bugger has it worse. One webmaster, Steven Don, has had Google claim that he has anywhere between nine and fourteen trojans on his website, but he has none. The Google Safe Browsing page claims nine trojans presently, but can’t say which domains he […]

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How brands fool us

The Google experience over the last week—and I can say ‘week’ because there were still a few browsers showing blocks yesterday—reminds me of how brands can be resilient.    First, I know it’s hard for most people to believe that Google is so incompetent—or even downright corrupt, when it came to its bypassing Safari users’ […]

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